Merci, Monsieur le President. I want to thank the mover and the seconder for bringing this motion forward. And I'm casting my mind back to the 18th Assembly when we dealt with the Public Land Act. And how this got started was we, of course, through devolution, GNWT inherited some federal land, at least the administration of it, and of course it had had its Commissioner's lands already. What the Minister of Lands of the day told us was that they were going to bring forward a bill to basically try to combine some aspects of the administration of those two pieces of legislation, to make it more consistent. But, poof, about a year later a Public Land Act arrived on our desk that wasn't just a kind of, you know, integrated some aspects. It basically was a repeal of the other two pieces of legislation and replaced. It's still not in force. But the preparation and development of that bill, there was very little public engagement around it and zero involvement from the Indigenous governments. And that's the root of this problem, Mr. Speaker, is the way that that bill was drafted. There was zero involvement with the Indigenous governments where this can and should have been fixed right from the start. Committee identified this because I just quickly scanned the SCEDE report on Bill 46. Committee identified this as a problem. We told the Minister that this was a problem. We tried to fix it. Indigenous governments identified it as a problem. But they wouldn't fix the bill. So this is the root of the problem, was it was not a co-drafted piece of legislation. Our government refused to incorporate the pre-existing rights that were already entrenched in land rights agreements. They refused to recognize and put that into the bill in the first place, or we wouldn't be here talking about this.
So I'm fine trying to fix this through the regulations, but the problem is with the law itself, Mr. Speaker, and that could and should have been fixed in the last Assembly, and that's why we're here still talking about it. So I want to make sure that this Cabinet actually fixes the problem with the legislation, not just the regulations. And if we had adopted the proper kind of UNDRIP lens that we're about to probably do maybe later in the life of this Assembly, that would prevent this from happening again, and we will also have the legislative development protocol with the Indigenous governments as a result of the Intergovernmental Council work. So this is a holdover problem from the last Assembly. It can and we did try to fix it in the last Assembly. The Cabinet of the day would not allow it to happen, and that's why we're in this mess right now. So I'm -- I'm really -- oh, I'm going to be curious to see what the response from this Cabinet is on this problem. And they need to fix the legislation, not just try to do it in regulations. Thanks, Mr. Speaker.