Agreed.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As such, one of the things that was not transferred over as part of the devolution exercise was what we euphemistically call the “dirt doctor role” and having an understanding of the quarrying potential and the aggregate resource potential out there. That is something that we’ve identified as a gap within the department and something that we will be trying to add capacity around because there is a huge potential if we manage our sand and gravel resources both from a revenue perspective and also something that we would want to do anyway. But it is not something that we currently have within our mandate.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The $225,000 that we estimated for ‘15-16 revenues was based on the open active quarry permits that we’re aware of and the quarrying activity over the last five years. Quarrying is actually really hard to estimate or to know what might or might not be quarried. The royalty is paid in advance and then only on final inspection do you recognize the revenue, and oftentimes the amount of royalty deposited in advance is actually refunded if the quarrying doesn’t take place. From the information that we had available since Lands came into being, we felt that $225,000 was a reasonable and conservative estimate. Hopefully, we do much better than that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, the rec leasing land management framework is currently in the consultation phase. We’ve held a number of consultations so far. We held our first consultations in Hay River. It was represented by five participants, and we’ve now published on our website what we heard from those participants. We have also had sessions in Fort Simpson with 11 attendants; two in Yellowknife, one with 65 and one with 40 people attending; and one in Detah with eight people attending; then Fort Smith, 17; and just last week we had I think it was another 18 people attend the session in Behchoko.

As well, we have an online survey and a request for comments and we’ve had around 46 people commenting on that so far. As I said, the only summary we produced, though, is for the first set of consultations, so we will be publicizing the results of those consultations fully from all of the consultations once we’ve finished the current ones that are ongoing up in Inuvik right now.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Securities are included in the land administration division because of the linkage with the inspection function. Part of the responsibility of the inspector is also to examine the site, should there be additional things that require more security, as well as be able to report on progressive reclamation and as it would then affect the levels of securities that were held. So as a company does progressive reclamation, they would ask of us that we inspect it so that potentially some of the security that’s being held could be released. The linkage here is to the inspection function around securities.

We are not fully staffed in the inspection function. We are currently running a number of competitions and hope to have a full complement of RMO 3s and RMO 2s complete in the next short while. We also, as the Members are aware, and as the Minister announced just last week, have the new RMO 1 positions, and when the inspectors got together along with the superintendents to look at that program they made it clear that it was important to have the 2s and 3s in place to be able to mentor the 1s. So they spent their time over the last while devising a comprehensive training program that would allow entry-level community-based participants to come into that program.

Those positions are actually out for advertisement, and if the Members know anyone that would be interested in applying, we would encourage them to do so. Those positions, then, we hope to have filled in the next four to six weeks or so.