Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, I think there were some comments made by the Member and I don’t know if this will just turn into a two-way discussion. He has his strong viewpoints. We have the language in the agreement-in-principle. I made a commitment in this House that in fact if there is any infringement on land claims, that those land claims prevail. We’ve said that, that the groups have been included from the earliest days of 2001 in the framework agreement and in fact in the life of its government through our regional leaders’ table and more specifically when the issue of the agreement-
in-principle on devolution was picked up again with the federal government. We provided funding and the groups participated either as active observers at the main table or as full participants at the main table. I mean, I’ve shown the Members that information, and more important to that is through the agreement-in-principle there was funding set up for Aboriginal groups as well to take part in the work leading up to the negotiations and I’ve even committed in this House that we would come back with a budget to meet with the regions and the community leaders and the communities to go over the agreement-in-principle. Nobody is being excluded. If there’s any exclusion, it’s at the choice of the communities or the regions who make that decision and we have to respect that if that’s the way their process is, but clearly there’s no veto provided to anybody on this file as we go forward.
Now, as we go forward and as we negotiate, a final decision will have to be made at some point, not in the life of this government. What we’ve done here is allow for a process to get into real negotiations going forward and those negotiations have a seat at the table for every region that wants to be there, and I encourage them to do that because there is not only the seat, but there are dollars available. The fact that the devolution agreement talks about protection of Aboriginal rights, constitutional protection, the fact that we as a Government of the Northwest Territories, and even as the Member raised the caribou issue, the settled areas that have clearly established co-management bodies we use that example. In fact, it’s those examples that are used as we talk about how we set up a co-management regime in the rest of the Territory and that is with full Aboriginal participation. So we continue to work on that path. Again, I use this opportunity to say as I stated in this House to Members after the signing of the agreement, that the role we will play, the way forward, is to recognize Aboriginal rights in this whole process and the final agreement that would be voted on at a future date will have to show that that’s the case.
Again, I encourage all the regional leaders to join us as we go forward. In fact, even prior to the official negotiations, as I said, I’d come back once we have a framework and a budget established to come to this House to seek that approval to continue on those discussions because I believe, in the same words the Members used, that we need a win-win here.
Resource revenues, the fact that if you looked at the last five years, as the Minister of Finance stated, we’ve lost $200 million. Every time we go to a community and we go to an AGM or an assembly, there are requests to improve housing, to improve health care, to improve municipal services. This provides some relief to that. Our work has shown, as a Government of the Northwest Territories, which we shared at all the Aboriginal tables, the
cost of self-government is higher than what’s on the table and we need to work together to get the federal government to honour their commitment and their fiduciary responsibility.
So we’re working at all those tables to try to find a way forward. I would say it would be very dangerous if any government, even our government, to then put core funding in place when you’re basing it on a resource revenue that fluctuates, and that’s a dangerous precedent. But we’ve agreed, at least at the starting point, and in fact the AIP, chapter 12, talks about negotiating bilateral agreements on resource revenue sharing of public lands that are included in this transition.
I would say that when you look at the actual process of devolution, there are no new rights being established here. This is in fact drawing down what Ottawa and federal staff are doing today. They’re making decisions on the North. They’re impacting us by those decisions and what conditions are placed on any projects. The fact that when you look across this country, all the provinces already exercise those rights and one territory being the Yukon. As I said earlier, interestingly enough, they’re now requesting a renegotiation based on our agreement, I believe. So, again, I think much of what the Member said and much of what I said are on a very similar path in a sense of trying to find a way to benefit all residents of the Northwest Territories. I think that that provision of chapter 12 of sharing resource revenues, if you look across the country that is the most progressive piece of any agreement with Aboriginal governments in the land when it comes to sharing of resource revenues from public lands. Again, I think that we can find a way forward and that we can find a win-win solution. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.