Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to have quite a few comments so I appreciate committee indulging me.
This was a private Member's bill brought forward by MLA O'Reilly. I thank him for doing that. It has started a lot of conversations in the department with industry, and within the committee. Ultimately this report has no recommendations and as noted by our chair, there wasn't -- the committee was not able to reach agreement on whether to proceed with it.
Firstly, I think there's a bit of a learning curve on how to deal with private Member's bills, and what exactly can be done in that case. Sometimes it opens up a conversation that puts a lot of work that could not be expected about private Member. And I think royalty disclosure is one of those.
I'll note this committee yesterday tabled a report with a number of recommendations regarding the mining fiscal review. One of those, I think most importantly, was for the department to look into transparency measures.
Some of the origin of this bill was the department's current review of the mining fiscal regime and committee asking for some hard data on what is actually been paid by the mines and then being told that that's not information that could be shared, which made the review kind of difficult and led to ultimately, I believe, MLA O'Reilly's private Member bill.
I want to clarify the current state. Right now, you can't find out how much the mines are paying in royalties with any precise measure. There's a number in the public accounts which contains oil and gas and mining royalties. We know, the last couple of years, they've paid about $20 million to the GNWT. You can't get that number to just be mining or just be oil and gas. I suspect the reason for that is if we just included oil and gas, well we're all very aware that would just be Imperial Oil's royalties, which is protected information. You could kind of, in a backhanded way, look, considering they're one-third owned by the federal government, find that out. Right now, the federal government has ESTMA which shows some of the payments that mines are making, but that doesn't necessarily line up within the public accounts, and there's a number of reasons committee got quite into detail about what ESTMA was intended to do versus what the public accounts are intended to do.
I think there's a lot of work to be done in the transparency area. As I said, I encourage the department to take that request seriously.
I'll note that the Member's private bill does not actually touch on public transparency at all. It is able being able to share information with committee. Committee also ran into this issue when one of our mines went in to creditor protection and we wanted to know how much they owed the GNWT. That was not a figure we were able to get, let alone publicly. There was some of that in the court records so you could kind of glean some things.
Also, committee has asked for some of the historical data, specifically, you know, what happened with gold mining in Giant Mine and Con Mine. There's one report done by the federal government that kind of gleans at that, and it really says that the most significant income government got from gold mining was personal income tax from miners. And this kind of leads to trying to piece together how much we're getting from mining is a very difficult thing to do. I think the government is not doing a good job of reporting enough in this area.
And I want to say, I think there is some credit to industry that there is an argument to be made that when you look at the impact benefit agreements, that our diamond mines might be paying the most in royalties of really anywhere in Canada, but no one can say that with a fact because the impact benefit agreements are extremely confidential.
I understand why they're confidential. If you, you know, ask the Tlicho to see their impact benefit agreement, they would tell you to go away quite quickly and the mines would also say no, that would prejudice our negotiation with other Indigenous groups. Also impact benefit agreements are hard to quantify because sometimes they're jobs, sometimes they're contracts, sometimes they're cash payments. And what is reported in ESTMA doesn't really reflect that. But given the size of some of our development corporations and the success, it's clear that the mining industry up here is working very well with Indigenous governments, but I think it would be nice to get a little more information on where we're actually going with that.
I think as part of the ongoing review that the department is doing, one of the big questions is how Indigenous governments can get more; what does the role of equity play in this? I note that that would be another one of those questions.
I also want to comment that I think there is a lot of mistrust in this area. I think there's mistrust from some members of the Department of ITI. I think there is mistrust between some members in industry. I think there's mistrust between some Members on the committee which led to some divisiveness. And I think we really can't have a reasonable conversation about mining and whether the mines are paying their fair share without building some of that trust. So I have some hesitancy about passing a private Member's bill that may, you know, start off what is going to be one of the most important conversations we have in this legislature about royalties if it's going to cause further mistrust. I think the department has a lot of work to do make sure that the various parties can come together and find some common agreement. I think there is common agreement that we want mining to pay their fair share, we want a little more transparency, but we don't want to, you know, essentially tax mines out of existence or make ourselves less competitive. Those are all balancing acts but to piece together what a mine is actually paying, you would have to get into IBAs, which you can't do; you'd have to get into corporate income tax, which you can't do; you'd have to get into personal income tax and payroll tax, which you can kind of glean. You have to then get into royalties, which you can't do. Then you'd have to get into the "I know we charge them some land lease fees and other payments.” So it really is a complex endeavor and the data that is incomplete and can be shared with committee is very incomplete.
I believe that a principle here that committee could allow the Minister to share more is a fair principle, and I believe the Minister, you know, is not going to hand over one of the mine's corporate income tax returns. I just don't believe that's ever going to happen. I don't think you're going to have the Minister of ITI handing over that kind of information. But I think you could get a Minister who could maybe confirm whether the modeling they're using right now to talk about mines is accurate of what is actually been collected over the years.
I think you could get a Minister to give committee a little more information about when they are using actual data based on what we have received since devolution verse modeling based on other jurisdictions. I think there is a lot of work to be done in this area, and I'm hoping that this Member's private Member's bill, as well as our report on the royalty resource review, can allow us to have a conversation that makes sure that the people of the Northwest Territories, the mines, the industry, and all Members in this House, understand what we are asking the mines to pay and understand how much in royalties they're actually paying. That's a very hard thing to figure out right now with publicly-available data.
That is all. I thank the department for their work. I thank all of the people who submitted on this. A number of people from industry came forward. I thank the committee for their deliberations.
I think probably the best course of action is to hold off on passing this bill until we get a response from yesterday's motions regarding the resource royalty review and to see what the department's next steps are but obviously that would be up to the Member who introduced it. Thank you, Madam Chair.