Thank you, Mr. Chair. It’s obvious the Minister hasn’t heard a word that we said, the ongoing record of committee bringing concerns to the Minister and getting no joy.
I appreciate that committee’s done a good job laying the issue out here in this report. I hope the Minister will, at some point in his life, read it over and really take it to heart.
The motions that I have are the motions that are in the paragraphs on the last page. There are no changes to those. We thought, let’s formalize them and just see if the Minister might eventually acknowledge that a lousy job was done on the consultation, that the public interest side was under-represented and so on, all the things that are talked about in the report.
We’ve moved on. We’re not attempting to change the Mineral Development Strategy. I know Mr. Yakeleya was worried about that. The committee has moved on from this. We’re moving ahead. It would be great if the Minister would look to the future to improve his performance and the department’s performance in this regard.
Certainly, the mining is the backbone. There’s no question about it. It is a priority. I don’t think committee has any problem with that. What committee wants to do is maximize the public benefits given that this is such a fundamental part
of our economic activity. The Minister clearly didn’t hear a word we said on that front now. That’s not true for the economic opportunities panel as profiled in the report. That was well consulted and so on. It wasn’t a third party there. We actually had input and made decisions on what would be included in our strategy as opposed to mineral development which was adopting the industry perspective without input despite how valued our zero input was to the Minister.
I would like to move… First of all, committee recommends that when departments adopt third-party recommendations, such as the stakeholder panel… Let me start over again.