Madam Speaker, nobody is disputing the fact that it is important that capital is available to aboriginal businesses.
The parliamentary secretary said that the loan loss reserve pilot program was to enable these other major institutions to provide these larger loans. In fact, 80% of the loans they have given out to date have been well within the limits of what the AFIs themselves could provide.
What we have here, according to this article, is that:
...AFI’s are being selectively disadvantaged in the marketplace through offers of loan guarantees to non-aboriginal institutions. To further add insult to injury, INAC is using aboriginal money to provide this double standard.
It goes on to say that it is difficult, if not impossible to find any true and valid justification for why the AFIs were excluded from the loan loss reserve program.
Nobody is disputing that the First Nations Bank does a very good job and is an important lending source for aboriginal enterprises, but the AFIs should have been allowed to be part of this process. They were not consulted or included and were not able to actually put their names forward on the loan loss reserve program.
I think they are just asking for a very clear and simple explanation about why they were excluded from this process. They have a track record. A number of their lending institutions are members of the AFIs and they are able to provide loans greater than $250,000. So, why were they excluded from the loan loss reserve pilot program?