Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the opportunity to address Bill C-27. I rise in support of this bill, but will express some concerns later. My name is Joseph Quesnel. I'm a policy analyst of Métis descent with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, an inde

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, I do believe in a government-to-government relationship, but the way you're phrasing it, it's not as simple as that. We have subsection 91(24). We have the Indian Act. It's not as easy as you're making it when we're talking about first nations governments.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  There were 3,000 respondents and 32 individual first nations communities.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Are you talking about this bill in particular?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  As far as I know, there have been other witnesses; there have been other first nations. No bill proceeds directly right from the grassroots, unless we're talking about some kind of citizens' initiative or something. As I was saying, we don't have the well-funded lobby groups th

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's not what I said.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Whether individual citizens can comment on the minutiae of a bill.... Is that really fair, on any bill, that every single person can comment on every clause and every section?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  As far as some of the consequences you were speaking about, I'm just thinking back.... Before I got into what I do now, in policy analysis, I worked in aboriginal media. I worked at a newspaper called The Drum /First Perspective, which prided itself on accountability, transparenc

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I believe so, if you found that, yes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Because it's a moral relationship. It's an ethical relationship. You are given funds and you are the steward of those funds and you have to distribute them according to the best interests of the recipients. Anything else is fraud, or all these kinds of words we use to describe th

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In terms of band chief and council—it doesn't include tribal councils, which I think probably it should be expanded to, or child and family services for first nations. But insofar as identifying any public moneys or moneys that are used for band entities that are basically econom

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The main requirement is for the first nation to place the three types of information on a website insofar as bands receive band support funding that would likely come from that. We deal with first nations, without this legislation, that do that already, and that comes out of thei

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The whole idea of first nations independent dispute resolution mechanisms is usually used in the context of elections and governance. The argument is that if a first nation removes itself from the Indian Act, as far as elections go, and adopts its own custom code, it can adopt it

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Could you remind me of the question? I think there were a couple of points I was eager to answer.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  For this particular bill? I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand completely.