Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I know I'm grateful, thankful that, you know, Indigenous government were involved in drafting this Bill 74 to its current form. And it's good to see two sides of government working together, the GNWT and the Indigenous government technical working group developing this draft.
I know this is very -- this is important for the Indigenous people, especially people living in the area that deals with the lands and resources. So I know that it's respecting the rights of the people living in the area, especially Tlicho and other Indigenous people in the NWT therefore I will support this Act because a lot of work went into it. But when we were travelling, though -- when we were travelling and one of the communities that we went to -- it's all the same. We went to Whati. And this is what the people said in the outlying communities, Whati, Fort Simpson, that, you know, that the forest fire management was better in the past than it is now. That's what we heard on our tour. And they said that they haven't seen these kind of problems before that they are seeing today, the mass evacuation, so which is a problem for them. And they're saying that GNWT used to do a better job fighting the fires in the past, and they got to it before it got out of control and threatened the communities, so what they used to see. And they said that they would like to see brought back is that maybe, like where the GNWT at the beginning, as soon as the forest fire start, they used to drive around in the communities and recruit anybody that was able to fight fires and able-bodied people. You know, they used to collect them. And our elders, they have a lot of knowledge and experience fighting fires without today's fancy technology. That's what we heard in our tour. And they would like to see some of those brought back. So that way we don't have to go through the chaos that we went through with the mass evacuation of Yellowknife, Fort Smith, Hay River, Behchoko. A lot of these were avoidable.
And they said -- what we heard too is that a lot of these people they said you do not mess with Mother Nature. And that's not what this government did. They messed with the Mother Nature, and it got out of control and resulted in 4 million hectares of land burned in the Northwest Territories. Our animals destroyed. Our livelihood destroyed, our language, our culture. And that's what we heard from the people. And we saw what happened. And I just hope that we will not go through that again and we will -- through this act and through both governments, the GNWT and the Indigenous government working together, we can make this better in order for us to move forward. Thank you.