Right now, because of COVID, the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs hasn't been able to keep up with the business of registering land transfers, particularly with band leases and what are called “locateee leases”. That's had a direct impact on the business line of individuals as well as band communities.
What I said in my presentation is that there's a $172-billion shortfall in the potential that first nations have. One of the panellists was talking about housing. One of the reasons first nations can't keep up with the housing demand is that the federal government looks at housing as a labiality.
We want to turn that on its head so that individuals are able to monetize and go to the credit markets to build their own home, have equity in their own home and be able to retain the underlying title of our own land. We're not asking that these lands be given up, but that the federal government put in place a mechanism that our ancestors asked for in 1910 to have our own land title system so that we can compete on better terms with the whites, so that we have our own land registry and so that all governments would know that these are our lands.
The biggest problem is that the federal government owns these lands as a result of section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, so the interest is vested in Queen Elizabeth.