I think a lot of it is that old saying, “location, location, location”. That's very important when you're actually looking at an opportunity. For us in the central and southern interior of British Columbia, agriculture is a very realistic opportunity, especially when looking at how we can mix that with putting value onto a farm product, as I mentioned some people are actually doing. If we look at other areas of the country, we see that Saskatchewan, for example, has about two million acres. They're about to add an additional two million acres through treaty land entitlement. With regard to some of the negotiations that were mentioned earlier, in southern Ontario, most of these people who are having settlements are not going to be buying property in downtown Toronto. They're going to be buying something that's more viable, like acreage.
Agriculture has always been a part of our cultures, especially in the southern regions of Canada. It was for subsistence. Going back four generations, we were like everybody else; the supermarket was in the backyard. It was only recently that those practices actually stopped. So, agriculture is not foreign to us; it's more or less a movement. In our community, as I said, we had agriculture that was based upon ditches and flood irrigation. Then we went into dryland farming when that collapsed. We need to be able to take the next step.
This is one of the things I told the province. I said that it was a very myopic view not to support first nations in the 1940s and 1950s in putting in waterlines and such. If it had, every last acre on our band would have been under registered lease, which is also taxable. I said, “You've basically forgone hundreds of millions of dollars.” It was a missed opportunity to have not only the benefit of another producer, but the tax generation that comes from that.
If you look at it from that perspective, some of our bands in the Okanagan Valley.... Westbank First Nation actually contributes close to $80 million; $50 million goes to the provincial government, and $30 million to the feds. Osoyoos Indian Band is somewhere along the same line, and in between are other bands that are probably contributing close to $100 million. Can you imagine adding agriculture to that mix?