Thanks, Mr. Chair. Once again, I would turn to the work that committee has done to point out that committee received numerous submissions, representations from community governments, including the Town of Fort Smith, Town of Hay River, City of Yellowknife, representatives from the Town of Inuvik, the mayor in Enterprise, the Northwest Territories Association of Communities, all raising a litany of issues in trying to secure and manage lands within their boundaries.

We heard about the difficulties of acquiring additional Commissioner's lands within municipal boundaries; issues around control and ownership of public land within municipal boundaries where land was being sold, transferred, or used willy-nilly without any notice to community governments; difficulties in getting adjustments to municipal boundaries; land withdrawal issues. What we heard was that, often, community governments would apply or request changes to boundaries, additional lands within their boundaries to meet municipal purposes, and they would just never get responses back.

I think that I would refine the recommendation a little bit myself to indicate that there needs to be a clear policy framework around how municipal governments, community governments, can request land, with deadlines, the need for written reasons if their requests are rejected, and to provide some certainty to our community governments, so that they can manage and acquire lands within their boundaries to allow them to grow and prosper, because our current system is not working.

The purpose of this recommendation is to attempt to get the Department of Lands to approach this in a more consistent manner and develop a policy framework to try to deal with some of these issues and assist our community governments in the growth and land management that they really desire and need to better serve their citizens. Thank you, Mr. Chair.