Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With the warmer weather and our ferry back in the water, our NWT roads will once again be bustling with more traffic and tourists. As one of many people who have had near white-knuckle misses with bison on the highway, it’s not if you will have an encounter with bison, it’s more likely when.
I have some residents of Range Lake wanting me to mention and seek a long-term solution to prevent bison/human conflict in the NWT. As the number of collisions and probability of human fatality is increasing with increasing traffic, the expansion of herd areas due to flooding in the Mackenzie bison sanctuary is very evident, and improved road conditions over the last 20 years is making the encounters that much more problematic.
Ultimately, the GNWT has undertaken the following actions under the Wood Bison Management Strategy for 2010-2020 to address this concern. Some of the action items have been the expanded harvest in the Tlicho and Nahanni regions, allowing harvests in the area along Highway No. 3, increased public education, improved road signage and the use of campaigns such as Drive Alive. Good as these initiatives are, there is still the physical issue of North America’s largest land mammal competing in the same arena of chance as motorists. Harvest strategies, deterrence measures and more signage, albeit great tools, are no match when the probability of chance occurs.
Therefore, Mr. Speaker, we as the government need to look outside the box for a long-term, viable solution to protect animals and motorists. We need to create and manage the proper mitigation strategies that would include in-vehicle warning systems like on-board animal detectors, or better yet, the use of reflective ear tags so that visibility becomes the driving force of safety. We understand that ear tagging and collaring could be done in a way to minimize the stress or injury of the animal. This is a given. The true hurdle would be those groups who could possibly object to such intrusive intervention, and it is with these groups we need to collaborate fully.
In the end, with the proper safety program of electronic reflective tagging, we, for the first time, can solve the issue of safety and scientific herd monitoring all with the same keystroke.
I will look forward to asking the Minister of ENR later today to seek his support of the extension of the Bison Management Initiative with the use of reflective ear tagging for wood bison on our NWT highways. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
