Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I have a little trouble with this bill because I think it's -- well, through committee discussions, the department's opposed to it, and it is a discretionary power to the Minister. So even if it was in place, absolutely nothing would have changed to my knowledge. The Minister's not willing to share that information, and just because she may share it as for the bill, it seems pretty clear that they would not actually share it. So I don't know what it accomplishes.
That being said, I guess I just want to -- we've spent a lot of time trying to understand royalties. There's essentially one number for royalties in the territories so roughly $20 million in the public accounts. Obviously, that fluctuates on how profitable mines are. And you have to really make a lot of assumptions about that number. First off, you have to know that that is the total amount. Then we give the feds half, and then we give half of our half to Indigenous governments. You have to know that it includes Norman Wells. We don't really know how much money we get from Norman Wells, but it is -- the federal government owns a third of it, so you can go through their reports and generally try to guess how much money we get from Norman Wells oil. There's no other oil obviously paying us royalties. And then you can assume, really, it's three diamond mines doing the rest. On occasion, there has been another mine in the territory that has paid royalties but historically, we know, you know, you can assume something, like, Snap Lake never paid us any royalties. We don't know how much royalties we got from mines like Con or Giant or Pine Point. We don't have that information. That was federal -- before devolution. But there is a single line in a federal report that tells you that Giant Mine paid less in royalties than it paid in -- its workers paid in income tax. I think about that single line a lot, and I think it would be very helpful that perhaps when one of our diamond mines close, we publish some of these historical royalty numbers that shows how many carats they mined, how profitable they were, how much they paid. I've asked the Minister at times, you know, why did royalties all of a sudden get cut in half. And they can't answer that question publicly. They can't say well, one of the diamond mines had a bad year. That's business information.
How confidential is any of this is a bit debatable. If it's a publicly traded company, you can buy a stock and you can go see all this information. It's quite available. Companies in exploration actually really like to share this information on how their mines are doing because they want to raise capital. And then, as has been mentioned, there is ESTMA. So the mines voluntarily report quite a bit of this. The numbers are not quite the same as ESTMA. So I don't know whether if this passed the Minister would have gave us anything at all in committee in doing our report. Probably not. I'd like to think that if this existed and perhaps a mine had closed, long since closed, the companies stopped to exist, we would then publish some of that historical royalty information because I find it extremely interesting. I know that during our current royalty review, we are adding a lot of -- considering adding a lot more exceptions to royalties. You know, whether they invest capital in the Northwest Territories, whether they have a headquarters in the Northwest Territories.
I think if you do that, there's kind of an obligation to say why did this mine pay zero money in royalties and to be able to somewhat explain confidentially why the royalties were done. You could say, you know, Company X moved their headquarters and invested a lot of capital, that's why there's zero royalty dollars coming in on that line item. Right now, none of that information is available on a confidential basis. I think there are occasions where it would be warranted, and the Minister might even appreciate -- and the company, in fact. I found a lot of the mines are quite willing to explain their ESTMA and why, you know, perhaps you gave an Indigenous government a bunch of cash one year, and then instead their IBA of required jobs so they didn't get any money the next year. They are actually quite willing to explain how and willing to be transparent. And so I think, you know -- I don't ever see a Minister abusing this, and -- well, I hesitate to see a Minister even using it, but I think there are definitely cases where we will hold this historical data for the decades to come, and we will do research on our royalties where it would be helpful to be able to share it on a confidential basis.
You know, at the end of the day, I will support it because of that. Thank you, Madam Chair.