Mr. Dent.

Mr. Chairman, I move we report progress.

There is a motion on the floor to report progress. The motion is not debatable. All those in favour? All those opposed? The motion is carried. I will rise and report progress.

The House will now come back to order. Item 20, report of committee of the whole. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, your committee has been considering Minister's Statement 46-14(5), Minister's Statement 47-14(5) and Tabled Document 35-14(5), and would like to report that Ministers' Statements 46-14(5) and 47-14(5) are concluded. Mr. Speaker, I move that the report of the committee of the whole be concurred with.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Do we have a seconder for the motion? The honourable Member for Hay River South seconds the motion. All those in favour, please signify. Thank you. All those opposed? The motion is carried. Item 21, third reading of bills. The honourable Member for Thebacha, Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Weledeh, that Bill 5, An Act to Amend the Adoption Act and the Family Law Act, be read for the third time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. We have a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.

Mr. Speaker,

I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for North Slave, that the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word "that" and substituting the following:

Bill 5, An Act to Amend the Adoption Act and the Family Law Act, not be read a third time, but be referred back to the Standing Committee on Social Programs for the purpose of conducting public hearings on the bill.

I am just going to pause a moment until the motion is circulated and all the Members have an opportunity to read the motion in its text.

I trust all the Members have the hard copy. We have a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this motion is calling on the government and the Members of this House to allow for due process in allowing for public hearings to take place on this bill. I believe this bill is an important enough issue that we should have had public hearings when it went to second reading. I think it is crucial that with a bill of this type, that we conduct public hearings, that we go out to the public to see exactly what the public thinks in the whole Northwest Territories, and we have to take that time to do justice to this bill. We should have done that. Now, this is the only time we have to do so.

I am asking my colleagues that we allow that process to take place.

-- Power Outage

The House will now come back to order. Mr. Krutko, the Member for Mackenzie Delta, had the floor. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in regard to Bill 5, this amendment that calls for Bill 5 to go back to the standing committee and go through the full public hearing process that allows for and used to take place in the different regions in the Northwest Territories. I think it is crucial that a bill of this nature, that has to be done. I think what we are asking for here is to have a fair system to allow for that public hearing process to take place, which did not happen after the second reading of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, at the appropriate time, I would like to ask for a free vote and a recorded vote regarding this amendment.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. To the motion. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Handley.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just for the record, I want to point out that this bill was referred to the Social Programs committee some time ago. It was the committee's decision not to go to conduct public hearings, and our government concurred with that decision.

In our view and in my view, there is nothing that has come forward since that time that would cause a change of mind that we know of. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Handley. To the motion. The honourable Member for North Slave, Mr. Lafferty.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. To the motion. The honourable Member for Yellowknife South, Mr. Bell.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just wanted to address this issue of process. There has been some concern, and we have heard this for the last couple of weeks, about the lack of process some Members feel that the Social Programs committee and the government embarked on.

Members feel very strongly about this issue one way or another, Mr. Speaker, and I do not expect to be able to stand up here and change any of that, so I simply wanted to let Members and the public know how we went about the consultation process.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, on certain bills, there is not a public process. We wanted to gauge the level of interest in hearing from the committee on this bill, so we advertised across the Territories, asked people to write in, present us with written submissions on their views on this piece of legislation, and we sent them a package -- a plain language version of the legislation explaining exactly what this did do and what this did not do.

I think one of the questions that kept coming back to my office was this concern the people were somehow not aware that gay people currently do and can adopt, so that was one of the things that we had to straighten out, and this legislation was not going to do anything to change something of that nature, Mr. Speaker.

So after the plain language summaries went out, we received a number of submissions. As for concern about the fact that we did not go to public consultation outside of Yellowknife, we made the offer in the package that we sent to the many people who picked them up, suggesting to them that if they wanted to hear from us in their community, to let us know. That did not happen, Mr. Speaker.

I feel we have done what we needed to do to make that offer. There was a request from Yellowknife, a number of people asking us to host a public forum on issues to be debated. We felt that really was not the role of the committee in our system, but certainly we were not going to take away from the ability of any other interest groups in the community to host their own debate on this issue.

So after making that offer and not receiving a request, Mr. Speaker, we felt we had enough information from the submissions made -- they were very clear and well-articulated, the points were pretty much black and white. We felt we have enough to make a decision and enough to go on. That is why we did not end up going out to various other communities to host public hearings. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. To the motion. The honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, Mr. Nitah.

Mr. Nitah, I just have to remind you that you are to speak to the motion, not to the content of the bill. This is to the motion and the motion is very specific; to refer the bill back to standing committee to conduct public hearings, not about the content of the bill. Mr. Nitah.

Mahsi, Mr. Nitah. To the motion. The honourable Member for Range Lake, Ms. Lee.