Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to start by thanking the chair of the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure for guiding us through consultations on this proposed act. It’s been a huge one, as my colleague Mr. Yakeleya has mentioned. Much
bigger than we had expected. I’ve appreciated his guidance and the assistance of our staff. As I believe our chair said, I was very impressed and thankful to all the people of the NWT who took time to participate in those consultations.
We had tremendous turnouts, tremendous and enthusiastic turnouts, passionate presentations, both at our public consultations and through written submissions and comments. We had people from, you know, long-term dog mushers to representatives of various societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. A huge diversity of people. We had a lot of Aboriginals speak, a lot of lifelong Northerners, right down to people relatively new to the North. A lot of these are busy people, not necessarily comfortable in these sorts of settings. They came out and spoke frankly to us.
We decided in our consultations not to go into small communities but to centre our consultations on the large or regional centres with the option to bring people from small communities into those regional centres if they wish to present. Sort of a standard practice for many of our consultations.
I think I’ll leave it at that because our standing committee report basically covered things well. I just want to be sure to express my appreciation again to the people of the NWT who have participated in this, as well as my colleagues. I’ll leave it at that.