Thanks, Madam Chair. Yeah, I want to commend the chair and members of the committee, that included myself, for the hard work that went into this. We had a lot of support in getting these presenters before us and in compiling the report. And, you know, why is this important? You know, our government has assumed tens of millions of dollars of unnecessary public liabilities as a result of measures that were not taken to prevent contaminated sites. And, you know, the biggest one is just, you know, five or seven kilometres down the road here, the Giant Mine, where our government is now contributing, over a period of time, about $23 million towards the remediation of that site.
Another one -- and I'm certainly going to be raising this a little bit later in this sitting -- is the Cameron Hills sour gas field that was owned by Strategic Oil and Gas. Our government is now booked $20 million of liability associated with this property.
You know, I would rather spend that money on housing, education, healthcare, anything except for remediation of contaminated sites which are clearly preventable. And the last site that I mentioned was assumed post-devolution. So that's why this is important.
It's also important because this can help us as a government implement some of the provisions of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, specifically Article 29, which says that States shall take effective measure to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous material shall take place in the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior, and informed consent. That hasn't happened here, Madam Chair.
So, in any event, I commend committee. There's, I think, a number of very sound recommendations here that provide a bit of a roadmap for how we can avoid and prevent liabilities in the future. Unfortunately, this was a mandate item in the last Assembly for the government and very little, if any, work was done. And I don't really -- I have yet to see any legislative regulatory changes in the life of this Assembly to help prevent further contaminated sites. And I think that's one of the reasons why committee took such an interest in this topic. Because the government hasn't done anything on this, we're giving them a mandate and, I think, a bit of a roadmap to lay that track. And there are some timelines associated with some of these recommendations, and I really look forward to the response from the Cabinet side to these recommendations. And some of these are very easy low hanging fruit that this government should undertake very quickly. Thanks, Madam Chair.