Mr. Speaker, I take my job and my responsibility to my constituents very seriously. I have a duty to represent all of my constituents and, when it comes to the harvesting of caribou, I have aboriginal harvesters, non-aboriginal harvesters and the outfitters to represent. The difficult task in all of this is the fact that I have not been given the opportunity to debate, question and discuss the crucial piece of information that is missing and that is the numbers.
ENR itself has some very conflicting numbers in terms of total number of animals in this territory. The Minister of ENR has all but admitted that his department does not have a concrete answer on what the total population of caribou is in the Northwest Territories today. Yet his department was ready to kill the caribou outfitting industry in the North Slave region based on best guesses, without consultation with Nunavut and, worse yet, without consultation with the Regular Members of this House.