Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have a question for the Minister of ENR. As you heard earlier, there are a lot of concerns about low water levels, especially up in the region of Beaufort-Delta, Mackenzie Delta, and a lot of this when we’re travelling throughout the river system what we notice is there are a lot of beavers in the region, but the price on the pelts are so low that nobody is trying to trap them.
I was wondering if the Minister is open to putting a quota on the beaver in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Blake. The Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We, of course, would be interested to talk to the Member more about his thoughts on that. We have co-management boards we’d want to talk to and other involved stakeholders. So, of course, we’d have to look at the financial implications, but we could talk further with the Member about it. Thank you.
It’s pretty clear that the population has skyrocketed, and I’d like to ask the Minister what steps his department is doing to ensure the beaver population is controlled. Thank you.
We deal with the beaver as we do with any other animal under our Trapping Program. There’s a price that’s there for fur, and people are encouraged and we support trapping and all the trapping initiatives to make sure that we do have folks that trap and that they pass those skills on to the children. We don’t have a specific program specifically targeted at beaver. We do have some special attention paid to wolves, trying to encourage folks to harvest them and receive some benefit from that.
The Member made a comment about the populations skyrocketing. I’d have to check that with our staff, of course, and see in fact if that’s the case and where.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
