Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Of the three territories, the Northwest Territories has the largest GDP. We have gross domestic product worth about $4.5 billion. There are challenges in our territory. One of our challenges is that our population has been stagnant. We're looking to ge

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I'll quickly touch on some of the goals we have. Around Yellowknife, in the North and South Slave, we have two unconnected hydro grids that we need to connect so we can have greater efficiency, and so we can look at providing energy at a reasonable cost up to the diam

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Very quickly, I'd like to point out an earlier comment you made. We learned from the Yukon experience. I read the paper that was done by the federal government on lessons learned from the Yukon process. I think there were lessons that we all took into co

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. With regard to your skepticism, I guess it's maybe easier to be skeptical because you're sitting here in Ottawa, but I'm telling you, where we live, we're ready to go. We know there's risk, but there's risk in everything we do. We're in the risk business, s

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. We have heard the concerns and are aware of them. We have our own concerns about the amount of what was initially traditional use land that has evolved into a significant amount of land in the Northwest Territories. So there are land claim issues to be resolved. I heard the

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. We're on the move. We're taking over the responsibilities. We are getting the resources to do that. The federal government has a role to play. On the MVRMA side they are maintaining some significant involvement. There are some unfinished issues that need to be resolved, and

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If I could just use a comment by the premier this morning, he said that one of the big things is going to be having a lot less Ottawa and a lot more Northwest Territories in the process. As Yukon has demonstrated, when you make decisions in your own backyard we tend to have a rig

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I could just quickly touch on the comment I made in my remarks about a consensus culture, we work very closely with the aboriginal governments. We have come up with critical pieces of legislation—for example, the Wildlife Act, which took 20 years unti

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Can we do this? I believe we can. There was a comprehensive claim back in the eighties, where at one point all of the aboriginal governments—the first nations and the Métis—except the Inuvialuit, were going to do a comprehensive claim. At some point, th

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We've negotiated transitional money. We've negotiated $67.3 million into our A-base to take over all the functions. We're getting resource royalties sharing for the first time. We're about 115 days away from implementation day on April 1. We've been managing with the money we hav

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. There was an agreement early on between Prime Minister Harper and Premier McLeod at our request. Because of the urgency and our political timelines, an agreement in principle was signed. Last year at the previous assembly, the 16th assembly, we could see t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, the two governments, the Government of Canada and the territorial government, worked hard collectively. Both parties have devoted enormous resources. We've redeployed resources in a time of fiscal restraint at all levels of government to meet the ta

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm not fully knowledgeable about the federal law-making system, but if a bill of this significance and size were taken back and put into two pieces, I believe it would absolutely have an impact. That's only based on experience in the Northwest Territories, but I know that if you

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, Mr. Chairman, as I indicated, we'd be happy to share that analysis with the committee. Thank you.