Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's good to hear what my colleagues think of this, of the bill. Mr. Speaker, you know that everybody knows climate change is here. It's maybe it's here to stay, or it's going you know, it's going to be different next year. We're not too sure, you know. But at this time, we are dealing with hot and dry weather. Minister of ECC said on the news article in a newspaper that this year he knew it was going to be a dry and hot summer, yet we feel they did not do enough to fight the fire that went that, you know, like, that burned out of control. And in the process, with the evacuations and all that, it created a lot of chaos. It displaced a lot of our people. Yes, I understand about 6.4(b), the local authority, but the local authority is not Indigenous government or Indigenous organizations. So what we're trying to do is that we want to put Indigenous government, to recognize Indigenous government or Indigenous organizations to work with us in coordinations, in coordinating some kind of to work with our organizations I'm sorry, I'm just a little bit upset here because to work with us, to work with the Indigenous government to do a better job of coordinating a plan. Instead, what they did now is, like I mean, like, just like one of my colleagues says, what happened in the south. We lost some members from the North, you know, and we are worried about the vulnerable people. So that's why we wanted to put in here Indigenous government, to recognize the Indigenous government.
We cannot be second class citizen anymore, and that's what you guys are doing. This is what the government is doing. We're second class. Like, all this was happening in our land and we were we were not consulted. Tlicho government was not consulted. Other Indigenous government were not consulted about the state of emergency and about the evacuation that was going to happen in Yellowknife because that state of emergency put our life at risk, and there's still 28 communities that we have to consider. And that 28 communities and they're still, okay, half of Yellowknife is gone, or almost all of Yellowknife population is gone, and along with the South Slave, but there's still 15,000 people here. And it is us that's going to be here, not we know we lost some some Northwest Territories residents as a result of all this, as a result of the evacuation. Some of them are not going to come back. We know that, you know.
So I wanted to say that, Mr. Speaker, in times like this, many of our elders have said, you know, we may not like each other but make an effort to work with each other to move forward. We should put our political difference aside and try to work with each other to support each other to move this government forward. This is not about us. It's not about the Cabinet. It's not about all the Regular MLAs. It is about the people of the Northwest Territories. So we don't have to go through another chaos like this, because the climate change is here to stay. And the expert that Minister keep referring to, well the expert needs help. They need to work well with the Indigenous government, Indigenous knowledge. For me, I don't consider them expert because they did not include the traditional knowledge. They did not include our elders who are the keepers of the land. And you guys, all of you, all of you Indigenous should know this. Thank you.
