As I highlighted in my opening comments, we've identified a number of dollars to help us, as a government or Executive, stay involved in keeping that file alive, I guess is the term that can be used.
Yes, there's been a commitment to work together. That has been honoured through a number of Assemblies. In fact, this file goes longer than a number of us Members who were elected back in '95–96. I think the term was originally called the Northern Accord.
Part of the Dene-Métis comprehensive claim process was also an allocation of resource revenue sharing, and that is a piece of this — as well as self-government with some devolution, of course. We must recognize, as I’ve stated at the Dene assembly for languages in response to one of the chiefs, that the land claims that have been settled and the one self-government agreement that has been settled — and there are many under negotiation right now — have a portion already of resource revenue sharing, in a sense, of their lands. They collect already from the development of
resources on lands that are transferred or have settled claims. That is occurring to date.
We have to realize — all parties, not just the Government of the Northwest Territories, but aboriginal governments as well — that if we don’t reopen this through this process, there is no reopening. In a sense, once that claim is settled, it’s settled. It is constitutionally protected in that place, and the work to try to reopen it becomes very difficult. We’re all aware of that, especially a number of Members who were directly involved in the claims process themselves in a past life.
So it is a challenge. We continue to work with aboriginal governments and organizations to try to further this process. What we’ve established now, for example, through a new initiative in trying to formalize our working relationship with the aboriginal governments — this was through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations — is four annual meetings with the regional leadership and then one meeting with each region and all their leadership or chiefs. That is a new way of doing business. As well, how we structure those meetings becomes more of a working relationship and then formalizing it. So that is a fairly different stance, and I think it’s more progressive in moving forward and trying to create partnerships in the Northwest Territories.
As I met with the leadership, the first initial meeting I had with them was to ask if there was support to go down this path. There is still some support, and there are still organizations saying that they’ve got their negotiations to go through and that’s their first area of interest. So that’s some of the focus we’re working on. It is an area that’s something we continue to put our energy and efforts into. We’ll continue to do that and try to build that consensus in the North.