Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on June 9th, 2009

[Neil McCrank]

It was made clear to me right at the very beginning that this was the subject of other processes and I was not to be reviewing the Mackenzie Valley. So any discussion I had was very informal and not on the record. I'll leave that to the process that is occurring before the joint panel review and the National Energy Board. It's a linear project. You've answered the question to some extent in your question in the sense that it adds to the complexity. I guess there are all sorts of speculations as to whether there's a problem there and what that problem is. I haven't really contemplated what it is.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

If there were a project, let's say a mine in the specific area, and the region happened to have a land use plan—if we caught up on those, and I totally agree with you that we should have those done all over Canada—it would solve a lot of problems. Assuming there was a land use plan and there was a mine going to set up in the area now, are there big problems in the Northwest Territories?

[Neil McCrank]

If you look at the three or four diamond mines that have established themselves, they've been through the process and obviously they were able to make it work well enough for them. It was a costly exercise, so I'm told by the mining companies, but so be it; that's part of the price you pay. I think the difficulty was more in the very much smaller mining projects, like a diamond drilling site for a prospect, which goes through a very complicated process that is deterring some of the mining projects from occurring. I was advised, for instance, that there are mine sites right on the border of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories—and you know about this, I'm sure—where the decision was made that they would do it all in the Yukon because they knew the process and could make it work. If they got into the NWT, it was too complex, too unpredictable, to make it work.

I was a regulator, so I know there are always complaints about regulators in the business. I take that with a grain of salt, but that's what I was told.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

INAC is sort of a schizophrenic creation, in the sense that it has at least three mandates that are not always congruent: aboriginal rights, environmental regulation, and promotion of northern development. Did you find that an interesting speculative issue in your discussions?

[Neil McCrank]

It certainly came up, Mr. Bagnell. You're absolutely right, they're juxtaposed one to the other. Sometimes they're opposite and there's a conflict. I didn't comment on that because I was looking at only the regulatory system, but there's no question that the issue of at least the two sides of INAC came up in a lot of discussions that I heard about, just the way you've described it.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Please make any further comments on Nunavut. You haven't talked about that much.

[Neil McCrank]

I only spent two days in Nunavut. I had good briefings by the Nunavut government, by Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., by the mayor and a variety of other people in Iqaluit. From what I could see, I actually thought there was a desire to make the system work, and work reasonably well.

Having said that, industry...for instance—and I won't give the specifics—one particular organization came to me with a project that they had in Nunavut. If they scoped it out on the regulatory bodies, from the regulatory bodies' point of view, from the application to the building permit, if you want to call it that, it was 14 years. Of course they said there's no way anybody will invest. They've since pulled off that project completely, so I'm told.

I didn't spend a lot of time there, but it's not without its problems. I had an impression when I was there that things were pretty smooth, but I'm not sure they're quite that smooth.

On the project that I'm talking about, by the way, I asked the company before I would write it up--which I didn't do--“Have you tried to run this past the regulatory bodies to see if they agreed with that 14 years?” They hadn't done that, so I said that, in the absence of that, I was not writing it up in my views.

Perhaps that answers the question.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Mr. Bagnell and Mr. McCrank.

Now to Mr. Clarke, for five minutes.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

If possible, I'll share my time with Mr. Duncan as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Sure, by all means. Go ahead.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Mr. McCrank, for coming today.

I have a couple of questions here. Coming from a first nations background myself, I'm kind of curious in regard to the consultation process that you undertook with the first nations and Northwest Territories. How many consultation meetings did you have with first nations?

[Neil McCrank]

There is a list. I think I met with every land claim agreement signatory in one form or another and all of the unsettled areas, with the exception of the Dehcho. We tried to set up meetings with them in Fort Simpson; they simply didn't work out. That's why I made the comment that I met Grand Chief Antoine last night.

