Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I cannot support anything that would increase the cost of living for the people of the small communities. The people I represent are natural people who go out and they hunt. That is how they supplement their income. As everyone knows, we have very low incomes in the small communities. When an elder asks a young hunter to go hunting for them, their responsibility is to pay for the gas. Then the young person does all the work, goes out on the land. The further away the caribou is moving, the more costly it gets for the gas for the young person to go hunting.
Even if there is a tax rebate attached to the gas, or just a tax rebate inside the Income Tax Act, it is still going to cost money at the time the person needs to go hunting. It is not going to be that, sometime after income tax season, the individuals get a rebate and that becomes something that can be then turned into the gas they had already paid extra for to go hunting.
For me, I am thinking about: what would my community want? Tomorrow, when they pour gas into their vehicle, gas into their machines, snowmobiles, and whatnot, at that point, do they want to pay extra because they might get a rebate or they will get a rebate sometime during the income tax season? When you are hungry now, you can't wait for income tax season to buy the food that you need.
What they need to do is to not pay the extra as a tax on the gasoline. The cost of gasoline is high enough. Sometimes, the elders have just enough money to buy just enough gas to be able to get somebody to hunt for them. The hunters do it because they, too, can hunt for themselves at the same time at the expense of the elders. The elders do it because it is a lot more efficient for them to have caribou meat, moose meat, whatever it is that they are hunting for, muskox. It could be a variety of things.
The communities I represent, all four communities, rely on caribou. The fact that there is a reduction in the numbers with the caribou and the caribou seemed to either have disappeared or moved further east, a lot of the people and the elders say, "A lot of the caribou have moved east or have joined other herds." It has become more difficult for them to access caribou.
Then on top of that, to tell them that they will have to pay extra at the pumps. I am saying: it doesn't matter to them whether they get a rebate sometime in the future. That will go to something else. That rebate will be consumed by something else.
Also, the premise that the major reduction of greenhouse gas is going to be based on the Taltson project, I spoke against an expansion of Taltson here. Although I will most likely vote in favour of money that is going to be handed out to the territorial government from the federal government to consult with the people who are impacted by Taltson, I still think there is a lot to be settled there. I mean, the Taltson dam wiped out a whole community. It wiped out two communities, actually. Very little was said about a place called Rat River, which had a few people who generally had family in Rocher River, the other community that was completely wiped out. You hear about, the elders talk about, there were so many muskrat on the shores that it looks like there is a hill sitting there, and I think an elder told me the other day that there were so many muskrats swimming down Taltson river that he thought it was a raft. That was wiped out completely.
It happened a couple of years ago, too, by the release of water during wintertime, when you release water in the wintertime. Although NCPC said there was no release of water, I do not think, naturally, they flood the river. I do not think mother nature would kill all of its animals on a river by itself. I think that is man who has done that, and I think that has to be settled, too. If we are going to put together a strategy that bases itself on Taltson river expansion and that is how we are going to reduce our greenhouse gases and that is our contribution, then we should settle with the people from Rocher River. We should settle with the people who are wiped out, forced to relocate, lost their way of living, became a lost society. I think that has to happen, but the bottom line is today.
For today, the most important thing is the increased cost of gas, and, for today, to put more cost on the elders, that is what will happen. It does not matter what it looks like. It does not matter what the Income Tax Act is going to say at the end, when we make those adjustments. It's the cost today that's important. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.