Thanks, Madam Chair. I figured that that was the kind of response I was going to get. We have some delegated authority under the MVRMA. Presumably, the objective here is to increase the delegated authority and/or give us some ability to change parts, perhaps, of the MVRMA ourselves. I'm not opposed to that in principle, but I think that it has to be approached very carefully, and it is going to require the support of the Indigenous governments.

I think that there is the mistaken belief that, if and when GNWT gets control, we could just higgledy-piggledy start changing things. That's not the case at all. These are constitutionally entrenched provisions. They cannot be changed unilaterally, and Mr. Harper's government got themselves in very hot water over this. In fact, it ended in litigation with the Gwich'in Tribal Council and the Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated; they took the federal government to court and stopped some changes to the MVRMA.

I think this has to be approached very, very carefully, and I have every confidence that the deputy minister is well aware of this and understands this, but that is not very well-communicated to our public, who think that, for whatever reason, or some segments of the business community think, that things take too long to happen and so on. You can't just start going in and changing things. How are we going to communicate that to the public and the business community, and build confidence in our environmental management and resource management system? Thanks, Madam Chair.