Thank you, Mr. Chair. As Mr. Ramsay indicated, this bill certainly caused a lot of discussion to some of the clauses that we’ve worked on. It was quite a task for Members to come together and move it to this level here. I do want to say that this act is outdated and that we’re bringing it forward where it’s a somewhat controversial matter.
We did not have the opportunity as committee to go to the smaller communities and to listen to the Aboriginal people in the smaller communities. We took the onus, and it was our decision, to go into the larger centres. However, we missed the opportunity to go into small places such as Kakisa or Colville Lake or Tsiigehtchic or Ulukhaktok. We didn’t hear from the First Nations people, the Aboriginal people and we didn’t hear them in their own language where they can express themselves more clearly and better. We missed that opportunity to get their perspective on the Dog Act. We heard mostly from the larger centres where we went in and that was, for myself, a missed opportunity to have input from the communities, because there were some issues that we certainly needed to hear from our Aboriginal partners.
The smaller communities prefer you to sit across the table and talk to you in that manner, rather than send us letters or e-mails. It’s not really that way of communicating with us from our communities on such important issues as this one. There were a lot
of good suggestions and a lot of things that we were talking about outside our committee meetings, to a point where people were saying that there’s something mixed up here because we’re now talking about...And there are many reasons that we heard for the protection of dogs. It’s a Dog Act here so we’re protecting. Usually dogs are to protect people. Somewhere we got turned around and we’re now protecting the dogs for a lot of reasons that we heard. A lot of reasons. Now that we’re spending a lot of time on this one here we have other issues that people talk to me about in terms of this Dog Act.
This Dog Act I didn’t think was going to get so much play time until I witnessed the large crowd that turned out here in Yellowknife. I heard it in Smith, and on the radio, and in Inuvik and, of course, in Hay River. A lot of people feel very passionately about the Dog Act. So I want to say that we never got the whole picture. We’re missing half of our population on this important legislation. I didn’t think that was fair or right. I do want to say we had some very important things to say about this legislation.
However, we’re at this point here, the juncture that we have to continue moving on. I want to make it for the record that we missed our Aboriginal partnerships on this piece of legislation. This government here represents all people. I want to say that, for the record, hopefully when we look at further legislation that it will encompass all communities such as this one here. The Aboriginal people believe that dogs are for protection for us and there are strong cultural and traditional beliefs on that. We never really got the meaning of those beliefs or traditions. We made assumptions. We thought we could understand it, but we needed to hear from the older people and people in our communities what they talk about this specific issue here and what we mean by traditional use or cultural use. The meaning behind what they’re trying to get across to us, I think we did capture it in some of our new wording and it’s a good compromise.
I do want to say to all the Members on the committee that we heard a lot of discussion on this and we had some good discussion in the committee meetings. We came to a compromise; I hope we can bring this through. I do want to say that I’d like to thank the chairman for your leadership and the Members for bringing it this far here. Those are my comments.