Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. ENR does have a spill line. It’s operational 24 hours a day. Plus, as well, we rely, as the Member well knows in his constituency, on reports from folks that are on the land. They have been very, very helpful in spotting leaks, especially on the pipeline. There is that opportunity there. The National Energy Board has responsibility for responding to leaks at production sites and exploration sites, but clearly, when you look at the map across Canada where spills occur, I mean, it’s very clear that when there’s oil and gas, this type of situation is going to occur, given the volume of material being moved and thousands of kilometres of pipelines and such that are in operation.

According to reports from Imperial in 2009, 127,000 litres of water contaminated with hydrocarbons that was used to

force oil up from the underground also poured into the water. Even though we do have a report-a-spill line for all these types of incidents, with the Minister of the Environment, what are the consequences to ensure for these illegal releases of contaminated water in the river?

With the increase of oil and gas in our region and the development that’s going to certainly increase if the proven resources are there in the Sahtu, what type of level of increases of spills could we expect, based on the performance of the pipelines and the companies and the reports that we’re just finding out now from the CBC report? I’d ask the Minister.

I want to make it clear that we’ll want to look at the numbers clearly. If you use a global number of spills, some of them are going to be very small; some of them will be larger, as the Member has indicated. We have to set up the processes as we take over. We want to make sure that we have the capacity to monitor, to do a better job, to work with the industry, to work with the National Energy Board to bring a better focus to bear, but there is a reality that if you have this type of activity with that type of material being moved, and given the fact that they’ve been in operation for decades, some spills will happen. The issue is going to be to make sure we catch them quickly, that they’re small, and that, in fact, we aim for zero spills, as difficult as that may be.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.

Mr. Speaker, the National Energy Board and the Government of the Northwest Territories are certainly going to enter into a partnership where we will become the employer and the National Energy Board will become the employee on April 1, 2014. I want to ask the Minister: Would he set up a meeting with the Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated, the GNWT, the National Energy Board – because they’ll be our new regulators – and Imperial Oil to look at this report here and look at, going forward, where do we need to work together to put a zero effect of oil spills, pipeline corrosion, any type of incident, that would assure our people this work can be done in a safe manner?

As we move towards devolution and as we move towards the Government of the Northwest Territories setting up its northern-based regulatory regime, we will very certainly be meeting with industry, with the regulators, with the land and water boards, with the

folks in the regions, in the Sahtu and other regions, and offshore as well, and absolutely, the issue of this type of damning report will be looked at carefully. We’re going to want to make sure that we’ll be able to provide comfort and certainty to Northerners that due process and due diligence and rigor has been applied to this issue, and as the Member said, the ideal would be to have no spill and what do we have to do to get there.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.