Thanks, Madam Chair. Who could have thought tax bills would be so exciting? But the committee report raises a few questions for me, and I did have the privilege of sitting in and listening to the review of the bill. There was some amendments made to the bill, and some of this, the provisions now, are being made retroactive to like more than five years ago. And I just had wondered why these changes were going back five years in time. Was there some delay on our part in getting some of this implemented? And I think the Minister said that that was not the case. But the report also says that the Minister was going to try to find details of which she would try to find and provide separately to committee. I'm not aware that that actually happened. So was the Minister and her staff actually able to see why these delays in implementation took place? Thanks, Madam Chair.
Sorry, and if I could add. I just wanted to get the Minister to reconfirm that none of these delays were our fault as a government. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Member. Minister of Finance.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I do remember that exchange, Madam Chair, and I apologize if we didn't include that on any correspondence to committee. I did just confirm again now with the Department of Finance, as I had at the time, that, indeed, these were changes that were slow in coming from the federal government and so we are simply aligning with the calendar that they had or the timelines that they had put forward on their side. So, again, I ought to have conveyed that to committee earlier; I apologize for not doing so. Thank you.
Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.
Thanks, Madam Chair. So the other matter that I raised was clearly going back in time now several years for some of these provisions. I just want to get the Minister on record that we didn't actually lose any revenues as a result of these delays or changes or whatever. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Member. Minister of Finance.
Thank you, Madam Chair. No, there's no lost revenues on that. Thank you.
Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.
Okay, thanks, Madam Chair. And I understand that one of the provisions of this bill are to allow for greater information sharing between the I think it's the Canada Revenue Agency and our government, and maybe that sort of goes both ways. But committee has raised the issue of trying to understand and get, you know, precise figures for a number of tax credits that we have, like for political contributions and so on. And because I guess in the interest of transparency and accountability, it would be nice to be able to put dollar figures on the value of the lost revenues associated with some of these tax credits.
So, can the Minister confirm, with these new information sharing provisions, that we can now get information from the Canada Revenue Agency on the value of these tax credits? Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Member. Minister.
Thank you, Madam Chair. So, Madam Chair, I can say that refundable tax credits do show up in the public accounts but something that is a non-refundable credit may not be the same. Obviously, we'll certainly do our best to try to make better use of the information sharing provisions. But, I mean, if there are specific elements of tax credits or specific tax provisions that the Member's interested in getting information on, you know, if we can get that, again, I'm happy to try to distill that data as much as possible. This, theoretically, is supposed to help with that data collection from the federal side and they do administer, on our behalf, a lot through the Canada Revenue Agency. So, again, hopefully this will indeed answer that, but if there's specific elements of credits that the Member's looking for, that would be helpful to know. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Member for Frame Lake.
Thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, it's not so much "me" I might have some interest but I'd understood committee was interested in getting some calculations or, you know, the value of the lost revenues to this government from things like political contributions as a tax credit. So I'm going to leave this to committee, but I think there's a commitment from the Minister there to ask Canada Revenue Agency for that information if committee wants it. And probably in the interest of full disclosure, that kind of information should start to appear in the full accounts in a more transparent and fuller fashion. Thanks, Madam Chair. That's all I have.
Minister of Finance.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, Madam Chair, I'm happy to try to get that data. And, again, just having briefly a conversation here with the director of fiscal policies, that that may be difficult to determine just what the amount of lost revenues are, are sort of anecdotal. The expectation is that it's not likely a significant value nonetheless and again, I mean, if it's across every type of tax credit, yes, we would need to just go back and look at exactly what kinds of credits we're talking about and what kind of lost revenue we're talking about. But, again, we'll go and have a look and we'll see if we can get some information. Thank you.
Thank you. General comments? Does the committee agree that there are no further general comments?
Agreed.
Can we proceed to a clause by clause review of the bill?
Agreed.
Committee, we will defer the bill number and title until after consideration of the clauses. I will call the clauses in groups.
Please turn to page 1 of the bill. Clause 1 to 5, does committee agree?
Agreed.
Clause 6 to 10, does committee agree?
Agreed.
Clause 11 to 13, does committee agree?
Agreed.
Committee, to the bill as a whole, does committee agree that Bill 62, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, is now ready for third reading?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Does the committee agree that this concludes our consideration of Bill 62, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act?
Agreed.
Thank you, Minister, and thank you to your witnesses. Sergeantatarms, please escort the witnesses from the Chamber.
I'll go to the chair of the Standing Committee for Economic Development and Environment for any opening comments. Member for Nunakput.
