Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would first like to commend the Minister of ENR and his staff for all of their proactive planning and work to deal with the declining caribou numbers. I think it is good that they have done all of that work. I fully support the summit and bringing all of the folks together to look at the next steps, as well as I would support it as it comes forward. Of course, the use of some of their whatever circles may be left from the light fire season to help offset the cost of the summit, because I think this is an endeavour that we have to pursue.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to make the point today, in conjunction with the statement I made earlier to the opening address, that this is an example of why we have to take a broad look at the environmental impact in many areas, of why we have to take the environment from the second chair up to centre stage when we look at the planning that we have to do. There are issues tied into caribou that are going to tie into other species as well like the fish habitat where there is enormous pressure. There are fires that wreak havoc through the landscape, a natural process but it affects migration routes, access to feed and many other factors. We have development permits for access to exploration across the land to check out all of the resources we have there. We have roads going in where there were never roads before, Mr. Speaker, making hunting that much easier. All of these factors tied into, as well, the water and the underlying climate change issues tell me that it is absolutely fundamental that we start looking at all of these pieces not as individual events and issues, but how do they affect our capacity to absorb resource development and what is cumulative impact?

The caribou herds migrate. They don’t respect borders. They don’t know borders. That is foreign to them. They go from the north right to the South into the provinces over into the Yukon and Quebec. We have a circumstance with the caribou where we have to get our own house in order, but clearly we have to work with other jurisdictions but we need that broad frame. I will be making that case again and again in the coming months as we look at the planning. If we are going to do this right and we are going to look at the economic big picture, we can’t do that without this same look being taken on the environment. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause