It was a learning curve for all of us when the councils and boards fell into place and as more came along with each successive individual first nation final agreement.
You're moving from generally a fish scientist or fish biology focus to now considering a lot of human dimension issues, for lack of a better term, or social scientist type of issues. We weren't all that prepared for it. It was a situation where we had to slowly learn those skills and work with groups that collectively had very strong influences. It's no doubt created more upfront time, when we plan. In the long term, once you reach it, you have buy-in from the communities and the general public. From a territorial perspective, those are the people you're interested in.
It's been dynamic; that's for sure. At the end of the day, we still have the opportunity for the first nation governments to deal directly with the minister, on a minister-to-minister basis. The boards and councils are separate entities. They don't represent either government or first nation, but they bring first nation people and others together in trying to identify concerns. They generate many of these concerns on their own. Some, we bring to them and say, "Here are our challenges. Here's our dilemma. Here's what we're dealing with. What do you think about it?"
It's worked well from our perspective, but by no means has it been a simple process. At the end of the day, I think it's better than what we had previously, which was an arbitrary, single-minded focus.