Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Certainly this is an area in which a lot of progress has been made over the last two years. In 2007 the government announced a new initiative called “Justice at Last”, which responded directly to the frustrations expressed by communities about the slow pace of these outstanding claims. Some of them went back decades without any resolution or solution. So we put in place a fairly aggressive process by which within three years of receiving a claim we would have completed the assessment and made a decision as to whether we accepted the claim—whether or not there was a legal obligation—or we refused the claim. Then after that would be another three-year timeframe within which the claim would be negotiated and an offer would be made and hopefully resolved.
After three years, the first nation has the option of taking the claim directly to the specific claims tribunal, which is now up and running and hearing cases. It has five cases now.
In terms of assessments, we have completely cleared the backlog that existed back in 2007-08. Now we're in the process of negotiating many of those claims we have accepted to negotiate. There are over 300 claims currently under negotiation. Some of them are fairly small. Some of them are fairly big. We've made some changes. For example, for the small claims, in order to avoid a lot of the legal costs, the negotiating costs, we have a fast-track process through which we can simply resolve the claim very quickly without the first nation incurring loans. That's one of the approaches.
The other approach we've taken is to do shared valuation studies, so that at the end of the day when a settlement number is put on the table, the first nation is not surprised, because they were part of the valuation. So if they lost 10,000 acres of land 100 years ago, we know how to evaluate what that land is worth today; they will have all that information, and that hopefully will lead to a quicker and easier solution and settlement.
The progress we've made so far does demonstrate that we are making progress, having settled about $1.2 billion worth—over 70 claims—since the introduction of “Justice at Last”.