Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all the presenters here. It's always important we hear from you, and actually this is the second presentation from NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mines.
In the first presentation I brought up a point with this graph on exploration. Really the desire to change the regulatory system in the Northwest Territories is being driven by this sense that exploration has declined in the Northwest Territories. That's what's driving it. It's not being driven by the number of mines that are now in environmental assessment, which is actually quite large for the Northwest Territories.
I'm always interested in the statistics. If you had taken a 20-year view of exploration in the Northwest Territories, you'd see we had a huge bubble of exploration in the nineties throughout the whole Slave geographic province, where we put in enormous effort and probably led the whole country in mining exploration for almost a whole decade. You can compare it to what's happening here with Nunavut and the Yukon, where their mining exploration is finally taking off; much of the Northwest Territories has been through that mining exploration boom, and you see that mining exploration, although not high this year, is the fourth-highest on your graph in the last 14 years. Does this make it a crisis situation?
You and the whole industry have been hammering on the Northwest Territories about mining exploration. After a while, I get a little tired of it. I don't see it in your graphs that....
This other graph you have on page 13 suggests to me that finally the rest of the country is catching up on mining exploration. Things like the Ring of Fire and many other areas in southern Canada have exploded with mining exploration; the dollars are going there, which is correct, because those are the areas of interest right now.
This is a very important point. This is what this government's basing changing our regulatory system on, more so than the surface rights board, but we'll probably get into the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act a little later on.
In reality, when you look at these numbers and you look at the history of mining exploration in the Northwest Territories, you have to say to yourself, “Let's be realistic here; mining exploration is still continuing in the north.” Our major area, which is the Slave geographic province, went through a huge bubble in the nineties. Why, then, are you continuing to try to make this argument, which in some ways is simply not following the facts?