Thanks, Mr. Chair. This recommendation really speaks to a number of the problems that committee identified with the bill. The consultation process that the department went through in developing the bill was really about amending the Commissioner's Land Act and the Northwest Territories Land Act. Then, all of a sudden, out of thin air comes an act or a bill prepared by the Minister and his staff that amalgamated the two systems without any warning to committee or to the public about doing that very thing.

Committee also heard from Indigenous governments that they did not have the opportunity to review the bill or that this was not a co-development process for the bill before us, unlike some of the other resource management environmental legislation that we have dealt with over the last week and a bit. This sort of stands out in contrast to some of those other pieces of legislation.

I think the last thing that I will say about this is that there is no preamble. There was no purpose statement in the original bill, even though the department has a Land Use Sustainability Framework that it has developed over a period of time. There didn't seem to be any efforts to actually incorporate that or the department's establishment policy that sets out a number of principles around sustainability and effectiveness and efficiency and all those sorts of great things. None of those were incorporated into the bill despite a mandate commitment on the part of the department that they would find ways to develop systems or places where the Land Use Sustainability Framework would actually be implemented in one form or another.

This is a bill that arrived out of thin air without any kind of purpose and required a lot of work on the part of committee to try to bring it to where it could be. I think we were partially successful. You will see a number of recommendations here about trying to encourage the department, moving forward, to do things in a more collaborative fashion. I think that is really what is at the base of this recommendation. Thank you, Mr. Chair.