Thanks, Mr. Chair. Anybody who has hiked around Yellowknife knows that you can stumble across drill cores out in the bush that have been left there. As my colleague from Yellowknife North mentioned, we want to ensure that the money they expensed, the effort that has gone into drilling and retrieving core and storing it, that geological knowledge is protected. In some cases, drill core, when it's left out in the open can present a safety issue, a public safety issue, when cores start to fall over and so on. Some of the core may have the potential to generate acid, leach metals, so that there can be some environmental issues around some of the cores that might be brought above ground. I'm happy to say that we did work with the Minister and the department to make a couple of changes to the bill so that abandonment is now subject to regulations at the Minister's discretion.
What we did discover is that drill core is not actually dealt with in any way through something like the Mackenzie Valley Land Use Regulations, Territorial Land Use Regulations. The thresholds and items covered in those regulations don't really cover drill core. This is a policy recommendation around making sure that we close up that regulatory gap in the other regulations that deal more generally with reclamation and restoration of lands so that we capture the geological knowledge to make sure that there is no safety or environmental issues in the future. I support this. Thanks, Mr. Chair.