Thank you Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish to report to the House on the 58-member RCMP tactical unit and emergency response teams brought into Yellowknife on May 25 as a result of the strike at the Royal Oak mine.

On May 24th I was advised on an urgent basis by the commanding officer of G Division RCMP that tensions and the threat of violence at the mine site were well beyond the capacity of the local detachment to respond to and deal with. It was their recommendation that the only available option was to request additional resources from outside the Territories, and according, that request was made to the commissioner of the RCMP on May 24, with an immediate, positive response.

The decision was made after careful consideration of the only other option, which was to draw police resources from the other communities and regions of the Northwest Territories and to retain them in Yellowknife for an undetermined period of time. This is the option usually chosen in the provinces, but it would have been totally unacceptable to reduce, and in some cases eliminate altogether, police services in our communities for this purpose.

Members have expressed concern about costs of the RCMP reinforcements which have been in Yellowknife for three weeks now and were first deployed in full force during a serious incident last Sunday. Estimates provided by the RCMP

indicate that as of last Friday, June 12, costs reached one million dollars. However, they caution us that these do not yet include actual salary and overtime calculations and that they have estimated on the high side rather than underestimating.

Our government takes the firm position that these costs must be borne by the federal government for a number of reasons. Essentially, as we have advised the Solicitor General and his colleagues, the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, this labour-management dispute is exclusively within an area of federal responsibility, both in law and under the policing agreement we have with Canada.

The Minister of Labour has full responsibility for private sector labour relations in the Territories and is in that sense the territorial Minister of Labour. Later today I will circulate a letter that I sent yesterday to the Hon. Marcel Danis, the federal Minister of Labour, concerning the strike. The RCMP reinforcements are here exclusively to deal with the fallout from this strike and are not required in any normal role of preserving the peace and enforcing the criminal laws within the city of Yellowknife. Thank you.