Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will be supporting this motion and I appreciate the mover and seconder for bringing this motion forward.
A massive amount of work has been done for a long period of time and is represented and boiled down in this report. The report says, “We have concluded, as a review board, that there are major significant impacts from this project.” They further concluded, not surprisingly, that there are major and significant public concerns, and they have, I would say, done a pretty good job of recommending measures to address those significant concerns and impacts.
What we have here if we fail is a tangled web of consequences and liabilities that extend across this country. The consequences are something we don’t want to consider; we want to avoid. I think this report goes a good ways in making progress on that front.
The first one is – and many of these issues have been spoken about and expressed very well from a broad range of interests and people and groups and so on, the Yellowknives Dene First Nation for decades – we don’t want an in perpetuity solution. That is not a solution. This report recommends shortening in perpetuity – that is infinity – to 100 years. Now, even that is a grievous undertaking, but it says no to in perpetuity. We want a solution implemented, and this board has recommended that and listened to the public, even if it is four generations and they also put in some review time frames every 20 years, so that is just about every generation. Let’s take a look and see if we can tune up even further.
They have said we don’t want to freeze it in place forever. That’s not a solution. That is a temporary stopgap. Albeit that may be acceptable in the short term, we want to find this permanent solution that actually deals with this massive and insecure storage of a highly toxic substance, in this case arsenic dioxide, a very deadly substance.
The funding, we have all seen programs come and go from governments. Here we are talking about in perpetuity. Now 100 years, several generations of funding. Where is the certainty that that funding is going to be there every year to do the due diligence we need to keep this situation secure and safe while at the same time we put in significant and meaningful effort into resolving it? This board addresses that issue of funding.
Oversight, my gosh, this grey hair – I didn’t have it when I started working on this, and I got grey hair at a young age. Ecology North was started because of this issue in 1973, 1971. I am so old I am starting to forget those numbers.
We need a public, independent and legally binding environmental agreement that governs our public oversight. This has been said repeatedly over and over again for decades. This board is recommending that they see the requirement to this.
Health effects on people, again – and I’m trying to personalize this – I and many others have been case studies of the health impacts of this arsenic and other heavy metal contaminants in Yellowknife. Other members of my family have been part of the health studies and so on. Many of our gardens have been sampled for soil contamination. Health effects on people is a big one. This board has addressed that in this solution, in this environmental assessment. Baker Creek goes right over storage chambers and presents a very high-risk situation because of the vulnerability of those chambers to intrusion by the Baker Creek. This is addressed in the environmental assessment we see before us.
The treated water quality and diffuser Ms. Bisaro talked to, and I and others have talked to at various hearings. Again, this assessment pays a good level of attention to those.
Impacts on traditional use, something that is often glossed over. Again, for many, many decades now, our Yellowknives Dene and other Aboriginal people, those staying in the area, had to travel for miles to get away from the contamination and do so to this day. Those are impacts that have not been properly discussed and they are called for. A proper discussion is called for by the board, the review board.
Community engagement, again, I have to say I was on a community engagement committee sponsored by DIAND, and it soon became very apparent that it was not going to be real engagement and I left in protest over that. That was again decades ago. Again, I very much appreciate the board addressing this point as well.
This is not a perfect report, but this goes a long way to indicate to me that this review board has done their work; they have heard people from a broad-sweep range of the public interest. They have heard the concerns. They recognize them as real concerns. As we have heard today, there’s probably no more serious environmental issue in Canada and perhaps a much wider geographic scale.
Finally, I would say, why are we doing this? The board has made the recommendations while we are doing this, unfortunately, because Ministers have a record of ignoring the recommendations of these review boards despite millions and millions of dollars put into these reviews, heart and soul of all kinds of people. The Ministers ignore these reports and say no, we don’t like that, we don’t like that. We negotiate with you and get you down on that one. It is sad, but that’s where we’re at. That is why we are at the table today saying, Ministers, endorse this report, get on with it, the people have spoken. Mahsi.