Thank you.
Mr. Chair, certainly from our perspective, the additions to reserve change does need some fine tuning. I think there are ways in which it could be made more effective.
What we have here is something that was not signalled in the budget. The committee was not designated to even have consideration of any component of this. Certainly, from a technical briefing, there seems to be some merit to where they were going to go with it, but I just will bring to mind Bill S-3, which this government brought forward. It was not until we heard expert witnesses that we realized it was a complete disaster.
I would like to say that we cannot support this, because it really should have been brought forward as a stand-alone piece of legislation. It's not that the INAN committee is so overworked with legislation that they couldn't have had done their due and proper diligence with this, where we would have actually brought in people from the municipalities and first nations groups and others to just ensure that it's been done properly.
Again, I think this is unsupportable. It's important to look at what we're doing and how we're doing it, but to be doing it in an 800-page budget bill when it was not signalled in the budget, and when there is the capacity of the committee, is actually quite shameful.