Bob McLeod

Mr. Speaker, the Northwest Territories Lands and Resources Final Agreement represents an important step forward for the Northwest Territories and the people we serve through this Assembly.

As I have stated before, devolution of lands and resources will provide tremendous benefits to the people of the Northwest Territories. Devolution means that decisions made over public lands and resources in the Northwest Territories will be made here, by a more accessible, accountable and responsive government. Devolution means, finally, a direct benefit in the form of resource revenues will flow to the...

We believe we have been able to successfully negotiate that, but recognizing that that field is still being proven. It’s still in the exploration stage but the potential is unlimited. I think there’s tremendous potential in the Sahtu and we’ll see it come to pass.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have had those discussions on several occasions with the Government of Canada, first and foremost during the development of the agreement-in-principle. We couldn’t resolve it, so it was punted to the negotiations of the final agreement, so to speak. We made some progress by the fact that they have agreed that royalties will be paid on two-thirds of the Norman Wells interest. The Government of Canada remains steadfast, though, that their one-third share is ownership, it’s a commercial interest and that it is not a royalty. On that basis they do not see fit to pay...

We definitely want to make sure that is the case. That’s why the legal and technical review of the final agreement that we’re doing right now is so important, because we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think every Member in this House should be responsible for whatever they bring into this House. If you bring in something written by another person or party that has references to individuals, you should be held responsible to make sure that you don’t refer to individuals. Otherwise, we could all get individuals to write letters and we could read them out holus-bolus without any form of control. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I’m quite prepared to do that, if committee obviously agrees with that, that they want me to go out and make these announcements to the public before I get feedback from them. In an abundance of caution, I will wait until I hear back from committee.

We do have quite a number of committees that are working on all these different issues and we’ll be providing that information in the very near future. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I think we’ve had very good success with devolution in the past. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve had about… I think every program that’s with the Government of the Northwest Territories was a federal program at one time. At every instance we’ve been very successful at getting the incumbents to come over. I think the airports transfer was very successful as well. I think we’ve got some of the best airports operating around. The reason we’re using six months is so we can get an early indication from those who are not intending to come as part of the devolution, so we can either go out to competition or...

I don’t want to get ahead of committee, and I’ve committed to committee that we will bring the organizational design, and once we’ve had input from committee, I’ll be pleased to make it available to the public.

We put a significant amount of information on the website, and as we go forward with organization design, we will also provide that on the website. We will also provide for that as we go around to all of the communities in the Northwest Territories.