Thank you, Madam Chair. The Standing Committee on Economic Development and Environment identified contaminated sites in the Northwest Territories as a priority for the committee to focus on. Several stakeholders were engaged to provide feedback and guide the committee through its review of contaminated sites. Committee received seven public presentations from the stakeholders in both private and in public sector throughout the review, and as a result that the review as a committee presented the report with the 16 recommendations to the Legislative Assembly, February 7th, 2023.
I want to thank my committee for reviewing this as a priority in prevention of the management of contaminated sites. And, Madam Chair, individual Members might have some additional comments. Thank you.
Thank you, Member for Nunakput. I will now open the floor to general comments on Committee Report 3919(2). Member for Frame Lake.
Thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, I want to commend the chair and members of the committee, that included myself, for the hard work that went into this. We had a lot of support in getting these presenters before us and in compiling the report. And, you know, why is this important? You know, our government has assumed tens of millions of dollars of unnecessary public liabilities as a result of measures that were not taken to prevent contaminated sites. And, you know, the biggest one is just, you know, five or seven kilometres down the road here, the Giant Mine, where our government is now contributing, over a period of time, about $23 million towards the remediation of that site.
Another one and I'm certainly going to be raising this a little bit later in this sitting is the Cameron Hills sour gas field that was owned by Strategic Oil and Gas. Our government is now booked $20 million of liability associated with this property.
You know, I would rather spend that money on housing, education, healthcare, anything except for remediation of contaminated sites which are clearly preventable. And the last site that I mentioned was assumed postdevolution. So that's why this is important.
It's also important because this can help us as a government implement some of the provisions of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, specifically Article 29, which says that States shall take effective measure to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous material shall take place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior, and informed consent. That hasn't happened here, Madam Chair.
So, in any event, I commend committee. There's, I think, a number of very sound recommendations here that provide a bit of a roadmap for how we can avoid and prevent liabilities in the future. Unfortunately, this was a mandate item in the last Assembly for the government and very little, if any, work was done. And I don't really I have yet to see any legislative regulatory changes in the life of this Assembly to help prevent further contaminated sites. And I think that's one of the reasons why committee took such an interest in this topic. Because the government hasn't done anything on this, we're giving them a mandate and, I think, a bit of a roadmap to lay that track. And there are some timelines associated with some of these recommendations, and I really look forward to the response from the Cabinet side to these recommendations. And some of these are very easy low hanging fruit that this government should undertake very quickly. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you. Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I, too, want to thank all of our staff and the committee for the hard work on this report. One of the reasons that this was an important topic to myself is that I have also had a lot of involvement with the Giant Mine for many, many years as a consultant. And, in fact, that was actually the reason that I ended up in the Northwest Territories to begin with, was to take a job with the technical adviser at Giant Mine.
As an employee of the contractor at the mine, as a consultant at the mine, later on I have watched, over the years, numerous contacts and workers from the south or contracts going to the south and workers coming from the south to do the work on the project. And you can imagine how disappointing it was when I once bid on the project for the construction management contract only to find out that the government, once again the federal government at least this time chose to use money as the deciding factor and went with the company that had proposed $25 million less for the project on their bid despite the fact that our project actually would have or our proposal would have placed Indigenous people into the leadership roles at the mine within five years.
Then, bidding on the projects at the mine as a consultant, I was then told that the Aboriginal content that I had worked very hard to incorporate into my bid was only going to be used if my technical bid was the same as another, and they needed a tie breaker. That was from the current contractor or construction management supervisors at the mine now. My understanding is most of them live in the south, Calgary. I'm looking at their website right now. Their head office is in Centreville, Virginia, in the US. So it's very clear to me that this project, which is billions of dollars, is just funneling money out of the North, and nobody really is benefitting that much here from it. If anything, what the people here are getting are health issues and headache and poor quality of life as a result of that, not to mention the impacts of all these southern workers coming in and taking all of our housing away and not having any ability to build their own camps. We have no market for that. So I guess I just want to say that I think this was a missed opportunity. I actually think it is way too late. I think that we've missed the boat on Giant Mine, and I'm hoping that the work that the committee has done can actually spur future work to be in the true spirit of keeping work and money and contracts in the North. Thank you.
Thank you, Member. Any other general comments? Seeing no further comments, MLA for Nunakput.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories create a mandatory legislative requirement for companies to operate with approved closure and reclamation plans that are regularly reviewed and updated with appropriate adjustments of financial security. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. To the motion.
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
MLA for Nunakput.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that this committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories keep closure and reclamation tools up to date and publicly available to ensure that the GNWT is collecting enough security to reflect true costs of closure and reclamation. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. To the motion? Member for Frame Lake.
