Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
Member for Nunakput.
Madam Chair, I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories review and amend all legislative requirements regarding the form of financial security for environmental compliance and remediation to ensure financial security must be irrevocable, and absolute unconditional. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. To the motion? Member for Frame Lake.
Thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, why this is important is under our watch, we had the Cantung Mine go into creditor protection, and the federal government had allowed them to put up the Mactung property as financial security. How crazy is that? But our government didn't change that when we took over the site as a result of devolution. Management of or at least environmental management regulation of the site postdevolution. So that's why our government had to go through all of that mess and eventually try to sell Mactung, get some money back. I'm not convinced we're ever going to recover all of our costs. But our government allowed the company to keep Mactung as financial security. That's crazy. Shouldn't have happened quite frankly, Madam Chair. So the Minister now can accept any form of financial security. If you scribble a note on the back of a napkin, a promissory note, promise to pay some money, the Minister can accept that. That is not the way that we should be operating in terms of responsible resource development. So this is about restricting the discretion of the Minister to accept unreliable forms of financial security that put the public at risk. And we need to put this in legislation to restrict the Minister's discretion to protect the public interest. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you. To the motion.
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
Member for Nunakput.
Madam Chair, I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories undertake an immediate review of the oil and gas spills and debris liability regulations to ensure that the absolute liability caps are increased to fully implement the polluter pays principle, reflect best practices and protect the public from liabilities; and further, that the review and increases to the caps should be implemented before the end of the 19th Assembly. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. To the motion? Member for Frame Lake.
Thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, this is a cap that's set in regulations. Cabinet can change this tomorrow if they want to; the Minister could change this tomorrow. The federal government had these caps. We adopted those with devolution. But after devolution, the federal government, the Auditor General came and looked at how the federal government tries to manage public liabilities and the Auditor General recommended to the federal government that they needed to change these caps in the areas where they retained jurisdiction, the offshore in particular. And so the Auditor General said that you need to change this, especially in light of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. So the federal government changed its regulations for the offshore and the absolute liability cap, as I understand it, I think is a billion dollars now. So that's the kind of and I'm not suggesting that the same kind of risk or blowout could happen necessarily on the onshore but as a responsible resource developer, you would think that by now we would want to protect the public and at least change the caps that were set by the federal government, artificially low in my opinion, and it's something that our government can do tomorrow. So I've raised this in the last Assembly. I've raised it again in this Assembly. But there just doesn't seem to be any appetite on the other side to actually protect the public interest. So, again, I'll be very curious to see how the Cabinet is going to respond to this because the Minister can change this tomorrow if she wants. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Thank you. To the motion.
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
Member for Nunakput.
Madam Chair, I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories make financial security information, including operator, land and waterrelated securities, amounts, location of project, form of security, expiry dates, public through a website to help build public confidence in resource management. Thank you, Madam Chair.
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
Member for Nunakput.
Madam Chair, I move that the committee recommends that the Department of Finance provide a plan within timelines to enhance reporting on the Government of the Northwest Territories environmental liabilities dashboard by matching report on prevention and management of contaminated sites reporting practices in the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat's Federal Contaminates Sites Inventory. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Firstly, we now have an environmental liabilities dashboard so I would like to thank the government for taking that step. But it's not quite as fulsome as the federal one and hopefully we get there one day. And to this point, specifically we can see in the public accounts the total environmental liabilities for the GNWT, and then you go to the dashboard and you can see all the sites we have environmental liabilities for but you actually can't figure out what the estimated liability is for any individual site. And Finance, during public accounts, says they don't want to do that because it'll affect procurement, and I'll note the federal government does it. And the other reason at times they don't do it is because some of the sites are essentially at zero dollars, no cost estimate has yet really been fulsomely done to note the environmental liability. The feds have done some really cool work in this. They've actually created models for the you know, they categorized the type of contaminated site they have and then they go and find an average cleanup cost and it's a moving model of what they you know, if you have a gas station, what does a gas station cost to clean up as an example. And then they book that as a liability. So that's a great step we can potentially take.
And I'll just once again belay I don't think the procurement concern is real. You know, we have some contaminated sites and the cost estimate is from, say, 2015 and it's been shared with committee. We all know that already that cost estimate is out of date and by the time you actually go to procure the work, it's probably a decade or two away and the scope of work will change. So just trying to publicly claim what you think the current liability is is not somehow going to affect procurement which is, in most of these cases, many years away and with a much more expanded scope of work. But allowing the public and allowing committee to know 'okay, how much do you think a site is presently worth' would be very helpful to know just whether our current environmental liabilities on our books is at all accurate. And I suspect that it is not at all accurate; it's very, very low. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. To the motion?
