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Canada’s federal, territorial and provincial environment ministers will meet in Yellowknife on July 4 to discuss air quality, contaminated sites, climate change and reconciliation.
Leadership of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, or CCME, rotates on an annual basis. The NWT’s environment minister, Jay Macdonald, is the current CCME president.
Macdonald will welcome his counterparts to Yellowknife’s Explorer Hotel for Friday’s meeting, after which ministers are expected to address reporters.
The coming week is also expected to feature at least one federal announcement related to the environment, details of which are not yet available.
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According to CCME’s website, items on the agenda when ministers meet “must be Canada-wide and intergovernmental in nature, and of interest to a significant portion” of those present.
The agenda is limited “to a small number of issues per year.”
The concerns on the table this coming week all have obvious connections to the North.
Air quality was a major issue in the Northwest Territories during 2023’s wildfires and continues to be a matter of concern across the continent as severe fire seasons rage back to back.
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Contaminated sites are a daily feature of life for many northerners, such as Yellowknifers who have Giant Mine – the toxic site of a former gold mine, now costing the federal government $4 billion to remediate – on their doorstep.
Climate change is happening far faster in Arctic and subarctic regions than in other parts of the world, with vast sums increasingly being spent on efforts to mitigate against it, adapt to it or protect the existing environment to the maximum extent possible.
Reconciliation, meanwhile, is considered a necessary and important feature of most government actions in the North, particularly related to land and water.
The meeting is expected to conclude with the publication of a communiqué outlining progress achieved between the ministers.
