Mr. Chairman, also another issue that has come up in regards to renewable resource council meetings at the Gwich’in assemblies is the amount of gravel that this government puts into the rivers on the Mackenzie and the Peel. I believe the Mackenzie is almost 1,600 cubic metres a year. The Peel is somewhere around 1,200. I think that if you have been doing that for the last 30 years, that is a heck of a lot of gravel that you have put into the river system. The concern is what effect it has on the aquatic life by way of fish spawning areas. The question they are asking is why is Fisheries and Oceans allowing the Government of the Northwest Territories to dispose of gravel into a river system and not saying or doing anything about it? Under the Fisheries Act, anybody, regardless of who you are, who throws anything into a river system or a lake system has to abide by the Fisheries Act. I think for myself I have raised this issue before and I think it’s something that this government has to seriously consider.

In regards to the residents of Fort McPherson, they’ve raised the issue that from eight miles going

south down the Peel to the Mackenzie that there’s more sandbars than they’ve ever seen before and they say it’s in direct correlation between the approaches at the eight-mile ferry landing and it has been having an effect in regards to the flow of the river by restricting the flow of the river by moving the approaches farther and farther out into the river. It’s affecting the downstream by way of these sandbars that are now in places where they’ve never been before. I think that has to be seriously looked at too.

I’d just like to ask the Minister if he would seriously consider looking at those by way of conducting a study of some sort and see if there is a direct correlation between that and the effects that people are seeing on the Mackenzie and the Peel.