Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning—I think it's still morning there—to the members of the committee and our fellow organizations who are there with you today.
My name is Kate Darling and, as you mentioned, I am General Counsel for the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. I'm joined by my colleague Jen Lam from the Inuvialuit Game Council.
IRC and IGC represent the rights of the Inuvialuit under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. We are here speaking today in representation of those rights.
We do apologize for joining you only by phone this morning. We recognize that it's very difficult to communicate complex ideas over the telephone. We did work with your logistics team to try for a video conference, but our upload speed is too slow here in Inuvik still. As you probably have heard from other participants in the past in your committee work, connectivity is a constant frustration for us here in the north.
Our disembodied voices are but one demonstration of how many of our Arctic communities are both geographically and technologically a fair way from the capital. Nevertheless, thank you for giving us the opportunity to present the perspectives of IRC and the game council on Bill C-69 today.
I'd like to start by providing a brief bit of context for our comments. We'll then lead you through the key issues that the Inuvialuit want to see addressed through this legislation. Then you'll hear from me briefly again at the end.
I should say that we both feel that this bill is an opportunity and that the review process was a thorough one, which brought together many ideas that we hope will see the light of day in the legislation that is ultimately passed. For context, the Inuvialuit settlement region is located in the western Arctic segment of Inuit Nunangat or the Inuit homeland, which includes the land, ice, and waters of the Mackenzie Delta, the Beaufort Sea, and the Arctic Ocean.
The Inuvialuit initiated land claim negotiations with the Government of Canada in the early 1970s. The Inuvialuit Final Agreement was given effect on June 25, 1984. It is a modern land claim agreement within the meaning of subsection 35(3) of the Constitution Act 1982.
The massive effort of connecting remote communities and settling the land claim came in response to increasing and relatively unfettered development activity in the Inuvialuit settlement region and the permissive federal policies that supported this kind of activity in frontier land, at the time. The agreement that resulted, as IRC chair and CEO Duane Ningaqsiq Smith regularly reminds us, belongs not just to Inuvialuit, but also to Canada. Each party carries a—