Kevin O'Reilly

I want to thank the Minister for confirming my understanding of how the committee is to work, and similar in function to these other boards. One of the features of the land use planning boards for the Gwich'in and Sahtu settlement areas is that they continue on into the implementation phase of land use planning by checking on the conformity with proposed land uses once a plan has been approved. Can the Minister explain whether the Wek'eezhii land use planning committee will have a role in the implementation of any land use plan approved for that area, and tell us what that role would look like...

Merci, Monsieur le President. Earlier today, I made a statement about land use planning in the Wek'eezhii management area. To be clear, while I take issue with why GNWT is picking up all the costs related to this effort, I support land use planning there. The Tlicho agreement refers to a land use planning body being established by agreement. Can the Minister of Lands tell us whether that body has been established, and what it is called? Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Merci, Monsieur le President. I rise pursuant to Rule 21(1) of the Rules of the Legislative Assembly to make a personal explanation. In my Member's statement and oral questions of May 24, 2019, I said that large emitters of greenhouse gasses, the diamond mines, will get all their carbon tax back under the July 2018 proposal released by the Minister of Finance. The Premier corrected this statement in his response to my questions by stating that large emitters would be paying a carbon tax on any motive fuels purchased.

Double-checking the publicly available information from the Department of...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the Minister's answer on that one, and I don't think I have anything further other than to say I haven't heard any clear evidence that the insurance industry is going to vacate the market here in the Northwest Territories, so I don't know why the Cabinet is so worked up about this and does not want it included in the bill. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the deputy minister telling me about the concerns of the insurance industry, but there's no evidence, then, that this has caused any market disruption by including genetic characteristics as a prohibited ground in the federal legislation. I just wanted to establish that.

My next question is about, and I did read one of the documents that my honourable colleague from Kam Lake tabled from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. It's called the Potential Economic Impact of a Ban on the Use of Genetic Information for Life and Health Insurance. It's a very...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that this government has not received any communications from individual companies or brokers that anybody is going to withdraw coverage from our residents. The federal government has already done this. It was a private member's bill, but it was passed in the parliament. What has been the experience? Have insurance companies withdrawn coverage from any areas of federal jurisdiction as a result of the passage of the bill at the federal level? What has been the general experience? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. The Minister tabled this letter from the CLHIA in the House on March 8th. Can the Minster or his staff tell us whether there has been any representation to this government from either insurance brokers or individual insurance companies that there might be consequences if genetic diversity was added to the bill, such as things like withdrawing potential coverage from the Northwest Territories? Have they received anything like that? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Merci, Monsieur le President. Again, I'd like to thank the Minister for confirming my understanding of how this committee is going to work. The legal authority for completed plans in the Gwich'in and Sahtu settlement areas are set out in some detail in the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act. Section 22.5.3 of the Tlicho agreement says: "The parties may by agreement establish a land use planning body and a mechanism for the preparation, approval, and implementation of a land use plan that applies to Wek'eezhii, other than national parks." Clearly, the authority of such a land use planning...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I served on Yellowknife City Council in 1997 to 2006, and certainly, when I was on city council, the position of the Northwest Territories Association of Communities was that access to information legislation should be applied to them.

I think what I heard during the public consultations was that municipalities are okay with that. They just want to make sure that they have the right kinds of support in place to allow that to happen. The idea here of having a working group, some sort of a collaborative process of developing a plan for rolling this out, is a great idea, and it...

Merci, Monsieur le President. I want to thank the Minister for that long explanation of what is going on. The reality, of course, is that our government continues to spend more on a visitors centre in Dawson, Yukon, than we do here in Yellowknife, which is the capital.

The Minister trotted out some great numbers of the increases in visitation at the visitors centre in the basement of city hall. As the Minister well knows, I helped drag him through the visitors centre when we were coming back from lunch one day. I think that the city is doing a good job with what they have, but they clearly don...