Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. Minister Sebert.

Mr. Chair, I do believe there is evidence that growth in the resource economy has slowed. I hope that is just not anecdotal evidence that I have heard. I do believe that there has been far less in the oil and gas industry, down the valley. As to the diamond industry referenced by the Member, there has been continuing robust, some robust activity in that. One mine has closed down, and another one has opened. With respect to Snap Lake specifically, I understand that inspections to this point have raised no concerns. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Sebert. Mr. O'Reilly.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So, I don't believe the Minister has been able to present any hard evidence, facts, figures to support the earlier statement around reduced level of activity. He is got anecdotal information about perhaps there is less spending on mineral exploration, but the facts are there are still lots of water licences, land use permits, leases out there that do require inspections. There is no evidence that that activity has diminished in any way.

Let's go on a little bit further now into this risk matrix that the Minister has spoken about. Can he just provide a little bit more detail about how that risk matrix was tweaked so that now we don't have to do as many inspections and will therefore spend less money? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. Minister Sebert.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am going to ask Mr. Hagen to respond to that. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Sebert. Deputy Minister Hagen.

Thank you, Deputy Minister Hagen. In the view of time, we will move on. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My first question, Mr. Chairman, is for the environmental cleanups that are occurring in and around the area here, the mines, I think one is called Bullmoose, the former mines. There might be seven of them. Is this the responsibility of this department? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Minister Sebert.

I understand this is the responsibility of ENR. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister Sebert. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I am going to speak about the lease costs here. Lease cost to the people in the communities. Currently the lease costs are very high. I indicated that in my questions to the Minister earlier about the cost of the lease being two to four months' salary for individuals and that. Of course as a committee, we are opposing the quick implementation of the increases to the land leases, land rent, land taxes, whatever, and what we are proposing is phased-in increases. I am totally against increases because they are too high as it is. I mean some are not that high and the Minister talked a little about the difference between, I think, Crown and Commissioner's land, or whatever status the land has, but one status for sure is 10 per cent of the value.

So I equated that to saying it is kind of like a 10 per cent mill rate. So I would like to ask the Minister if this department could look to re-examine their decision to increase the rates of leases, which is already reasonably high, in my opinion. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Minister Sebert.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. In examining this issue, we attempted to rationalize the two systems of Commissioner's land and territorial land and they both had different current minimums, and our proposed minimums, as is known, is $840. Now, my understanding is that these rates had not been changed or altered in any way for 20 or 30 years perhaps, so to some degree we are just catching up with inflation and we feel that this was a rational compromise in many ways because, if you looked at it even from the point of view of inflation, the increase probably would have even been more.

There were some initial discussions that perhaps a larger amount would be more applicable, so after an evaluation, though, of the concerns that I have heard from the Members what we did was that we selected an amount that we felt was reasonable. I do not think the amounts proposed would amount to sticker shock, if I can put it that way. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister Sebert. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I think the Minister and I are talking about two different things. What I am talking about here is I am trying to get the Minister to see the unfairness in a situation where we have a community that has employment rates in the 40 per cent, most people over the age of 65 living on Old Age Security; very few, if any, people in the small communities I represent actually have a pension that is, for example, a superannuation pension, something that gives them fairly decent income.

We are talking about people who are living on Old Age Security. There has never been employment in these communities, so people have gone from one short-term job to another short-term job to another short-term job until they get to 65 years old and they start to draw Old Age Security. Old Age Security, as an estimate, is about $1,000. How would any department or any government see it being fair to already charge somebody four months' worth of salary? I will correct myself because of the relief, it turns out to be two months' worth of salary, and that is if the senior knew that they were supposed to go down and apply for the relief.

So how does somebody justify or see that as fair now and even further look at possibly increasing that fairly sharply? We are opposing this because we are saying at least phase in the increases, and I am not talking about the minimums. If the minimum is $800 for this type of thing, that is probably about what we should charge. I am talking about this unreasonable 10 per cent mill rate, is the only way I could really determine it, and if it is rent it would be like if we rented a house in Yellowknife under the same type of rule. Let us say a three-bedroom trailer for $400,000. This indicates that $40,000 would go to rent and that would be the land, that would be just renting the land.

I am asking the Minister take a look at that. I think anybody would agree that is inappropriate and it is not fair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Minister Sebert.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Again, we feel that the overall rates suggested are appropriate tied as they are to the NWT Consumer Price Index. The Member has raised a broader issue as to how this might be difficult or perhaps unfair to certain individuals. I would like to remind Members that there is a 50 per cent discount for seniors.

Now, again, he has raised broader issues as to the affordability of housing of leases, but I think that could be dealt with in different ways. I do not think by lowering our minimums, lowering our rates, rather, which I suggest are reasonable, would be a reasoned response to this issue. I think perhaps what this Assembly might look at is providing more assistance in different ways to those need assistance so that they could afford these reasonable rent or lease payments.

The lease payments, again, are not just pulled out of the air. There is a minimum admittedly and there is 10 per cent of assessed value. For example, if a property was assessed at $40,000 the rent would be $4,000. If it was a senior it would be reduced further to $2,000, which would work out to $155 a month. Therefore, we do feel that this system overall is fair. We acknowledge that it could create difficulties for certain individuals, but we suggest that perhaps those individuals could look to other sources for income because we feel that the proposed minimums and the manner in which we determine the lease rent is reasonable. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister Sebert. Moving on. Mr. O'Reilly.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I just want to return briefly to this issue of the reduced inspection budget. Why I am so passionate about this is because of a promise our government made about how we were going to do things better than the federal government. I think with reduced inspections, we are going to have increased risk of some of these sites becoming -- we are pretty good at generating abandoned, contaminated sites here in the Northwest Territories. We have a terrible track record of that under the federal government. We are now responsible for that. If we are carrying out inspections on these sites, we are responsible. We can't go back to the federal government on some of these sites. We don't have the purse that the federal government has in terms of trying to remediate contaminated sites. If we mess up now, it is going to cause us a lot of financial difficulty and prevent us from doing some of the good things we have all agreed to do in our mandate. I think cutting inspections is very short-sighted. Save some money now is going to lead to a greater risk of us inheriting sites and things that we really should be doing a much better job at preventing.

I want to transition from that, Mr. Speaker, into another topic, which is: how do we prevent and make sure that we don't inherit these sort of sites? Inspections are part of the picture. The other part of it is making sure that we have proper financial security in place. We have had at one time a unit; I can't even remember the name of whatever the entity was before. We have had some people working on this issue now. I know they are doing good work and hard work, but we have had this jurisdiction now for almost three years, and there is not one piece of policy, not one legislative change that has come about to make sure that we improve our financial securities and liabilities regime here in the Northwest Territories. When can we actually expect to see something emerge from this department in terms of it improving financial securities?

I am just going to give a couple of examples. Right now financial security is usually asked for, but it is not mandatory. It is discretionary. It is discretionary under the current legislation. Why can't we make it mandatory as it is now indeed under the Commissioners Lands Act? Because of changes that were made a few years ago because of the lessons learned from Giant Mine. We have had this jurisdiction for three years. When are we going to see some solid policy work, some solid legislative changes come out of this department to prevent us from inheriting more contaminated sites? Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly. Minister Sebert.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think I certainly agree with the premise in the Member's question as to vigorous inspections. I don't want him to think that, because there has been a reduction in the travel budget, the inspections will be any less vigorous. I know that we have formed a securities project assessment division, which is 80 per cent staffed. They are building a securities tracking system. I am going to let Mr. Hagen perhaps expand on that. Thank you.