Merci, Monsieur le President. By the time this House reconvenes in May, the opportunity for public comments on the review of NWT mining royalties will have closed without much public debate or media coverage. Why is this important?
There has never been a comprehensive and independent review of mining royalties and the present process is fundamentally flawed, with literally billions of dollars of potential government revenues at stake.
I submitted eight pages of comments on a previous version of a research paper. It took two attempts to even get an acknowledgement and there has never been a detailed response. Very few of my comments and suggestions were incorporated or implemented.
The only information to guide the review to date are the faulty PriceWaterhouseCoopers competitiveness study - a high-level discussion paper with vague next steps and no timelines, and a research paper that perpetuates the extractivism paradigm. The discussion and research paper contains no actual analysis of past performance of our mining royalty system let alone any evaluation of its fairness or ability to maximize revenues or benefits.
The secrecy surrounding mining royalties and the lack of any financial analysis continues to cripple this review and these papers barely acknowledge this problem let alone propose any solutions. Clearly this review is heading towards the status quo.
That should surprise no one given the rampant regulatory capture within the department as a result of its conflicting mandate of promoting and regulating mining. This review needs to be done independently just as was done with the procurement review, with an independent panel and a report.
These papers don't even make any substantive use of previous work done by world-class experts like the ITI commissioned Natural Resources Governance Institute Report, Northwest Territories Mining Sector Review and Benchmarking Study, or the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Environment's Report on "An Economic Analysis of the GNWT's Approach to the Mining Regime Fiscal Review". These experts have concluded that "the NWT has one of the world's most charitable fiscal regimes for the mining sector" and "the NWT sells its nonrenewable resources more cheaply than most of the other jurisdictions in the world." I'll have questions for the Minister of ITI on how to fix the fundamentally flawed review of our mining royalty that's currently underway. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.
