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NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
A new review board is likely coming to the NWT, but this is not the so-called super board that the federal government has said will replace all other environmental and regulatory review boards - yet.

On Nov. 6, the federal government tabled what it is calling the Northern Jobs and Growth Act. The second part of this new bill is titled the NWT Surface Rights Board Act.

This new NWT Surface Rights Board, if established as is laid out in the act, will have the final say on granting access to any land in the NWT to extract minerals, oil or other natural resources. This is a board whose purpose is to act as a last resort to solve disputes between land owners and those who want access.

This board will be made up of five to nine NWT residents who will all be appointed by the federal minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

All land in the NWT, including aboriginal land settled under land claim agreements, unsettled land, commissioner's land, Crown land and municipal land will be subject to decisions made by the new board.

Any decisions made by the board are final and cannot be disputed, AANDC officials said in a technical briefing on the day the bill was introduced.

"If someone wants to get access through someone's property as well to get to their oil rig or their mining development or their forestry development and they've gone through the environmental assessment process ... then the land and water board would come in and set some terms for it," Dennis Bevington, member of Parliament for the Western Arctic, told News/North.

"But if the land owner didn't want you on there, this is where the surface rights board would enter into it,"

A surface rights board is part of the Tlicho, Gwich'in and Sahtu land claims agreements.

Currently, these three aboriginal governments have established their own seperate arbitration panels that deal with these conflicts and have for as much as 20 years.

In 2008, the McCrank report stated that one of the regulatory problems in the North was a lack of surface rights legislation to resolve disputes between land owners who did not want to grant access to their lands for development projects.

"It's important legislation. My concerns lie with unsettled areas," said Bevington.

"We're going to be working to hear what people say in the settled areas and the unsettled areas to understand whether the bill should be supported as is or whether we should look for some amendments to it."

The act passed its first reading in the House of Commons on Nov. 6 and will need to be debated before it can be read for the second time. No dates have been set aside yet for this debate.

Tom Hoefer, executive director of the NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mines, said that the chamber is happy with the prospect of the new board.

"It's helping to fill in the gaps in the regulatory framework and that's a good thing," said Hoefer. The chamber is also looking forward to more changes to the regulatory process in the territory.

The federal government is currently also working on amending the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act and replace current regulatory boards with one "super board," he said.

Bevington took a different tack, saying that the sweeping changes coming to resource management boards may diminish the amount of input individual regions can have over developments in their area.

"We're going to see the kind of regional authority and regional input into resource development decisions are going to be changed quite a bit," he said.

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