No, thank you -- or thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, we're kind of constrained to some extent by our procedures here, and we don't have the ability to have the kind of back and forth that we had in the technical -- sorry, with the committee meeting and in the clause-by-clause review so I appreciate the difficulty of trying to do this sometimes in Committee of the Whole.
But I just wanted to have an opportunity to respond to some of the things that I heard, and I respect all the viewpoints that I hear in this House even if I disagree with them sometimes. It's certainly not my intention to try to delay this bill. I want this bill passed in this sitting as much as probably anybody else because I had to try to deal with it in the last Assembly.
So that's not my intention here. I think -- well, I don't think; my intention here was to bring forward the motions that we had in -- from the committee to actually get a full response because we ran out of time, as several Members have indicated. So now that I've got the response, that's better; I have a better understanding of where folks have landed. But I haven't really heard any specific response as to why we can't release forest harvesting agreements as a public document. I haven't heard why we can't make permits and licenses that are not for personal use available for public disclosure as we do with all kind of other permits and licenses, because I think that's only in the interest of making more transparent and accountable decisions. So, you know, in no way am I trying to undermine the process convention that was set up, the Legislative Development Protocol.
I had to live through all of this in the last Assembly and made some very strong recommendations in the last Assembly supporting where we're at. So I'm not trying to undermine any of this stuff. We simply ran out of time as a committee. And I believe it is in the public interest to have the kind of debate and discussion we're having right now on the floor of the House about whether some additional information should be made public in the bill itself. That's what this is about.
And I guess in my view -- believe me, I'm not going to speak for another ten minutes so, because I'm the only thing that stands between people and dinner. So in my view, though, a lot of this can and should have been fixed before the bill ended up with committee.
The issue of a public registry, more public information being made public, that was raised in the last Assembly with Bill 44. It was raised again during the public engagement by the Northwest Territories Association of Communities and the NGOs. I made the same comments at second reading on the bill, so this shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. And I think those -- that issue of public information, of public registry, should have been fixed before the bill got here. But it wasn't. So we negotiated to a point where we've got a pretty short list, much shorter than I would like, and I think it's in the public interest to add these additional items. Clearly, it's not going to get support here, and that's fine. But I think it was worthwhile to have this discussion and debate on the floor of this House. And, Madam Chair, I think that's all I have to say.