Floyd Roland

Mr. Speaker, we have done advertisements in the papers for Aboriginal languages. We need to have the document interpreted, the plain language document interpreted so we can get that message out there. That isn’t a simple task to be done and to make sure it is done accurately. We are in the process of doing that. We will get that out as soon as we are able. Thank you.

Earlier as well, the Member mentioned Norman Wells as the one-third ownership the federal government has, and they call it equity as their ownership piece. The two-thirds that are there do provide royalties to the Aboriginal groups and to the Government of Canada. So two-thirds of that asset is already paying royalties. The issue is on the one-third ownership of the federal government.

Let’s do some history here. The Sahtu and the Gwich’in took the federal government to court based on that being a royalty. In fact, we, as the GNWT of the day, we’re quite supportive of that initiative. The...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Now that we have a signed agreement-in-principle we will be able to reach out to all our households across the Northwest Territories. We are in the process of developing a householder that can go into the homes to give a plain language overview of the agreement-in-principle. As well, while that is being developed and hopefully once we have a draft copy, we can send it off. It will be a matter of weeks to get that out.

The other side of it is through the radio and using Aboriginal languages interpretation to reach out to our communities through the radio programs that are...

As we correspond with the regional leaders and the chiefs in the communities, the elected leadership, we will have that as one of the options. Again, if the regional leaders bring their chiefs and they feel satisfied that’s the approach, we would work with them. If there’s a request to go in, we would take that into serious consideration of being able to go into the communities.

One of the things that we need to do as we prepare to do this, there’s the first version of this is what the AIP is and what it says. Secondly, is our process going forward, and we will need much more time on that...

As I’d mentioned earlier, there’s a number of things we’re doing with communications. One, first and foremost today, is tabling the signed agreement-in-principle. Secondly, working on the householder, which will go into all homes across the Northwest Territories, a plain language version of the agreement-in-principle. And probably more importantly and sooner to that plain language document, is through the Aboriginal languages be able to speak to the key points of the agreement-in-principle. Also more importantly, I talked about letters to go out hopefully before the end of the day, or as we...

The process is, as I responded to a question in a previous sitting about how we would go forward in respecting the process, we have already at the table with Aboriginal negotiations on self-government and land claims and resources, we honour that process, as it was not a signed document. The leadership across the North received letters from the chief negotiators, including ourselves, at the end of September, and from that process were involved in trying to come to a place where we could have mutual agreement on that. We’ve tried to stay out of the business of telling regional groups how they...

That will be, I guess, the big question, is how we bring the folks back to the table for meaningful involvement in helping set the course of the next months, years, of discussion and to a final agreement stage. As we’ve laid out, as the Government of the Northwest Territories, the regional leaders’ table model, where we bring all the regional leaders together and at times bring the chiefs along for other discussion, I am offering that to the regional leaders to meet with them, whether it’s at a large group setting or if they want to do region by region with their community chiefs involved, to...

There’s much work to be done as we look at this next phase and begin the work of preparing for setting mandates and negotiations. Those negotiations and the final outcome will then give us a clearer picture of what those exact authorities are drawn down and what areas of legislation that we will have our hands on as Northerners that we can rewrite. So we’re preparing a work plan and getting the pieces together to see just the timelines that we’ll have, the people we’ll need to put in place to help us with this process, the relationship with our Aboriginal partners on those initiatives that are...

Thank you. I believe there’s a number of ways we can do that and as we set out a roadmap for the next steps we need to take since the signing of the agreement-in-principle and the work that we need to do in negotiations, and that we can pull that type of information together to show people what It could look like as we go forward. The challenges there are sometimes what we want to negotiate in the final deal might not be exactly as we’ve presented, so we have to be careful there as well. But we do know some of the facts based on our net fiscal benefit discussions, for example. Thank you.

We’ve heard clearly for quite a number of years that some of the groups, in their opinion and their position developed, is one that clearly they feel they need to deal with their process first before any agreement-in-principle was to be signed. In fact, in our protocol work it was talked about having key issues dealt with first before having any signing, and those issues, as I expressed to the regional leadership, are actually in the agreement-in-principle talking about how we go forward in building that relationship in a formal way, so there is jurisdiction and sharing of the delivery where...