Thanks, Madam Chair. And I do urge anyone who's listening to actually read the rationale for this recommendation. But we have something adopted. This government has adopted the use of what's called the reclaim model. And it's basically a set of spreadsheets that are quite sophisticated, and unit costs are calculated based on experience from consultants working in the private sector on other governmentled remediation efforts, and those are used as a basis to calculate what it would cost for a third party to come in and remediate a site according to an approved closure and reclamation plan, and that's why having these plans approved is very important, so you can get an actual accurate estimate. The problem is that this set of spreadsheets is on the ENR website but it dates from 2017. It's now four and a half/five years out of date. And we know what has happened with constructioncontractor costs, fuel costs since over the last period of time. We've seen the effects of that in our capital budget alone. So this is why this recommendation is being made. That model on the ENR website has been prepared by consultants. And I'm glad that ENR posts it there and uses it and maybe so the unit costs have been updated, but it's not publicly available. And that's what proponents are asked to do, is to use that model to calculate the reclamation liabilities so the land and water board can hear from different parties using the same spreadsheet, maybe some different numbers, to actually try to set a value for the reclamation liability, to make sure that the public is protected from assuming those costs, because if we don't have the right financial security and something happens, it's going to come back to us just like it did with Cameron Hills, which didn't have an approved plan. So this is really to try to get the department to update that reclaim model, make it publicly available, and do it on a regular basis. And I'm sure the staff would like to get that updated. But when what's publicly available is five years old, we got a problem. So I know that the Minister wants to probably get this work done but maybe this recommendation will help move that along and make sure that the public doesn't get stuck with a bill at the end of the day. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Member. To the motion? Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Madam Chair. And yes, I agree with what my colleague has said. And to build upon that in a more sort of microscale is when this work gets done around environmental assessment and cleanup and I know that there's probably been some changes, and I hope there's been some changes since I was bidding on these old contaminated sites myself, but it's always a battle to get proper budgets in place for any sort of assessment and reclamation work with the consultants. And I think in this area it's at the disservice to the consultants, not what I generally am saying about GNWT contracts. In this case, oftentimes the environmental budgets are sort of nickelled and dimed quite a bit and that delays the work, considering that contracts are not put out by the GNWT or the federal government until well into August because of the at times, because of the fiscal yearend being in April. And as a result, once they start getting into that back and forth around the budgeting, it delays the start of the contract. And what ends up happening, our contracts don't get fulfilled and then it actually costs us double the money to go back later and try to get the samples that were missed.
As well too, any time you're doing environmental work, if you're only visiting a site once to get samples once a year, you're not really getting a fulsome picture of what is happening at the site during the different seasons and, you know, if you sample under ice, the water will have more contamination in it because ice will drop out contaminants. If you're sampling in the summer, the water will look cleaner.
Therefore one of the reasons I think this is so important, and agree that it's not been updated as crucially as it needs to be, is to ensure that we are actually getting good bang for our buck when it comes to environmental cleanups and assessments but also ensuring that, you know, we're not putting people at risk because we are skimping on their budget, that we're making the best use of the dollars, we're going at the right time of the year to collect the right data. A lot of environmental work is fiscally driven and to its detriment. And so I think it's very, very important to have a great a true understanding of what these costs are. And by updating their tools, it's the only way that they'll be able to do so.
I just want to note, and that I will follow up on this, that the contaminated guidelines or sorry, the guidelines for contaminated soil remediation have been the same since I first came north. I don't believe there's been an update since I became a Regular Member. And even then, they were only guidelines. Oftentimes you're sitting in an environmental limbo of which standards you're applying because the GNWT itself has not developed that standard for itself and, therefore, different companies will use different standards and they'll be down, you know, using different groundwater, like Alberta's levels and things that just don't always jive with the GNWT or sorry, with the Northwest Territories. So, again, I can't stress the importance of this recommendation. Thank you.
Thank you. To the motion. Member for Thebacha.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to point out a couple of things also. Some of these regulations that were talked about is a reminder from one of my colleagues on the 17th Assembly and a former ENR Minister. We also have a site in we always talk about Cameron Hills and we also always talk about Giant Mine. But we have a site that has to be looked at also is the NTCL Bell Rock site. It's one of the outstanding issues with the Salt River claim, Salt River First Nation. And, yes, you know, sometimes we are blamed for a lot of these recommendations that we bring forward when it's other Assemblies that have not dotted their Is and crossed the Ts. And I'm glad that we're correcting some of those standards, because those standards affect all the people within the area of Thebacha, especially with the Bell Rock site. And I'm glad that we are doing this these motions because that means that we're worried about the environment. And I, too, worry about some of these issues, especially when it comes to making sure that big business is always accountable for what they do within those areas. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. To the motion.
