Joe Handley

Mr. Speaker, I don’t have the exact day with me, but about three weeks ago I had a teleconference call with the northern leaders. They were generally in agreement with some of our discussions on interim resource revenue sharing. They were to have a meeting last week, but because of illness of one of the members they felt they were going to postpone that for a while. I expect to have another discussion with them soon. When I go to Ottawa this week I have been asked to meet with some of the key Ministers late on Tuesday afternoon to further some of the discussion. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, as recently as this morning I raised that issue with our MP and only to float the idea with her that we have to have some benefit from resources. I’ve also talked to the Prime Minister about that, as well, saying look, one of our mines is half way through its life. We still haven’t done anything here. So yes, I have raised that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I want to say first that Cabinet will be voting in support of this motion.

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We do appreciate very much the strong support that the Members have taken for the position that has been put forward in this motion.

Mr. Speaker, this pipeline project is the biggest project in recent Canadian history and its happening in our territory. We can’t sit back and just be happy that we’ve got the biggest project and be satisfied with that. I agree with the Members and with northerners, if not all northerners, that we also have to have a fair resource revenue...

Mr. Speaker, the Member is correct; we had a process in the last government and that process is continuing. I have talked to the Minister of DIAND, Minister Scott, about the Aboriginal Summit, about the Intergovernmental Forum, and he has confirmed to me that he wants to continue with those same discussions. The previous Minister of DIAND did appoint David Peterson to negotiate devolution, but he didn’t give them a mandate to negotiate resource revenue sharing. That mandate stayed with Finance Canada.

I am frustrated with Finance Canada because it’s been since the fall of 2003 that we gave them...

Mr. Speaker, that is a very complex question and I don’t know, I don’t have the information in front of me of how much we have spent as a government or how much has been spent by others preparing for the pipeline. I can tell you that it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly by industry. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am confident that we have the attention of the federal government. We have the attention of a lot of Canadians as a result of work that the previous Premier has done and work that I’ve done as Premier, as well as Members, the business sector and my colleagues on Cabinet. We have made sure that our issues are on the radar screen across Canada.

Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of signals that I have to read between because we don’t have concrete agreements on a lot of things. But when the Primer Minister appointed the Honourable Anne McLellan, Deputy Prime Minister, as the...

Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, we will not sign a deal that is not a good deal, so I can have that as a piece of certainty. Mr. Speaker, I fully expect that as a territory we are going to someday have much less of a grant from the federal government and be more self-reliant on our own resource revenue. So I expect the federal government will take some money out of our grant, but I think we’ve got a lot of wealth in this territory and we need to keep it here for our people. We can live someday on our own resource revenues and be a have jurisdiction in Canada. Thank you.

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Mr. Speaker, that agreement, in my view, is worth the integrity of everybody who signed it. That is what is going to determine how we treat that agreement. When we signed it, we took it very seriously. I am sure the aboriginal leaders who signed it took it seriously. So that is a serious deal. Mr. Speaker, I will say that we are not going to be rushed into signing or entering into some kind of devolution deal that is not a good deal. I would sooner have no deal than a bad deal. We are going to take our time. We are going to make sure that we have a good devolution deal. In the...

Mr. Speaker, generally, and I would have to say at the officials or bureaucrat level, the message that has come from Finance Canada is that Finance Canada negotiates arrangements that work with provincial and territorial governments. It does not enter into agreements with municipal governments or aboriginal governments and so on. To my knowledge, they have not changed their view on that. I have not heard that same sentiment from the political leaders, Mr. Speaker. I have heard it, though, clearly from the officials in the department. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, yes, I have talked to the aboriginal leaders. They were going to look at their own strategy and then sit down with myself and the Minister of Finance, and we would then formulate a more comprehensive strategy for getting down to Ottawa. The involvement of MLAs is something that I had not talked to them about, but I will certainly raise it with them. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.