Thank you, Madam Chair. I agree with the things that were brought forward by my colleague for Frame Lake. It was quite an interesting process back and forth with the department and the and the working group, the technical working group, the Indigenous governments and representatives. I had the pleasure of being able to chair a few of the meetings which was -- helped me to stretch my legislative muscles and work through that kind of a process. And as you can see, the number of motions that we brought forward as a result of just how much back and forth there really had been. I agree that we likely ran out of time to do anything further and to really tease out a lot of the nuances that perhaps committee was really excited to do so.

Given that the information we had heard from communities when we travelled was, for me, really thought provoking and along a whole different sort of line of thinking than maybe I would have thought before, and a big piece of that that I want to speak to here even though it does come up in motions, was the piece around the Indigenous science and knowledge and that incorporation into each community or area's ability to fight their own fires and to be in charge or control of their own fire management and forestry management plans.

A lot of the elders spoke to us about in the past how fire would be dealt with, that they would come with shovels and buckets and put out every sort of area that they found and in such manner they cared for the land.

Over the years, in the last decades, fire science has changed. I mentioned in the past that I grew up in British Columbia which was a huge forestry province. I remember when the government decided to stop fighting the forest fires for fear that it was changing the ecosystems of the forests in BC. The example given was the pine beetle that destroyed a lot of BC's timber industry. And at that time, a decision was made from what they said was an ecological perspective but also financial perspective because it was costly to go out into the forests and fight each and every single one of them. But what BC has that we don't have is that BC has fortified and built up municipalities.

They have municipalities with fire departments. They have resources within their own municipal governments to deal with fires when they do arrive on their doorstep. We don't have any of that in the Northwest Territories save maybe the capital city and a couple of the regional centres. And even then, it's clear that they were woefully underprepared and understaffed, under capacity for any of what's happened in the past while.

In 2014, ENR did lessons learned on the fire season that year in which we saw unprecedented amounts of our forests burn. At the time, ENR presented to the government -- or sorry, to the engineers and geoscientists on the fires and, quote, and said, that the regeneration of the fire of the forest was not the same any longer because the intensity of the fires in 2014 was so great that the regenerative seeds that were needed to come and bring back the forest and the plant life were all scalded or scorched and were not able to come back in the same manner.

So the fires in 2014, the department was aware that they had altered the landscape and the climate and the vegetation of the territory irrevocably at that time. So now fast forward, we're sitting here in 2023, nine years later, and we didn't seem to learn any lessons from that and instead we've allowed fires to burn. My colleague has spoken often to the resources that her people rely on that are in the -- sorry, in the forest and how decisions made by this government has basically wiped out huge areas of their resources because they're not considered to have the same value as a building or a structure.

So I understand there's a large complexity around fire science and things are evolving. However, it appeared to me, and going out on this act and being part of this committee, that this department did not bring in the general public of the Indigenous people in the communities. I do appreciate that the working group had a lot of input here, and that for me was the only saving grace of this act that gives me any faith, that it was done at least with some degree of ability to be successful. And I know a lot of the back and forth we had was around varying nuanced conversation raising the issue of the fact that people are not going to be carrying ID into the bush necessarily. So if they're stopped by an officer and need to prove indigeneity, you know, they may not have that card with them. And then I found out even that some of the communities don't even -- or Indigenous organizations don't even use a card. They know who their people are. They have a list, and it's just a matter of a confirmation. So that was really something new to me.

So that being said, I think what gives me assurance, though, is that many of these details will be fleshed out in the regulations and that the assurances from the department that the same collaborative approach with the technical working group will be held when the regulations are developed. It is what gives me the faith, at the very least, that this act will go forward with Indigenous people and their use of the land in mind. And I really want to urge and hope that the people that are on that group and the people in the department really look at what has happened here this year and really start to analyze whether or not this idea of letting everything burn until it's on our doorstep is really a smart one. Thank you, Madam Chair.