I would say we have a balanced responsibility to promote economic development, much of which is going to be driven by resource industries, and mining seems to be a better bet than oil and gas these days. It will probably last longer, given the Chinese appetite for resource commodities. It's probably a better long-term play.
What we want to see in the north is sustainable mining with responsible environmental and social impacts. We don't want to see the Giant Mine repeated out of Faro. We want to have modern, what they call third-generation mining, as you know, and I know you're very familiar with this, Mr. Bevington. We're trying to promote a sustainable approach to mineral development. We think in NWT, in the Yukon, and in Nunavut, this can be one of the drivers.
To make a quick hand-off to my colleagues, if you know you're going to be pulling iron ore up the Mary River site in Nunavut for the next 35 years, you can actually do some human resource planning as to where those skilled workers will come from and where the people are, and that's why the agencies are able to actually do something that's more sustainable than fly in and fly out, bring some people in from Newfoundland and they go back after the project is finished--all apologies to that model. I think it's a very important thing.
Lastly, just to help the members understand, in the Northwest Territories and in Nunavut, INAC and the minister are basically the equivalent of a provincial lands department. We do a lot of the things you'd see in a provincial lands department. In the Yukon we were successful in devolving that to the territorial government and we've been trying to negotiate devolution to the other two territorial governments. We would like to get out of the land department business and give it to the public government in the north, where it should be.