Before I ate my caribou stew, my wife mentioned to me, she said, you know, this issue about the caribou, the specific area that there is a ban on hunting, this is what we are fighting about. You know, to have caribou in our life. This specific issue here is about this whole thing about our way of life, our food, and when I talked to several people over the weekend about caribou and asked how does it seem like on the radio in terms of this whole issue from this government, from this Legislative Assembly, most of the replies were that it’s not very good. It seems like the government is telling us what to do. It seems like they are telling us we have money and we should go to the store only and buy pork chops or steak or bacon. It seems like they don’t want us to eat our food; for what reasons, I don’t know.
So I want to talk about the issue of consultation in terms of coming to an agreement of what this government has done in terms of coming to an agreement to put this ban on. Certainly the Minister has some weight in terms of the conservation issue. It is in the agreements. I am not sure if the timing is right, because right now there seems to be a lot of resistance to this. I think it was bad timing. I think we should have had more consultation. As Mr. Hawkins has said, we should come to an emergency summit with the people of the Northwest Territories and have a real good discussion on it, look at all the factors. It should be something like that with the people of the Northwest Territories.
This issue is a very big issue in our communities. As one elder has told me, I wish I could come down to the government and speak to them right face to face on this issue; I’m so mad. So I think that if this
government could come to an emergency discussion on this issue with the people of the Northwest Territories, I think we’ll have a win/win. Thank you, Mr. Speaker