Without going to the document—it's there, the list of all the parties—I would think probably, because some of them I met more than once, we had a dozen to 15. And they weren't called consultations, by the way. They made this clear at the outset: is this a form of consultation by the federal government? I said no. I'm not sure what that means anymore. You'll note that I made a recommendation about consultation in the document, as well, and what that should mean on the part of the federal government.

But it's probably 12 to 15. I'd have to go back through the list.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

What is their opinion of the regulatory process, as it stands right now?

[Neil McCrank]

I made a comment earlier. All would publicly state to you and to me that they are working well and that we should not consider any improvements. Privately, I was advised otherwise by many of them, that they thought there should be some changes. So I guess that's where it stands.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

When you say “privately”, what's their appetite for reform, then?

[Neil McCrank]

Privately, some of them were, I think, in favour of the recommendations that I made. As I say, what's in this book was all discussed in Yellowknife at the round table, and all, with the exception of the Dehcho, were represented at the round table.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Okay, John.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Thank you very much.

We never actually finished our conversation on a northern major projects management office. Would you like to carry on? I felt that you had something you wanted to comment on there.

[Neil McCrank]

I think I made the point that I think it has hope in the south; hopefully we'll have hope in the north. It should be driven by the north. It shouldn't be in the south. The capacity to fill the job, which you commented on, I think, probably exists in the south, as well. I know that they had difficulty finding the right person. I think they found the right person, and I believe that Phil Jennings is still in charge of that office. They'll have similar problems in the north, but I expect that with the challenges that would exist in putting together an office in the north to run the projects....

By the way, I have said that it should be a little different from the one in the south in that it should have the ability to confer with the regulatory bodies. I don't foresee any major changes in the immediate future, so you still have those 17 bodies to deal with. They should have the ability to confer with those bodies--not direct them, but confer. They should also have the authority to look at all projects, not just at the major projects, because there are a lot of smaller projects. First of all, there aren't the numbers in the north that there are south of 60, so you would have a limited number. But the smaller ones are sometimes extremely important as well.

I will give you an example. When I was in the north, I went out to a diamond drilling site 100 miles or so north of Yellowknife. It was a very small area that was having trouble going through a massive regulatory system for a small drilling component, and they were complaining about it. I think that a major projects management office or a major and minor projects management office would assist in bringing that to closure.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

I understand that the diamond mines filled a great void in the NWT when they came into being and that those may not have proceeded in the timely way they did if they had fallen within a different land category or a different status. They were under one of the areas with the least regulatory and bureaucratic burden.

Were you given confirmation of that kind of status as well?

[Neil McCrank]

Well, I heard rumours to that effect. Actually, my own belief is that these mines are so large that they will take the effort to actually make them work, regardless of where they are in the area. They have enough people and enough resources to make them work. Nobody said that the system can't work for very large projects of that nature, but you lose a lot between the small and large projects that are troublesome.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We're over time now, if that's all there is. Thank you, Mr. McCrank, Mr. Duncan, and Mr. Clarke.

Now, est-ce qu'il y a une autre question du Bloc? Non?

Okay, I have Mr. Payne. You had another question. Go ahead.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. McCrank, in terms of the land use planning, I certainly think we share the priorities you were talking about, and we're working on getting it settled and moving forward. Obviously there are some major challenges there with it being a tripartite process involving the Government of Canada, the NWT, and first nations.

Do you have recommendations on how we might get the other levels of government on board on this issue?

[Neil McCrank]

The only recommendation I would make is to just seek them out. I think one of the major responses of the NWT to my report was that the land use plans have to be complete. All the aboriginal communities I met talked the same way and said that land use planning is a key to this function. They just couldn't get it, seemingly, through the process. And of course, I think the federal government is interested. It's a question of putting a priority on this, and that's why I worded it the way I did.

Mr. Payne, you and I both know, coming from Alberta, that we don't really have a land use plan fully sanctioned in Alberta. It was one of the banes of my existence as the chair of the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board that there were times when we weren't able to navigate through because there were no land use plans. So I'm a great supporter, obviously, of land use plans, and I think there's an appetite, if we put a priority on it, to make it happen.