Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The role of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations is one where we’re, in a sense, and I think the Member may have touched on this, but in a roundabout way we’re the face of our role when it comes to working with both Aboriginal governments and organizations, and with the federal government and with our provincial colleagues, with our communities, quite a gamut of things. In fact, we’ve now stretched ourselves to also deal with the federal government, Foreign Affairs, for example, on intergovernmental issues when it comes to Arctic Council and those areas.
The work that we have done, for example, some of the frustration that’s shared by some of the Members in the files we’ve worked on, it is not Aboriginal Affairs in a sense dictating to departments what has to be done, but through our mandates where we’ve gone through this in the time of this government and are coming forward with those mandates, renewed mandates, that sets the degree of negotiation that can happen, and I must say that we’ve been operating on some very old mandates. I’m glad to see we’re starting to bring those forward for renewal and I believe some of our Aboriginal partners will in fact like the results coming forward on that.
On the consultation piece, I must say that that is one where the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations became directly involved because of the many concerns we’ve heard about consultation and the different levels between departments. So we’ve got that work done and, in fact, working with the Department of Justice we have implemented the training modules. As I pointed out in my comments, we have identified or we have worked with 70 individuals all across the North in that package. The Department of Justice will be taking on the training modules and that part
of it as of April 1
st
on that side now that it’s been
identified and we have used court cases, we have used the land claims documents, we have used many resources that talk about Aboriginal rights and how they get defined, whether that is an agreement signed by governments or how the courts have added further clarification on that. So we have used that and that is what we continue to use. In fact, that applies to even the AIP process that we’ve undergone.
In fact, on the other side of it, implementation, we can show with records and minutes of meetings through implementation that from a GNWT side we’ve been honouring the intent of those discussions as well.
Within some of the frustrations I guess shared by Mr. Menicoche, we share very similar frustrations at times. The Edehzhie process was one of those where in fact the parties were informed the GNWT was supportive of the decision made by the federal government and we quickly reacted to that and in fact had their key staff person go back to the Dehcho and tell them that in fact that was not the case. In fact, we directed the Minister responsible to write a letter to the federal government and the Minister responsible to tell him that in fact we are absolutely not supportive. What we are supportive of was the existing process being extended until the final work that was done, because we felt that we were close to a decision point on Edehzhie and on that process felt that it should have been extended like many of the other agreements were. That’s what we continue to hold and support. In fact, I contacted the Dehcho grand chief, Mr. Gargan, on that.
On the chief negotiator process, we’re not involved in that. The federal government is key to that and we have no influence on that process of their selecting a chief negotiator.
On the western Premiers, I hope to, as I was saying in my opening comments, be able to showcase the North from around the North and our cultural events and try to get as much of our vast Territory in and highlight that to the western Premiers. I think probably even more importantly is the fact that we have the pen on the agenda to help get our subject matters on the table, a little more prominence of doing that. In fact, we’ll have a delegation team from there going in to Fort Simpson to meet with the chief and the mayor to go over some of the initial work that’s been happening on this.
I know there’s been many frustrations over the years on Aboriginal Affairs. For example, on our representation it’s highlighted, I guess I would put it this way, we’ve both been blessed and cursed. The fact that we’ve initiated some of the work that’s ongoing overall in the Government of the Northwest Territories, it was Aboriginal Affairs that first put in place setting up associate directors where we
would bring key P1 employees to the table to begin direct training in a number of areas so they could look at advancement. In fact, by doing that we’ve had some key individuals now move on and take roles, for example, we’ve had one of our key representatives go to Education, Culture and Employment. Our most recent person that we’ve brought on has now been scooped up by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and these were key positions in moving forward. We were hoping that we’d be able to, I think we’ve set the example, in fact Human Resources adopted that associate director role and are now using that more government-wide. So in one hand we’ve done a good job, but on the fact of it when you look at it, it’s hard to show that advancement without going into the people who have come into our system who have stepped up and gone on to move to higher places in the government overall.Thank you, Mr. Chairman.