Yeah, thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, I just want to get into perhaps the weeds a bit here but I guess when the bill was being developed, the department waited until basically the end of the process to carry out a very abbreviated public engagement period where they put out a summary of a policy intentions document. I think there was about four or five weeks to comment on it. It happened partly over the holiday break. It wasn't a very helpful thing to have happen, quite frankly, in terms of trying to engage the public. So it happened at the end, and it was very short. Some of the work may have been done in the last Assembly, but people wanted to know more about what was in the bill or what was -- could possibly be coming in terms of policy intentions.
We also heard and read in two written submissions from the Northwest Territories Association of Communities and from the NGOs that they felt that the public engagement was not adequate.
So I guess where I'm going with this, Madam Chair, is that as a public government, we have an obligation to do public engagement around these resource management bills. That's not for the Indigenous governments to do. That's for our government as a public government to do. And, you know, credit to the department, they did a great job working with the technical working group. We heard that from everybody engaged and involved. That's great. But it seems like they didn't have enough resources or time to actually do the public engagement that was required. And what this recommendation suggests is that when departments enter into this process, they seriously need to look at the resources they have available.
We asked -- I asked on the floor, and during budget reviews many times, does the department -- are you securing any additional resources for this? The answer was no, they didn't. And I think it clearly showed at the end of the day, when the public engagement happened at the very end, was more or less an afterthought. So I do want to compliment the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment, again, for securing additional resources for the Mineral Resources Act regulation development. I've been critical of that process. But they did actually go out and secure additional resources to do the work. I just simply believe that other departments need to be able to access similar additional resources. This is not run of the mill stuff. We now have a legislative development protocol. We got -- that we have to live up to. And departments need to get more resources to do this important work. And that's what this recommendation is about. Thanks, Madam Chair.