Thank you, Mr. Chair. The country foods strategy and program development, we are currently working with communities to support on-the-land activities related to hunting, trapping, fishing, hunting, and gathering. We propose to develop a program consisting of the development of a sustainable, collaborative country foods programming that supports communities along with a community driven pilot initiatives to build capacity to deliver locally appropriate programs, and finally to develop a collaborative research and monitoring initiative related to characterization, stewardship, management, and sustainability of country food systems. What we're looking at doing is having 11 regional engagement sessions with a number of Indigenous governments. After that process, we will develop a "what we heard" document as a basis for drafting the strategy and further public engagement. We're expecting the strategy to be complete by March 2019. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. One of the initiatives that we've been really looking at and focusing our attention on lately has been the guardianship programs, where we're out with Indigenous governments and looking at having local community members. Not only have we encouraged this with our Water Strategy, where we've had local water monitors who have been out. We're looking at further capacity of doing those types of programs across the Northwest Territories. The comment regarding traditional knowledge, I believe we're doing a real focus of that in the department. We've recently changed the science agenda to the knowledge agenda, which incorporates the use of traditional knowledge. I see this as a huge opportunity that we need to continue, although I know that, at different times as we go across in different regions, having the conversations with community people, is we find that they want to participate. It's finding in the right time and the right opportunity for them to participate in activities. In certain cases, here in the North Slave region, we'll have community members who will actually go on patrols and provide that type of guidance and learning opportunities for our officers. That's worked really, really well.

Overall, I think, again, as we look at the Climate Change Strategic Framework, a big part of that is traditional knowledge and how we incorporate that. I see that as being a big focus of where we're going in the department. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. With the Knowledge Agenda, as I mentioned earlier, I'm taking it from a science to a Knowledge Agenda. What we've really tried to do there is encourage the use of traditional knowledge.

In the scientific community, and one that went through the science of going to university, traditional knowledge is not in their experiments. It's not in their theory as they go through school and as you get a doctorate and you're studying. I think one of the things that we need to do is try to ask: how do we incorporate that traditional knowledge at the front-end versus the back-end of the conversation?

Recently, what I did was I invited the president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the acronym is SSHRC, and that deals with social sciences, and brought him up with the opportunity to see of how we're going to try to incorporate more traditional knowledge in the science and letting him be aware that when these granting councils are giving millions and millions in dollars to researchers to come up in the North, what are some priorities of the North?

We had a really good visit in November. The President of the NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, whose name is Dr. Pinto, is going to be arriving in the end of March. That's on the applied sciences. What we're trying to do is bring those two granting councils, that give away millions of dollars to researchers, to align that to a conversation of how we do things in the North and ensuring that we have traditional knowledge. That's one of the first questions. As well, making sure that their engagement with Indigenous groups and different regions across the North is doing research that they want to do.

That's really where I see the Knowledge Agenda going. I see it as an opportunity for us to actually make a difference in this conversation, but again, I see it as a challenge. I don't see it as something that's going to happen overnight because we have researchers who come up into the North from a real, varied number of university institutions, but they've been doing their research in a certain way. With the Knowledge Agenda, we're looking at trying to change that way of thinking and making sure that traditional knowledge and local knowledge is included in that type of research. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, if we look at a vision, one of the things that I think what we have to look at is four pillars. The management of information, I think, is paramount. We'd look at building a repository so that we have these information sources from traditional, local, and scientific knowledge that we can refer to as we retain all this information.

We also have to look at our natural environment. Looking at the availability of information on weather, on permafrost, on aquatic ecosystems, forest and tundra and systems, all our species at risk, as well as our country food sources.

The third pillar would be looking at human health, public safety, culture, and heritage. They're looking at how we look at mapping vulnerable communities and seeing whether or not those have areas that we need to look in.

Finally, we would look at the goal of infrastructure and looking at how we obtain accurate climate data and information from the different areas. How do we make sure that it's based on the infrastructure design and look at climate projections, whether or not we can include that? Now that's more on the climate change side, but those give you kind of the pillars and the vision of what we're looking at in terms of the overall Knowledge Agenda. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Agreed.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The budget that is presented here in the amount of $319,000 is our operational budget for oversight and policy related to contaminated sites. The actual budget for cleaning up contaminated sites that we acquired as part of devolution is held in an environmental liabilities fund by the Department of Finance. It's not shown in our appropriation; it would be shown as an info item in the Department of Finance's budget. Thank you, Mr. Chair.