Merci, Monsieur le President, that's a tough act to follow.
Another day, another contaminated site mismanaged by our government. This time it is the Mactung exploration property in the former Cantung Mine. Cantung and Mactung are mining properties in the Mackenzie Mountains. The Cantung Mine was a tungsten producer from 1962 until it closed in 2015. The owner, North American Tungsten, went into creditor protection on June 9th, 2015 after we agreed to take on this operation under the Devolution Agreement.
Somehow the federal government let that company put up the Mactung property as part of its financial security for its water license. When our government inherited the management of the Cantung site under devolution, nothing was done to change that arrangement even though GNWT had total discretion over the form of the security. That's another preventible liability that has cost our government millions of dollars. So much for Polluter-Pays Principle and the devolution promise of responsible resource development.
As part of the creditor protection proceeding, Cabinet ended up purchasing Mactung for $2.5 million with a special warrant that bypassed the Legislative Assembly. In that way we were told GNWT could hand Cantung back to the federal government for remediation. When we acquired the Mactung property, a lot of junk and hazardous materials were on the site even though I had been told that there was nothing there. GNWT spent $172,000 on a partial site cleanup of that property. Then GNWT hired a southern consultant to prepare and submit a land use application to the Yukon government for an imaginary exploration program in an attempt to hike the value of the property.
As far as I can tell, GNWT has owned Mactung now for seven years and all attempts to sell the Cantung and Mactung properties have failed. These two properties are 140 kilometres away from each other by air and 700 kilometres by road. It's not clear to me why we are marketing these properties with the federal government. There is little chance that some buyer will take on these mining properties that are now contaminated sites without significant concessions and subsidies. Needless to say I will have lots of questions for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment about these properties, our failure to manage them properly, and whether we can ever expect to recoup the money spent on them. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
