Thanks, Mr. Chair. So, yes, committee did hear concerns around the impacts of mineral exploration and development within municipal boundaries and where this has led to some issues of land use conflicts, particularly in Inuvik. I am certainly well aware of a number of prominent cases that have been in the media around land use conflicts in Dawson around Placer Mining. Although committee tried to work with the Minister on this to try to find ways to provide notice and opportunities for temporary restrictions linked to municipal interests and purpose within communities boundaries and so on, we weren't able to make any progress because amendments required ministerial concurrence and he was not prepared to go there. So this is an attempt to try to get the Minister to address this issue and our government to address this issue on a policy basis going forward.

You know, realistically, what you would expect to happen is, once a community has identified key municipal infrastructure, like potable water, that there be a way to protect potable water sources permanently from activities that could impact potable water, source water. I think that was even some efforts that were being done by Environment and Natural Resources to protect potable source water for municipal governments. As municipalities grow and change, they may need to look at areas outside of their boundaries for sewage treatment, municipal landfills, recreational opportunities, that are even outside of their own boundaries.

We want to make sure that our communities have the ability to make sure that their investments are respected and so on. The efforts that committee was trying to go through were to try to prevent land use conflicts from happening in the first place and encouraging good neighbour relationships. TerraX has a great relationship within Yellowknife, but we wanted to find ways to try to instill that into the bill. Unfortunately, they weren't successful, so here is an attempt to try to get our government to deal with these issues on a policy basis going forward. Thanks, Mr. Chair.