Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I find it kind of mindboggling that people say they weren’t consulted. We’ve been talking about wildlife since the trapping industry moved into northern Canada back in the 1800s. From registered group trapping areas to game sanctuaries to looking at protection of different species on the basis of protecting species such as buffalo in the Northwest Territories, transplanting species, this stuff has happened over the decades.

One of the fundamental principles of legislation is to enact legislation that hasn’t been enacted. I’m talking about the land claims. We have land claims groups who have been waiting 27 years to enact their legislation and yet at the 11

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hour we have

people in this House saying they haven’t heard about it. I find it kind of insulting that today in this area realizing that we have constitutional land claims rights protecting the Constitution of Canada still not being enacted for 27 years.

The same thing when I came into this House some 16 years ago after being involved in the land claims process for 10 years talking about the Wildlife Act and talking about the Dene-Metis Land Claim,

talking about the settlement of the Gwich’in and Sahtu claims, ensuring those people that their fundamental rights as indigenous people to be able to harvest and to hunt and to have certain rights protected through a constitutional process. The only way that can happen is the legislation has to be enacted in a legislative process such as in this House. That’s the whole intention of the legislation that’s before us, to ensure that we fulfill our obligations under those constitutional agreements regardless if it’s the Inuvialuit claim, the Gwich’in, the Sahtu, the Tlicho and also those other self-government agreements that are presently in place. More importantly, the fundamental principle of the treaty entitlements under Treaty 8 and Treaty 11 which were one of the founding principles of those treaties to ensure that indigenous people were going to be able to continue to hunt and trap and fish as they always have without being interfered with and to be able to carry out that obligation under Treaty 8 and Treaty 11.

I think that I also took a glance at the e-mail coming from the NWT Chamber of Mines. They’re talking about legislation that was passed in this House a couple of years ago called the Species at Risk Act to have the ability to establish protected areas for certain species. As we see today, we have threatened species in the Northwest Territories, whether it’s the Bluenose herd or the Bathurst caribou. We are already realizing the challenges we are going to face going forward, regardless if we say it’s climate change or industrial development or whatnot. We have species in the Northwest Territories who are now being threatened. We have to have the legislative tools in place to ensure we’re able to do that.

I also look forward to going out on the road for public debate and hearing exactly from all sides. I think we also have to realize that we have an obligation to the land claim groups in the Northwest Territories who have been waiting some 27 years to get their land claim implemented in this Legislature and yet to say at the 11

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hour, sorry, we didn’t

know anything about this. I think, for myself, someone who represents the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in, we’ve been waiting a long time for this legislation to come through this House and I’ve been waiting 16 years to see this day become a reality.