Thank you. There is a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. Mr. O'Reilly.

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.

Thank you. To the motion.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just for committee's information, what might have been in the people's package as the last one, I am moving that up to the next one. Mr. Chair, I move that this committee recommends that the Department of Lands make a commitment to amend the regulations flowing from the Public Land Act in meaningful consultation with interested Indigenous governments and organizations and the general public in accordance with the timeline set out in the Land Use and Sustainability Framework implementation plan. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Vanthuyne. There is a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. It looks like the motion is being distributed. The motion has been distributed. To the motion. Mr. O'Reilly.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. The purpose of this motion is to try to address this vacuum that exists about how regulations are going to be made in virtually all of the post-devolution legislation going forward.

Committee tried to secure some sort of understanding agreement of the Minister moving forward on how regulations would be developed, and once again, we were told that there would be some sort of mysterious government-wide approach developed that has not revealed itself so far. There is no assurance that the Indigenous governments, organizations, and the public, interested stakeholders, are going to have any level of engagement and involvement in the development of regulations on any of these bills moving forward, other than the oil and gas ones, because of some residual brilliance from the federal government in requiring gazetting of regulations. Unfortunately, our government, our Cabinet, has not seen fit to provide an avenue for public comment on regulations moving forward. That is what this recommendation is meant to deal with. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. To the motion, Mr. Testart.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is consistent with other motions that the committee has brought forward, including amendments to bills that I will not reflect on further. This is an important piece of business moving forward into the next Assembly. We have this peculiar artefact in the Petroleum Resources Act that my colleague spoke of where there is a public gazetting process. The federal policy on this is to allow for public comment during gazetting, and in the case of the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, outright consultation with Indigenous governments if any regulations are to be drafted and changed.

This is not foreign to the Northwest Territories. In fact, in regards to our co-management system, I think that something that everyone is comfortable with is the operation of the MVRMA, whether it is industry or Indigenous governments. I think that we must take a position on this, and the government has basically asked for time to figure this out. This needs to be one of the first items of business moving forward. Curiously enough, the requirements for notice and public comment in the Petroleum Resources Act was not removed from the legislation when amendments were brought forward to update the bill, and if that is so problematic, I am not sure why that wasn't done.

Nevertheless, it is important that this gets done and that we allow the public to be able to comment and at least see what these regulations are going to be, especially when regulations are the real meat to the skeleton of our post-devolution legislative framework. It is imperative that we give the public and Indigenous governments the right to be heard on these regulations moving forward. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. To the motion.

Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed?

---Carried

Thank you, committee. Mr. Vanthuyne.