Thank you, Ms. Hilderman. Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I may have more questions regarding the amortization. For the sake of time and not wanting to jump around activities that have already been passed, I need to get a grasp on what exactly, in terms of capital assets, the department received during this very transitional year and how that amortization is going to look moving forward. I will end it at that. I might have questions further when it comes to amortization. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to follow up on a couple of things. First of all on the inspection side of the equation, when variances are found – and I am thinking of inspections of developments, resource exploitation-type developments – an inspector can recommend court action ultimately if things aren’t being corrected and so on. Under the federal government, in recent times, repeated variances were either ignored and not recommended for court action, or when they were, the federal court system declined to act and prosecute to correct the action as was obviously needed based on the information from the inspectors. I’m assuming that our inspectors have found some variances from what is permitted, so I’m wondering: have we taken any of these to the justice system for prosecution and penalty to try and stop such variances to date?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Warren.

Thanks to the deputy minister for that good information. I’m glad to hear we’re doing that. It seems like there’s a lot more activity than might have been happening under the previous regime. Could I just ask, have there been any taken to Justice that Justice has said they wouldn’t act on that Lands felt should be acted on?

Music to my ears. Thank you for that. I’d like to move on to illegal occupancy of land in terms of leasing and so on. The department currently sort of picks and chooses the things that it enforces with, for example, the squatters, I don’t know on what basis, but some areas perhaps where clearly the majority of the squatters are not being… The illegal occupants are not being addressed through the enforcement actions of the department. I’m just wondering why and what criteria are used to make a decision not to even sort of investigate illegal occupancy of land.

Thanks for that response. It seems that I’ve been misinterpreting some of the responses I’ve been hearing, and hearing responses to questions that I didn’t think I’d been asking, so I’m going to seek some clarification here. When I was talking about inspectors earlier, I was talking about inspectors of resource developments, which I believe is different than, say, the Recreational Leasing Policy inspectors but maybe not. When I was talking about variances, I am talking about the experience of inspecting, for example, diamond mines. When there are clearly some that have a whole lot of variances and others that respond immediately to variances and have few variances, those were not being taken to court to be dealt with. I hear now the Minister and the deputy minister saying, as I said before, there are 12 cases taken to court, and now I’m being led to understand that those 12 cases are illegal occupancy cases rather than mineral development inspections or whatever. I don’t know. Do I need to start at the beginning again here or does the Minister understand where I’m at? In terms of inspections of mineral developments, have we taken variances to court? I guess I will start over.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I apologize to the Member if I’ve confused him. We were responding to his questions like they were illegal occupancy questions, recreational leasing. Now I understand his question is on the minerals side, if there was any. There was one that I think we were in the courts with and that was just a continuation of a case that I think came over from the previous lands regime. That’s the only one. The 12 that the deputy minister quoted were the ones that we’re dealing with on illegal occupancy.

Again, my apologies to the Member if we didn’t get his questions clarified or didn’t answer them clearly.

In the interests of time, I wonder if I could get the Minister to commit to providing committee with information from the hundreds of inspections of mineral developments operations that have been conducted since April 1st , how many

variances have been found and the number of those, if any, that have been taken to court.

I’d appreciate any other relevant information. Are there any permit holders that have repeat variations from what’s permitted, and what action is being taken to follow up on that? Thank you.

We are in the process of putting some briefing material together. I think we’re seeking time with committee to give them a briefing on all the work that Lands has done up to date in kind of our first year of operation and then get some feedback from committee. There is information that the Member has asked for specifically. That would probably be a better venue to share that information with Members. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Committee, we’re on page 337, operations, operations expenditure summary, $11.770 million. Mr. Yakeleya.

Mr. Chair, the point I want to speak on is the unauthorized use of lands or land development. Is the Minister working with the land claim corporations and the regions that settled their land claim to work with them on this issue here?

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That’s a very important component of the work that we’re doing, identifying people who are out on the land. We’ve worked with local Aboriginal governments to try and help us identify some of their beneficiaries who might be out there. I think we even have some resources that we dedicate to help them with some of the input that they put into the work that we’re doing. So, yes, we are consulting with all the local Aboriginal governments. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, the unauthorized use of land or land development, especially in the settlement areas is clearly defined land occupancy for people out there. I appreciate the Minister working closely with the rightful owners of land settlements.

Is he working closely with the Department of ENR? I know ENR in the past has been cataloguing where cabin owners are, whether they’re Aboriginal cabin owners or non-Aboriginal cabin owners. What areas of the land in the Sahtu are being used? Is the Minister working closely with them in regards to identifying some of the unauthorized use of land or land development by people? This is pretty specific, but there are also areas where the use of land isn’t

being properly authorized by either governments, and people seem to have free will as to what they can do on these lands here. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, we do work closely with the Aboriginal governments. We have a website that’s up talking about unauthorized occupancy on Territorial lands. It’s actually a very good website and I would encourage folks out there to go on it. It’s on the Lands website. It talks about the 190 documented unauthorized occupants that have transferred to the GNWT. The bulk of them, again, are in and around the North Slave Yellowknife area. We have 167. We have one in the Sahtu. We have nine in Deh Cho and 13 in Fort Smith. The website actually is a very good source of information. It will answer a lot of questions. I think we even have contact numbers in there for people to report with what they think are unoccupied occupants. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, it is very important as the Minister pointed out. It’s a very serious issue here, what the Minister’s department is dealing with. We’re taking over a new department. The federal government is releasing its grip on this issue here and transferring over to the GNWT which is working closely with our land claim governments, land claim organizations, First Nation governments.

One of the important issues, listening to my colleagues, is the resource management units have a big cast ahead of them. I believe that properly fit and trained and going through the process, they will do their job as they are expected to do for the Lands here such as conducting hazardous materials and spill inspections and abandoned waste site inspections. There’s a lot of that in the North here. Some are category one, two, three or four. We’re just capturing the big ones as potentially causing harm to our people, our land or our animals, but there are also small ones.

Is this also working closely in conjunction with the ENR department as to you’ve identified a hazardous material site or there are spills from years ago to just recently, abandoned waste sites? I talked to the Minister of ENR last year about Drum Lake. There’s an old site there that was built by Shell Canada. I have pictures of barrels and…(inaudible)…but it’s not that important when measured against Giant Mine. This is nothing. But for the people who live in there and use it as a tourism lodge – and this is a sacred site to the Mountain Indians – it’s an eyesore. If we do the inspections, is this also the department that would enforce something like this? That could take one Twin Otter, load it up and get out and there’s nothing there. It sounds simple, but maybe it’s more complicated than that with bureaucratic red tape.

With this department here, that’s why I said it’s very important, trying to capture this as much as we can

within the scope of the work that these resource management officers are going to perform. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, our department would work closely with ENR on identifying and remediation of sites. Again, some of these sites were inherited. We have to learn from that. As we go forward, we’re working on putting a regime in place where we can stay away from issues like this and through the financial assurances division and security that’s required. Back in the day they just went pretty well anywhere they wanted to go, but times have changed and we’re responsible for the administration of our land in the Northwest Territories. We have the tools in place to help us deal with that and we’re going to deal with it. Thank you, Mr. Chair.