Brendan Bell

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll certainly find out what information and materials we have available to us and what materials we use in the regions. I haven’t seen the videos. I’ll take it that they exist and the Member has seen them. I assume that they aren’t available in some of the aboriginal languages and we can look at that too, especially regionally. Obviously it’s not relevant for all regions, but we can talk about where it is relevant. I think there’s also some merit in looking at other materials and making sure that people in communities understand these. Obviously that’s the idea behind...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right; the development of the Wildlife Act and the Species at Risk Act is underway. It has been underway for a number of years and obviously it’s a very slow process. We are required to consult with land claim organizations and with wildlife management groups. We want to make sure we consult with the entire public across the territory and all of the aboriginal organizations. It has been unwieldy. We have to make sure that we comply with the spirit and intent of all the land claim agreements, and we are aiming to do that. So, yes, I’ve run down a number of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll try to keep the responses as short as I can and save going into the history of how this came about from the Council of the Federation and just indicate that we’ve agreed on a number of thrusts in the National Diamond Strategy. There are several priorities that I think will greatly benefit the North. We know that it isn’t the intention of the NDS to speak to the creation or the development of a multi-stakeholder body that will assist in coordinating and implementing the strategy. The issues in the strategy that are of critical importance to us, I think, are the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right in that we have agreements with Ekati and with Rio, although I guess I would probably add that they’re more like understandings as opposed to specific contracts that we knew would be very difficult to enforce. In fact I think we realized early on we needed the companies to want to leave the diamonds here. We needed them to be willing participants in this venture. For the most part, I think they have been. I think it’s been very successful. Aber is complying with the spirit and the intent of the value-added industry here, as the Member knows, by...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have a host of sites that need to be dealt with. It is, and I believe it is, and the government believes it is, a federal obligation to deal with those. Because of the ongoing devolution discussions, we have to get this squared away. As I’ve said, we are not interested in inheriting all the baggage from the resource extraction or baggage from past military sites. So we have to find a way to force the federal government to clean up these sites. I think it was a positive step to see the amount of money earmarked in the recent budget for contaminated sites across...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I give notice that on Wednesday, October 20, 2004, I will move that Bill 16, Northwest Territories Business Development and Investment Corporation Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, we can do that. One of the things I’ve been very impressed with is our regional operations right across the territory. I know our regional staff are working very diligently with trappers. They make sure that they take in furs, they advance monies to trappers, we have a grubstake program to get trappers started at the beginning of the year, so we already have a lot of contact with trappers. Certainly, we can sit down and discuss the potential implications of not resolving these issues. They are very important to us. I would like to hear from trappers how they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I last met with committee we discussed this and I think it was quite a concern to the committee, certainly for my department, and I know also a concern for federal Minister Ethel Blondin-Andrew, that the agreement on humane trapping standards that we have with the European Union and Russia was at risk without the research being done at this Vegreville facility. We met with federal Minister Dion to express our concerns and we were able to get the resolution of that issue for this year. There will be continued funding for that Vegreville facility to keep us in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m still awaiting some of the input from the committee to determine what makes the most sense in the application of these fees. My sense is there will be an amount paid by consumers as they pick up these beverage containers which they will get back if they recycle. So I think the incentive is there for people to recycle in order to keep costs down. It also made sense, I believe, to have industry involved in the development of this program. The last thing we wanted to see was people finding a way to circumvent our fees by getting beverage containers from other...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Member indicated, the legislation in the life of the last government was in fact the Waste Reduction and Recovery Act. The first program falling underneath that legislative piece of work was the Beverage Container Recovery Program and that’s what we’ve been working on. The Member will remember that we struck an advisory committee a few months back. I think there were nine members from environmental organizations, from communities, from industry, who sat down to discuss the program and come up with some advice to us on regulations and a methodology for development...