Good afternoon.
Colin gave a good outline of the Tlicho. The Tlicho are located north of Great Slave Lake just 100 kilometres north of Yellowknife. We have a huge track of land. We own 39,000 square kilometres, which is about half the size of Nova Scotia. Our traditional territory is called Mowhi Gogha De Niitlee—and I was hoping to circulate a map for the committee members. They are going to do that once they translate that into French. The traditional territory of the Tlicho is huge. It takes into account the borders of the partnering first nations that have land claims.
When you look at the map, you will see that there is what I call patchwork where the Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, and Sahtu have land claims, and they have surface and subsurface rights in certain blocks of land, but the Tlicho is a single block of land that they own outright.
We're very interested in the PSAB, because, as Colin said, we have 100 million dollars' worth of a company that has done a lot of work. What has PSAB done for the Tlicho in the last 12 years of the land claims? Nothing. We have not been able to use PSAB for any of our procurement work, especially in the remediation work. There are lots of abandoned mine sites in our traditional territory. Giant Mine is the major one right now. It needs over $300 million to $400 million worth of mine cleanup.
We can honestly say that PSAB has not been applied in our claim area, in our settlement area, in our Mowhi area through our agreement. I know this because I've been heavily involved in the implementation of the land claims prior to effective date, which is over 12 years, and I've worked with our companies to try to secure contracts using PSAB, but we have not been able to.
At one point I was told that PSAB doesn't apply to land claim areas. I said, “No, I don't think so. You need to read our agreement and what PSAB says.”
I think the committee needs to understand that even though it exists out there, some of us haven't been able to use PSAB because its application has been very discretionary in our region, as far as we're concerned.
I don't know if my time is up, but as Colin said, we do have some suggestions for fixing that. One is to not have discretionary application. As well, there are too many rules as it is right now. The interpretation of PSAB is also something this committee needs to consider.
Basically, I think overall it's a sound policy, but it hasn't been applied. As I said, it was very discretionary, in our region anyway.
Mahsi.