Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Yakeleya has covered a number of significant areas that we’re involved with as the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations. Our role is to be involved from the GNWT side to ensure that we promote the best practices as the Government of the Northwest Territories in a number of areas. The Member has touched on, as I said, a number of key ones.

Political development, as we go through, is one of those key pieces of how we go forward as the 16th Legislative Assembly, and working with our partners in the Northwest Territories. We’ve been holding a number of meetings now. We just recently held our seventh meeting, I believe, with regional leaders, and from there we had our second meeting on political development. As we’ll be dealing with that budget item later, we can get into more detail. That political development is about building a common vision for the North and how we approach the federal government in a number of key areas where they still impact on delivery of services and programs here in the Northwest Territories.

So as we do that work, we do that work recognizing the aboriginal rights that have been established through treaties, through court decisions, through land claims agreements and, for example, through the self-government agreement that’s been signed in the Northwest Territories with the Tlicho. All of those things come together to help us form our position that we could work together on, and that’s recognizing each other’s roles when it comes to program delivery services in the Northwest Territories.

The area of the Aboriginal Summit, well, the regional leaders’ meeting, in a sense, is the evolved version of that. The Aboriginal Summit came together as an initiative in the last government. It may even have started in the 14th Assembly to do

some of its initial work. That, after a while, wasn’t including all of the groups at the table. Whereas, the political development piece or the Northern Leaders’ Forum, as we call it, includes everybody at the table, and the GNWT isn’t the one setting all of the agenda. We, in fact, work together as leaders to put the agenda items on the table for discussion. Our next meeting, hopefully, is near the end of March, and we’ll be talking about that political development piece and formulating for more certainty the future working arrangements of the Northern Leaders’ Forum. I look forward to having that further discussion. I think that will bring us the furthest of any Government of the Northwest Territories in solidifying our relationships with aboriginal governments in the Northwest Territories.

Further to that, the revised mandates, we’ll be able to speak to it in a little more detail later on as well. But we’re working with committee on that and, hopefully, we’ll be able to sit down here soon. I believe we have some time set up to start that work in going through our mandates. Some of those mandates are quite old and, as talked about earlier, the common vision, developing that, the aboriginal rights established today, some of these mandates outdate the new agreements that are in place and the new interpretations that have happened from either agreements that have been put in place by aboriginal governments and public governments as well as the courts. So that work is meant to update that.

The consultation framework is something we’ve worked with the Assembly and committees. We gave them a document a while back on the consultation framework the process was undergoing. We then did training modules with departments and from going forward we will serve, along with the Department of Justice, as the tool that department can use when it comes to satisfying the requirement of consultation when it comes to dealing with aboriginal governments and organizations.

When it comes to the Metis, the Government of the Northwest Territories treats Metis as aboriginal groups. We recognize them in delivery of programs and services. We do not differentiate like the federal government does, and we will continue to advocate on that issue when it comes to the peoples in the Northwest Territories.

The Member talked about the sensitive area of the animals and rights legislation when it comes to conservation and so on. We continue to work with the groups up and down the valley, and that is a very complex issue. Much like water, much like land, animals are a very important part in the fabric of who we are as northern peoples, aboriginal peoples in the Northwest Territories. So we have to make sure we do the best we can in ensuring that our future generations can have what we’ve taken

for granted with what we have established as our rights. So we continue to work with that, but in a complex environment, for example, with the land claims that are in place, there are co-management bodies that have worked very, very well for us when it comes to dealing with conversation issues, harvesting rights, as well as legislation. The Species at Risk, for example, is an example of that, and the Wildlife Act that’s being worked on is another example of a more collaborative working arrangement on developing legislation that this government will put in place.

It gets a little more complicated when you come to the areas where there are negotiations ongoing where some of the groups that are negotiating feel they don’t want to sign off on some of the legislation we’re working on because they feel it might prevent them from taking a more active role in their own direct negotiations. One of the things I say to our aboriginal partners in the North, no matter what happens, as we draw down that authority from the federal government and self-governments then get signed off and then implemented in the Northwest Territories. That will then pass, if it is just for the sake of discussion, Mr. Chairman, from the federal government to ourselves, as the GNWT, and then to the self-governments as those agreements are signed and then implementation goes into place. The one place we have more clarity is, in fact, with the Tlicho Government, for example. That is the self-government that has been signed off and enshrined in the federal legislation, as well as ours, and there is a working relationship established there. As they go towards implementing and drawing down their powers, we will continue to work with them on that side of it.

So it is a complex environment. When it comes to representing the interest of the peoples of the Northwest Territories in general and then more specifically on the rights issues that are established and being defined on a day-to-day basis as well.

So I look forward to having the discussion with Members as we go through this work. One other area that the Member discussed was self-government financing. That is an issue we feel is very serious. In fact, we took it upon ourselves to look at all the negotiation tables that are negotiating and what is being requested through those negotiations and we came up with a model. Now it’s not the be-all/end-all but it is the basis of a starting point. We came up with cost estimates on that model and put it to what we deliver in today’s environment. We’ve identified a gap of between 24 and 30 million dollars if we were to implement every self-government table across the Northwest Territories. We’ve raised that with the federal government. In fact, we’ve held bilateral meetings between aboriginal organizations and governments and ourselves to show them the work we’ve done, so they are well prepared and looking forward in

dealing with the federal government to have them recognize that as they sign these agreements, there’s a need for additional resources to be able to implement these agreements and make sure that in signing those agreements, everybody fully understands those cost implications of doing that as well. We can get into that detail as we go further on into this budget process. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.