I have to start by saying it is ironic
that we’ve been discussing a socio-economic agreement that the Minister is anxious to get underway and funded even before the project is started, yet here we are with a project having serious impacts in every community in the North Slave, and we’re backing out of it like crazy.
I am the first to agree and to state that this should be a full financial responsibility of industry, particularly when as a government we’re not getting the royalty revenues and so on. If we negotiate socio-economic agreements that fail to provide that, then obviously we have to pony up. In this case we have…. We did not negotiate that sort of agreement, so we have to participate. We made a commitment, and here we are backing out of it without the okay of the parties to the agreement, as far as I understand it. Discussions are underway. We have sent a letter suggesting that we’re going to back off in support of it, but we certainly haven’t, apparently, brought agreement to the table. So on that basis, as a responsible party, if we are going to make commitments for socio-economic agreements where these major impacts fall, we need to come through and fulfill those commitments. On that basis, I make this motion.