Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for the three questions. I think they are very thoughtful questions. It is good that he asked them so that the House can understand the answers. I will answer them backwards because I have shorter answers for the last ones.
In relation to the North Slave Métis, the reason I did not bring it up during my speech was, as the member said, because the action is before the courts and as we know, members of Parliament do not comment on actions that are before the courts. However, I can say that most of the members of the North Slave Métis have access to one land claim or another. They are a member on various lists, either the four Tlicho communities or some other list. In that respect, there was not a separate negotiation with the North Slave Métis, although there were attempts originally to somehow work them into the negotiations, but those were not successful. Therefore, we are at that stage.
There is also a clause in the agreement that protects, so it is without prejudice to any other claim holders. If something were to happen later on that was determined that the North Slave Metis did have some rights--and if they won some rights--there is a clause in the Tlicho agreement that would leave that open for that to occur. I think they are protected in that respect and we will let the courts proceed. I cannot comment on the court proceedings.
In relation to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies. That is our policy now, so we put it in any self-government agreement that we are negotiating. Any extra wording is only to make it clear to people who might have that hesitancy or wonder how it applies. It applies fully in the agreements, as per the Constitution and as per the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The member's first question related to the concurrent laws and their interpretation. We can have concurrent governments in two different ways. We can have three provinces, such as Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta, that have concurrent laws. They are all doing their own thing in different areas. We can have different orders of government, such as the municipal government creating laws for roads, provincial government creating laws for health care and the federal government creating laws for defence. We can have concurrent things going on.
In the case of overlap, where we are into the same area of jurisdiction with the federal government,--and the Tlicho agreement has very limited law making powers to start with, so there are not a lot of areas it would be making laws--then the federal law would prevail. There is no contradiction or inconsistency there.
Also, for all intents and purposes, in most cases if there is a conflict with a Northwest Territories law the Tlicho law would prevail because it is basically a parallel government and hopefully the duties of who is doing what will be sorted out so that there is no overlap in jurisdiction.
I can say that to date--with the board that I talked about earlier in my speech, that delivers the social services, health care and education--there is great cooperation between the Government of the Northwest Territories and the Tlicho government. I think they will work out their laws and their services and deliver them very effectively. To some extent they have already done it and this will just be put into NWT law. I think it is a very forward thinking way of having all these governments work together.