We

deliberately called the Water Strategy Northern Voices for Northern Waters because we know it’s of interest and of great concern to all Northerners. We know that there’s a strong natural alliance with the territorial government and the Aboriginal governments as we work collectively together to protect our interests and ensure that we have these agreements, these legally binding transboundary agreements.

The Mackenzie River Basin Act has given us a vehicle to move forward on that. All the other jurisdictions have indicated willingness. We intend to continue on a going forward basis the strong relationship with the Aboriginal governments in the North as we go to the table to negotiate the bilateral agreements. We believe that we will be successful using that process. These are all steps we would first take before we would even contemplate something like the Member is talking about. We also know that there are, across the country, untested areas of what treaties and land claims mean legally when they talk about the water issues and protection of waters and what does that mean.

For ourselves going forward, we’re working on a good-faith basis with the other jurisdictions and we’ve been successful to this point, and we anticipate, though there may be frank and forthright discussions, that at the end of the day we will get the agreements that everybody knows we need.