Wendy Bisaro

Thanks. I don’t need the exact section, so Mr. Fulford can stop searching. I guess my concern is that we could have decisions being made by an individual, I would hope not, but we could have decisions being made by an individual to exempt or waive or change royalties. So, my question further to this is whether or not there will be anything in regulation which will determine under what circumstances the Minister can exempt or change royalty payments. Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Fulford. I’m still struggling to understand this benefits plan. If you say it applies to everybody, so there’s no need for an authorization. Is this benefits plan specific to the NWT or it’s bigger than that? I’m not really understanding what we’re talking about here. Thank you.

Thanks to Mr. Fulford. So, I understand that there’s no requirement, but that doesn’t tell me the rationale for why we did not continue to keep the NEB as a regulator. One of the concerns that we had from somebody who provided input to us, as committee, was that their concern is that the Minister of ITI should not be the regulator for petroleum resources and felt that if that was the direction that we were going to go that there ought to be some public discussion prior to us making that decision. So that decision has already been made, but again, I guess I would like to ask what the rationale...

Maybe I could ask Mr. Fulford to give me that in plain English. I kind of got half of it, but I don’t really understand what he said. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We would like to continue with Bill 10, which we started yesterday, then Bill 11, Bill 13, Bill 14, Bill 15, Bill 16, Bill 17 and Bill 4, time permitting. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to make a couple of comments on this bill. This is a huge bill, and when we first got a copy of the bill it was rather daunting. It’s about an inch and a half, two inches thick. We don’t get very many bills that are that large. It’s appreciated, I think, by Members certainly, the amount of work that the department first and the Minister second has put into this bill. It’s been a number of Ministers, I think, that have put time into this bill. It’s been some seven or 10 years in the making. It needs to be appreciated that this is a bill that has been needed for a...

Thanks to Mr. Fulford. That makes sense. With regard to that, though, is this a provision that will exist forever, or is it time limited? If it is going to be on the books forever, is it quite restrictive in who it applies to? Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Speaker. To the Minister, at this point I’m a little surprised the Minister couldn’t give a ballpark estimate of time that it would take to go from planning to actual start of construction, but there we are.

To date, the government has incurred costs in terms of the legal costs in terms of the court costs. The Commission scolaire has also incurred costs. From my perspective as a Member of the Assembly and trying to keep costs of the government down to a dull roar, I’d like to know from the Minister what kind of costs we have incurred to date. I know we are going to incur more costs...

Thanks to Mr. Goldney. I guess I’m looking for reporting to the public. The public is funding this to a certain extent. The public is interested in the management of lands and resources. Is there any provision in the act or in the agreement for reporting to the public on some annual or bi-annual basis?

Thanks, Madam Chair. I have a few questions here. I have to echo Mr. Bromley’s comments that without having seen these bills ahead of time, it’s difficult for us to understand them in the short period of time that we’ve seen them. The Premier mentioned that Bills 16 and 17 weren’t available until a couple of weeks ago. Well, even two weeks ago it would have been really helpful for us to get them at committee to at least look at them ahead of time.

I did want to ask a question with regards to the Premier’s comments on the bottom of page 1, this act “…makes legislative amendments that have been...