Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move that this committee recommends that the Government of the Northwest Territories continue to provide updated timetables for schedules for the environmental assessment of potentially contaminated sites for which the GNWT is responsible to be included annually in the public accounts. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Nadli. To the motion. Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. To put this motion into context, environmental liabilities have a new accounting standard referred to as PS 3260 and that is referred to as liability for contaminated sites. Committee reviewed things like the Giant Mine environmental liability and another 129 potentially contaminated sites. Dialogue between the government and the OAG staff did put some degree of uncertainty about how the GNWT was calculating its cost to remediate and record them in the public accounts. In theory, the process and the practice should be doing so at the beginning of the year. We are led to believe that this practice is being done near the end of the calendar year. This is something that would have to change. We did ask the Auditor General his thoughts on that. Some of the feedback we were getting back from the government was they did not have the time to get out to some of the sites. The Auditor General was quite clear that there cannot be any excuse. It is the role of the GNWT to get out there on time, and it is recording and it’s our legal responsibility and obligation to do so.
Since then, Mr. Chair, we’ve been given some degree of certainty that the GNWT will comply with these new provisions, new accounting standards, but it will be up to the future Assemblies and standing committees to definitely modernize, not to modernize but to monitor this performance moving forward. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. To the motion.
Question.
Question has been called. The motion is carried.
---Carried
Mr. Dolynny.
