Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there’s the short-term need, because of the precipitous drop in numbers, for the ban. The long-term goal, to affect the rights of all aboriginal harvesters especially going forward into the future, is to make the right decisions now to make sure that there are caribou, in fact, available to be harvested and so that aboriginal people can, in fact, exercise that right to harvest. Thank you.

We have some information that I can share with the Member that we just got though Public Works and other departments. So we can share that with the Member and we can have the discussion about necessary next steps to try to be able to be more responsive to this issue, if that’s possible. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. While we have some involvement with the telecommunications on the regulatory side, in the normal business operating issues we are not normally involved. So, no, I was not aware and I will have to check with the department to see if they received any correspondence of this particular outage that the Member refers to.

I can point to the two workshops that were held I believe in October, here at the ski chalet, where we brought in representatives from all the stakeholders from around the lake and from some southern jurisdictions. Many of them were elder status, if we use 50 or 60 as the gauge for elder status. The information, insight, exhortation that we got was very similar to what we hear up and down the valley about the value and importance of the caribou, the need to respect the animals, the need to make sure we do the right thing so that our grandchildren and future generations are in fact able to...

The Member makes a good point. There is a wide range of numbers in terms of the harvest in the North Slave on the Bathurst; anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 a year, depending on who you talk to. The issue is, and part of the harvest management plan is going to have to deal with the issue, the requirement for mandatory reporting from all harvesters. Right now we can tell how many outfitters there are, how many resident tags there are, but we have no clear idea except on a voluntary basis on the aboriginal harvest. So part of the ability to have a good harvest management plan is to set up a process...

Each of the diamond mines was reviewed and I’ve given approval. The issue of cumulative impact is one that has come more and more into the forefront as we look at resource development. What we’re dealing with, with the band, is a short-term period of three to four months that will get us through the hunting season and allow the longer-term process for a harvest management plan to be put into effect. It’s during that longer-term process that the work done to look at what the effects are, what are the variables that are driving the caribou numbers down have to be taken into consideration so that...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to point out one of the factors we are going to have to work around is the fact that three of the Members, Mr. Bromley being one of them, are registered as interveners and there are legal considerations as we go forward briefing MLAs and such. We honour our legal requirements in terms of access to information, treating all interveners the same and it has been pointed out to us that we have to be prepared to work around that consideration as well. You, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Yakeleya, I believe, are registered as interveners, so it just adds another...

Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that the territorial government, in fact, looks far beyond its own operations as we look at things like the Taltson hydro project to get power up in the North Slave Geological Province. We’re working with communities to help them get their community energy strategies in place. We are a major funder for the Arctic Energy Alliance, which we, I would point out, have taken from death’s door one Assembly ago and we’ve funded them to the point where now they are doing a significant amount of work with us on conservation, on advice on a lot of other energy initiatives. We...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have a Ministerial Energy Coordinating Committee that plays a very lead role in terms of bringing together all the resources and planning functions that relate to that. Tied into that, in an advisory capacity of course, we have the Climate Change Committee. There are tie-ins with other work that’s being done in terms of electrical rate reviews and those types of things. We’ve also committed to the broad government approach to redo our Greenhouse Gas Strategy, but the central focus for government here in this Assembly has been the Ministerial Energy Coordinating...

We have heard that concern from some elders, but we also know that if you take the long view that it is actually out of respect, that we’re doing this to try to get the best understanding possible about the caribou, which covers vast tracks of land and moving as only caribou know how they’re going to move, so that we can have the information to make the most informed decision both as co-management boards and as the territorial government. We do it very carefully. We do it with as much involvement of the local aboriginal governments and co-management boards as possible, recognizing that there...