Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the raven flies, this Assembly is a mere two kilometres from the site of one of Canada's worst mining legacies. I am speaking of the vaults of lethal arsenic trioxide lying underneath the Giant Mine property. This site ranks along with the Nova Scotia tar sands as one of the ten most toxic waste sites in Canada. Mr. Speaker, arsenic is a giant problem.
These underground caverns are sealed with concrete bulkheads a few dozen metres below the surface. They are the seven repositories of almost 40 years of a dark side of a mining industry. They store an estimated 237,000 tons of this toxic by-product. To put this in a bit of perspective, Mr. Speaker, if this stuff is aspirin tablets, two of them could be lethal.
Earlier this month, a consultant assigned by DIAND to the Giant Mine working group said that while a search continues for viable ways of eliminating the problem, the best answer still appears to be to leave it in place, monitor the rates of seepage and discharge and, if needed, artificially freeze the ground around the poison to prevent its escape. This is not the type of thing I expect to hear at this time.
Storage is the answer -- absolutely not. The people of Yellowknife, Detah and N'dilo and everyone on the watershed of the Great Slave Lake deserves better than that from our federal government. The NWT needs a permanent solution to end this problem for good, not a storage site that we simply hand off to our grandchildren in the hopes that they have the will and the way to fix it.
Mr. Speaker, I applaud the efforts of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs to date for the communications that they have initiated to keep the community informed of what is going on. There are rounds of information sessions coming up in Yellowknife, N'dilo and Detah in the next two weeks. I urge citizens and organizations concerned to attend.
We cannot be complacent about this, Mr. Speaker. I am issuing a call for action to anyone who has the care to get in touch with DIAND to attend these information sessions and find out what is going on.
The Minister of DIAND and the federal government must accept and eradicate the environmental liability that lies beneath the surface of Giant Mine. We can accept no less. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
-- Applause