Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to continue to talk about the caribou issue today in terms of trust and relationship. Today I don’t want to talk about whether the decision was good or bad, right or wrong; I want to talk about it in the context of consultation as more than a fly-by, a coffee, a hey, how you doing? That is a southern mentality that has been brought up here for years when they speak to true Northerners and it does not work. Anyone here even for a short time can tell you that is not how decisions need to be made.
Last week I heard a wise man say, what good is a right if you can’t exercise it? He was true to his point. Because no one wants to hear the last rifle shot to take down the last of the caribou. The GNWT must realize that the caribou harvest is more than a right. It is an essence of spiritual being of the aboriginal people of our North. There needs to be some decision with context that works with them. It’s not about our lawyers are smarter than their lawyers and the Constitution tells us what we can tell you. It’s about working together. It’s about the moral obligation to ensure that the aboriginal people are sharing in their treaty rights, their destiny as how we work together.
It’s turning into more of a school-ground argument where my dad is tougher than your dad. But I’ll tell you, their lawyers are just going to waste more money on our lawyers and we’re going to lose in our relationship of trust.
There is more here than the law at stake, it’s politics; the politics of what we can do with our friends and their friends. I think there’s an equal relationship that needs to be constantly fostered between the Northwest Territories government and the aboriginal leadership.
The decision of the caribou needs to be a decision with the aboriginal people. A political decision like this is not just about the caribou, it is rather about the Dene culture. I think it’s time for this Minister and this government to immediately call upon a caribou summit that invites the Dene leadership to discuss this issue. Leave the special interests at home. Leave the bureaucrats, those Mandarins, at home. Have a face-to-face, eye-to-eye conversation with the leadership of the Dene and our government leader on this issue, Mr. Miltenberger, and we’ll find an immediate solution by calling a summit and together we’ll find a path to work together.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this afternoon, before lunch I had caribou stew.
Oooh.
Before I ate my caribou stew, my wife mentioned to me, she said, you know, this issue about the caribou, the specific area that there is a ban on hunting, this is what we are fighting about. You know, to have caribou in our life. This specific issue here is about this whole thing about our way of life, our food, and when I talked to several people over the weekend about caribou and asked how does it seem like on the radio in terms of this whole issue from this government, from this Legislative Assembly, most of the replies were that it’s not very good. It seems like the government is telling us what to do. It seems like they are telling us we have money and we should go to the store only and buy pork chops or steak or bacon. It seems like they don’t want us to eat our food; for what reasons, I don’t know.
So I want to talk about the issue of consultation in terms of coming to an agreement of what this government has done in terms of coming to an agreement to put this ban on. Certainly the Minister has some weight in terms of the conservation issue. It is in the agreements. I am not sure if the timing is right, because right now there seems to be a lot of resistance to this. I think it was bad timing. I think we should have had more consultation. As Mr. Hawkins has said, we should come to an emergency summit with the people of the Northwest Territories and have a real good discussion on it, look at all the factors. It should be something like that with the people of the Northwest Territories.
This issue is a very big issue in our communities. As one elder has told me, I wish I could come down to the government and speak to them right face to face on this issue; I’m so mad. So I think that if this government could come to an emergency discussion on this issue with the people of the Northwest Territories, I think we’ll have a win/win. Thank you, Mr. Speaker
