Thank you for the question.
You are nailing an incredibly important point, which I would turn back to the committee. Is there a way to find a vehicle to have aboriginal representation guaranteed within the House of Commons? That is the question I ask that the committee also consider. As you are thinking about ways to divide or assign seats from a proportionality perspective, are there ways in which you can do the same thing on a regional basis? Perhaps you use the historic and the numbered treaties. Of course, that then does not include any of the north, because other than a bit of the Northwest Territories, we don't have numbered or historic treaties here. We have modern land claims agreements.
There is a highly complex weave of relationships among various aboriginal groups across the country connecting to our federal system. In short, it will not be easy to figure out what that would look like. I would like to suggest that you speak to the first nations and aboriginal organizations to ask them if they have a sense of how that might be worked out on a national basis.
What do we have, about 640 or 660 distinct aboriginal first nations? In the territory we have the Inuit in the central and eastern Arctic. We have a different set of groups in Yukon, as we do in the Northwest Territories. There is a very complex array of subnationalities within that overall population of Canada, so I would not want to suggest a particular model, but I would recommend that you have that conversation with the aboriginal people of Canada, if you think it does have some merit, to see if there is a way to find that bridge.