Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Member’s comments

and his suggestions of where we could make life better. I want to reassure him that even though he challenges my memory, I have not forgotten what it’s like to be a Regular Member. I just want to reassure the Member of that as he constantly reminds me that I’ve forgotten, and I constantly remind him that I can well remember.

Unfortunately, I’m going to just tell him some things that he doesn’t want to hear. He says he knows the answers. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources is working, in my opinion, at capacity. In fact, we’re scraping to try to stay abreast. If you pick an area, it doesn’t matter if it’s fighting fires, dealing with wildlife issues, caribou, for example, bison. We’ve got enormous water issues that we’re trying to solve here in the next 273 days, the recycling where we’ve spent enormous amounts of time and money looking at our next big initiative which is all that electronic waste. The issue of tire shredders is there. It’s just we have not got the resources or the time to do all the things. It’s on our list and we’re working towards getting there.

The issue of consultation and outreach on recycling, I’ve talked to the Member about, yes, on things like plastic bags. We recognize that after five years or so it’s time to look at that so that it’s a little more surgical, maybe a little more precise. The world has changed. People’s actions and use of bags have changed, so there is an area that we are going to look at. We’ve committed to do that.

The fire season – and the Member’s made comments about revision of policy and hard choices and we can’t afford another fire season – while we want to be very prepared, we want to, I want to, the government wants to reassure people of the Northwest Territories, as we did last fire season, that if their communities are threatened, if people are threatened, if our homes and communities are threatened we will spend the money. We will have no choice, I don’t think. If we are faced with the new norm of $60 million fire seasons, the Member is correct, it’s going to take some very tough fiscal choices if we’re going to have to significantly realign our budgets for that new reality.

But for the coming fire season we’re going to fight the fires with the same focus, the same decision and the same extreme expertise, in many cases, flat out valour and hard, hard work that we did last fire season. We have some of the best firefighters and fire resources in the country on the ground and in the air, men and women who put themselves in harm’s way every day and went above and beyond in many cases, and we’ve had the benefit of using similar kinds of skilled resources in other jurisdictions. We are going to be ready for the fire season. We’re hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

I agree with the Member, especially for those folks living out in the hinterland, that they have to take part responsibility for their circumstances. We want to work with them, as well, in terms of the additional sprinkler kits, the fire smarting that you need to do when you’re that far away from any other potential resources, and when you factor in the vagaries of the weather and the extreme fire behaviour that in many cases has defied practice and standards that we’ve seen both in drought and in terms of the speed of fire.

The Giant Mine remediation, the Member has been on this idea, and I don’t disagree that it has worked in other jurisdictions and in other parts of the world in other areas. With the Giant Mine remediation we have invested significantly in a process where we’ve worked out, for the most part, the bugs of the system. The Member has raised an issue repeatedly in this House that I have yet to hear picked up at all from all the people, the interested people, the experts, the community people in Yellowknife and around Yellowknife that are involved in Giant Mine remediation. We have charted out a course of action. The Member has suggested a somewhat different course of action, but he, at this point, is a lone voice and I believe we need to stay focused on a path that we have laid out, trying to get it implemented and we both want the same thing. We want to be able to protect the environment and the people from the arsenic trioxide. That’s not to say there’s no chance that the Member’s suggestion will someday get some legs and be more timely, but at this juncture it’s an issue that we are, once again, fully occupied trying to do the work that we’ve laid out for ourselves. This is an interesting issue, but one that’s going to be hard to devote any significant resources to. Thank you.