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
Member for Nunakput.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories develop a plan with a budget and a schedule to better support communities in the management of landfills, that includes training, capacity building, best practices in waste management, diversion, backhaul and related matters; and further, that the plan should be developed by the end of the 19th Assembly. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. To the motion? Member for Yellowknife North.
Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. You know, this is we spoke to a number of communities and their landfills are largely becoming one of their biggest budget crunches. And that's largely due to water license obligations that have been placed on them, environmental regulations that have been placed on them, which are all well and fine but at some point if we're going to keep putting these obligations on communities and their landfills and not provide them any training, capacity building, or further funding, it's just setting them up for failure. And I know quite a few of our landfills are not in compliance with their water license and, really, there's no way they could be without getting some funding. And we also spoke to some of the communities and landfill operators, and there are things that can be done that in the long term are much cheaper. They just simply need the capacity.
There's another recommendation in here for a territorial backhaul program. We've done a couple of them. They've kind of been oneoff, and they've been successes. I tell you when you take the hazardous waste out of a community, all of a sudden, they're environmental liabilities go way down, the cost of them managing their dump goes way down, and it gets properly disposed of. We're shipping full barges up the Mackenzie all the time and we're bringing them back empty. I think we need to just standardize some of this and make sure we're supporting our communities so they're not left with landfills that, you know, are giant liabilities for them and giant costs and have no capacity to manage. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. To the motion? Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I agree with my colleague from Yellowknife North. I, again, in my former life prior to being an MLA, spent a lot of time in the territories' landfills. I was very lucky to be some of those people categorizing waste or working with land farms.
I do want to caution, though, that one thing that and sort of touched upon by my colleague, that the capacity of communities is often overtaxed. And this is an area where I think that is very much the case. And as well too that it doesn't always make sense necessarily for each community itself to be having maybe their own landfill strategy in the sense that some of these issues could be done in a regional sense I think as well. And I think that needs to be explored. We don't necessarily want to say let's build this in every community like a land farm, which is a soil remediation farm, which I thought would be a great idea until I started to speak to somebody about the logistics of doing that. So I've watched the GNWT come in and have to do assessments of the landfills for things like storage tanks, for asbestoscontaining materials, for lead paint. I've had GNWT clients tell me don't worry about that being disposed of properly, just throw it in the landfill after doing sampling where we wouldn't have necessarily known yet whether or not the materials contained anything hazardous. I've watched wildlife entering all the landfills as well which, while beautiful, is pretty disturbing to see a bunch of these majestic cranes all over the community garbage. So I can't, again, recommend this enough. I think we've given the municipal infrastructure gap that has not really been dealt with despite the $5 million we tried to throw at it. I think that the GNWT has a responsibility here to take this on and take this out of the hands of and responsibility only of the municipalities. Thank you.
Thank you. To the motion?
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
Member for Nunakput.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories explore partnerships with industry and industry associations to provide handson practical training for landfill managers across the territory. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. The motion is in order. To the motion? Member for Great Slave.
Thank you, Madam Chair. And, again, this addresses some of the issues I mentioned about capacity in communities but not only within the communities but within our own government. We were lucky enough as a committee to go and lucky to go and explore or take a tour of the Yellowknife City Solid Waste Facility. They don't call it a "dump" anymore. And in that, part of the tour was done by the contractor who is operating that site. And it was apparent to me that having that industry knowledge and expertise was really helping to improve the function of the waste facility. In particular, I found the innovative use of old tires to create a roadway for heavy equipment so that the heavy equipment no longer travelled on the dirt road which was eating it up every year and creating more in maintenance costs. So here we had an item that was a waste item taking up space in the landfill, and they used it to create something that saved them some operational money. So I don't know that that is necessarily or that type of creativity is necessarily present always in governments but yet it is always present in industry. So I think it's really key and clear here that this will only be tackled through industry partnership and is a good way to build northern business as well. Thank you.
Thank you. To the motion?
Question.
Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? All those abstaining? The motion is carried.
Carried
Member for Nunakput.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that the committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories provide a response to this recommendation within 120 days. 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
Thank you, committee. Do you agree that you have concluded consideration of Committee Report 3919(2), Standing Committee on Economic Development and Environment Report on the prevention and management of contaminated sites?
Agreed
Thank you, committee. We have concluded consideration of Committee Report 3919(2), Standing Committee on Economic Development and Environment Report on the prevention and management of contaminated sites. Member for Frame Lake.
