Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will continue on with my Member’s statement here, but I will ask questions to the Minister of ENR, mainly around some of the monitoring and some of the public disclosure of how we are regulating our wastewater.
I know that our government just signed a transboundary water agreement with Alberta just recently. I know we have one with BC and the Yukon as well. As I mentioned earlier in my Member’s statement, last year we had on record one of our lowest water levels throughout the Northwest Territories, and this year you heard some of that in Great Slave Lake as well as you are probably going to see it again on the Mackenzie River.
I want to ask the Minister or ENR, during our transboundary water agreements, were the water levels and monitoring of water levels an issue? As I mentioned, Alberta and BC both do hydraulic fracturing, and whether the amount of water they are using for hydraulic fracturing was discussed in these transboundary water agreements? It eventually might affect our water levels here in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The transboundary water agreement with Alberta definitely looked at quantity issues. We are blessed with significant flows into the Northwest Territories and on through into the Mackenzie and into the Arctic Ocean.
The amount of water coming in the Slave River has been negotiated at about 1.9 percent of the water is available for extraction between Alberta and the Northwest Territories. The other basically 98 percent stays in the river to feed the river and aquatic ecosystems and the Mackenzie Basin to make sure it stays healthy. It gives you a sense of the volume of the water that is going north. That 1.9 percent represents five times what Alberta’s most aggressive development needs were calculated to be. They looked at everything they had on their schedule and they multiplied that amount by five times. So there is an enormous cushion there in terms of the overall flows.
However, the issue of concern is quality, as well, and monitoring. It looks at not only flows but quality issues. We have built in requirements for quality, sharing information with Alberta, with the Northwest Territories, with the federal government what we are measuring for. We have spent millions of dollars within the Northwest Territories for community-based water monitoring, as well, up and down the Mackenzie River, to make sure that we work with communities so that they can have a certain degree of comfort that the water they are drinking is coming down to them is in prime, pristine condition as possible. Thank you.
I thank the Minister for the update on some of the information around the transboundary water agreement. What the Minister did say was the flow from Alberta down to the Northwest Territories, and that becomes a concern, as well, in terms of monitoring. It becomes a concern with wastewater and also becomes a concern with some of the fracking chemicals that might, if possible, if there’s a chance that it does get leaked into the water system and then comes down here.
I want to ask the Minister, in one of our areas where we talked about the four new regulations that we got with fracking, one of them is public disclosure. I want to ask the Minister in terms of the public disclosure of fracking chemicals, what percentage of chemicals do companies have to publically disclose to Alberta but also to the Northwest Territories? Thank you.
They are encouraged to disclose them all. What the discussion is, as we have heard around the table, is that they need to have the best practices possible. The issue of moving away from voluntary disclosure to mandatory full disclosure so that it is clear that we have the best practices, that is one of the things that we’re discussing and we’ve been talking about that industry knows is coming. In more and more jurisdictions in the United States, it is becoming a given, as well, that it’s not optional anymore. That issue is a very important one and it has been flagged by the government as we looked at these changes. Thank you.
The Minister mentioned the voluntary disclosure practice that is currently being used, and I am sure it is being used worldwide in terms of what companies have to disclose in their fracking ingredients when they’re doing the practice. He also mentioned it’s on the radar for the government to make it mandatory. It has been a concern heard in Inuvik at the public engagement session.
Can I ask the Minister, is there a timeline or does the government intend to make the voluntary disclosure practice mandatory so that we know all chemicals that are going into the fracking ingredients?
The goal with devolution was devolve and evolve, knowing that we’re going to have to look at amendments to various pieces of legislation and change things to better suit the requirements of the Northwest Territories. That issue is on the table for discussion, as the Minister of ITI has laid out, and we’re very well aware of the strong trends to mandatory reporting, and that is going to be a clear, I believe, expectation from Northerners as we talk about proceeding.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I mentioned in my Member’s statement the shale potential in the Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, the Sahtu region, and the Laird Basin. Should hydraulic fracturing get the green light and go ahead? Does the government foresee or has created or are they currently in existence of wastewater disposal sites, and if so, how many?
There is work being done on waste disposal, wastewater. The long-term goal is to manage it very effectively, treat it, if possible, and reclaim it, if possible, in the Northwest Territories. Those regulations and practices are also being reviewed. Right now every project in the past would have their own separate wastewater disposal requirements. There is an economic economy that I know has already been discussed and talked about in the Sahtu about if we’re going to do this in a coordinated way, having a state-of-the-art facility like that in Norman Wells as development occurs, again, to make sure that we can do the best job possible.
Right now there is no active fracking or drilling going on in the Sahtu to the ones that are there, and I don’t have the number at my fingertips, are relatively small and there are no new ones on the horizon because there is no activity currently in the Sahtu.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Ms. Bisaro.
