Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here.
It seems to me that the government must be starting from a couple of assumptions in the clause that they recommend for the Auditor General to be able to oversee the spending. The first is that they must view the money transferred to first nations as the government's money, that you're just spending the government's money and they have some right to comment on how it's spent.
The second assumption seems to be that the appalling social conditions in many first nations communities must be due to maladministration, corruption, or some combination of the two.
I'd like you to set the record straight on both of those facts, because personally I find it offensive, given the denial of the historic relationship between first nations and the federal government, on behalf of the Crown in the first case, and denying the....
Well, I'll let you speak.