My question today will be for the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Miltenberger brought to the House here a Minister’s statement the other day regarding a joint Canada-Alberta implementation plan for oil sands monitoring. In his discourse he mentioned, and I quote, “This new oil sands monitoring plan is based on sound science and incorporates world-class tools to monitor and assess air quality, water quality…” And it continues. It talked about transparency and accountability in the monitoring.
Mr. Speaker, we’ve heard today from two of our Members here on this side of the House the issues of their fish up the Mackenzie River. This was not the first time this was brought into the House and this is not the first time this was brought into this Assembly. This has been brought in other Assemblies. There is grave concern. As a chemist by trade, I’m also concerned with the fact: do we have a proper baseline as we move forward with this type of monitoring plan for the oil sands monitoring. In my Member’s statement earlier last
week I talked about the drinking water quality and I have to make a comment that the City of Yellowknife did bring forward their quality of chemical testing and I thank them for that. However, we have not heard anything to refute our own test samples here in the Territories. We have no chemical testing for our own data for Hay River, Nahanni Butte since 2009. There have been no chemical tests according to our data in Trout Lake in 2011 and many of the missing test results were in the Deh Cho community administrative region.
Mr. Speaker, how can we move forward with such an important initiative and yet we have no baseline to create this assessment? Thank you.