Bob Bromley

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I have a number of questions on this page. I note the intent of this division is to prevent and reduce the impact of human activities with a conservation goal. Yet, when I read about the climate change program section, there’s not a word about prevention in there, there’s not a word about forecasting the impacts of climate change and providing expert advice to our government on the likely costs and impacts of that. I’ll use, for an example, forestry. We heard a forestry expert interviewed this morning on CBC, and he noted that the average area burned… I can’t...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I just had one question. I’m wondering what the contract services are for, the $625,000. I see that’s up from $343,000 a couple years before, and if I could just get an idea of the sorts of contracts that are being budgeted here for contract services. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just under the Cumulative Impact Monitoring Program budget, I believe the federal government bumped this up quite a bit. They committed about $8 million or something to it just before devolution. It just seems like a modest amount to that, but I don’t know that for sure. It just seems like it from my hazy recollection.

Could I get some understanding of where that ended and how that’s being carried forward? I think there are some very pithy issues. The defining thresholds seems to be a big research topic and so on with which to interpret things that we’re monitoring. If I...

Mr. Chair, thanks for that update. I’m just getting a little concerned that this pause on protected areas could last for years upon devolution. I’m just finding there are all kinds of costs to devolution that weren’t discussed before. Here’s another one.

Is the Minister in touch with Lutselk’e people on the northern tools and are they at least privy to the Minister’s thinking on this more than those few words? Are they looking at northern tools?

Mr. Chair, we’re not talking about people that live outside community boundaries; we’re talking about people that live on the land away from civilization and make their living on the land. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The reason I see a difference here is because there are land use plans in place for the Mackenzie Valley Highway and we don’t have those for the area for the road that’s being discussed. As the Minister knows, those things take in the order from five to 20 years to do. To do it right, we need to get started yesterday in land use planning in this area.

On the establishment of protected areas and development of an ecological representation network, where are we at on ecological representation? I know what we’ve done on the cultural representation side, working with our...

I’d like to ask the Minister if he’s aware of a policy gap associated with the compensation for fire losses only being available to trappers and not to others that live on the land and make their living off the land and through important roles in remote locations.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My first question is on… I note the division is responsible for regional land use planning and I know through our Aboriginal government partners we’ve got a lot of land use plans in place, Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, Sahtu, Tlicho, I believe even the Dehcho have done some work there. But there are two major areas, the North Slave and South Slave, where there hasn’t been much work done.

Has the Minister initiated processes there to get that work done? For example, this government is talking about a road to resources, Slave Geological Province highway. Where’s the land use plan...

Just to complete that, when can we expect that to be added in? Do we have a date on that? And, for that matter, do we have an amount on that yet?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to all my colleagues for their comments. I appreciate that the Minister is very active on this file. I won’t attempt to comment on this voluminous statement. I will look forward to studying that and getting on top of all those things. I speak very slowly, Mr. Speaker.

---Laughter

I do note the Minister is taking this very seriously. I guess the one point I would make is that this was brought to me by the staff. I don’t want to miss out on stressing the vulnerability that patients have to this violence and the need to recognize them in particular.

I think the...