Thank you, Madam Chair. And yes, I agree with what my colleague has said. And to build upon that in a more sort of microscale is when this work gets done around environmental assessment and clean-up -- and I know that there's probably been some changes, and I hope there's been some changes since I was bidding on these old contaminated sites myself, but it's always a battle to get proper budgets in place for any sort of assessment and reclamation work with the consultants. And I think in this area it's at the disservice to the consultants, not what I generally am saying about GNWT contracts. In this case, oftentimes the environmental budgets are sort of nickelled and dimed quite a bit and that delays the work, considering that contracts are not put out by the GNWT or the federal government until well into August because of the -- at times, because of the fiscal yearend being in April. And as a result, once they start getting into that back and forth around the budgeting, it delays the start of the contract. And what ends up happening, our contracts don't get fulfilled and then it actually costs us double the money to go back later and try to get the samples that were missed.

As well too, any time you're doing environmental work, if you're only visiting a site once to get samples once a year, you're not really getting a fulsome picture of what is happening at the site during the different seasons and, you know, if you sample under ice, the water will have more contamination in it because ice will drop out contaminants. If you're sampling in the summer, the water will look cleaner.

Therefore one of the reasons I think this is so important, and agree that it's not been updated as crucially as it needs to be, is to ensure that we are actually getting good bang for our buck when it comes to environmental clean-ups and assessments but also ensuring that, you know, we're not putting people at risk because we are skimping on their budget, that we're making the best use of the dollars, we're going at the right time of the year to collect the right data. A lot of environmental work is fiscally driven and to its detriment. And so I think it's very, very important to have a great -- a true understanding of what these costs are. And by updating their tools, it's the only way that they'll be able to do so.

I just want to note, and that I will follow up on this, that the contaminated guidelines -- or sorry, the guidelines for contaminated soil remediation have been the same since I first came north. I don't believe there's been an update since I became a Regular Member. And even then, they were only guidelines. Oftentimes you're sitting in an environmental limbo of which standards you're applying because the GNWT itself has not developed that standard for itself and, therefore, different companies will use different standards and they'll be down, you know, using different groundwater, like Alberta's levels and things that just don't always jive with the GNWT -- or sorry, with the Northwest Territories. So, again, I can't stress the importance of this recommendation. Thank you.