Thank you, Chair.
And thank you to the panellists for your presentations this morning.
Mr. Contreras, I was most interested in the points that you made and particularly your opening comments and closing recommendations. It seems to me to be a bit of a contradiction. You were saying that there were three items there to start with. One of them was that the Métis were treated as regular citizens and the other was that the Métis were treated as following the first nation paradigm.
Can you just elaborate on that, and is that not a contradiction? It seems to me that being treated as regular citizens, you'd want a separate Métis stream in that area. But if you were saying that Métis are following the first nation paradigm, and yet they're being treated as regular citizens....
The Métis in my area, and I have a lot of them in western Manitoba, are certainly very entrepreneurial in their development of small businesses and businesses in general. In fact, Mr. Goodon in Boissevain was one of the first recognized Métis in Canada for business person of the year when they brought that award out. I had the opportunity of dealing with that when I was an MLA in Manitoba. They're very entrepreneurial and yet you're saying that there are organizational capacities in developing policy that you can't compete with the provinces in regards to.
I just saw that there seemed to be some contradictions. Also in areas being developed from Ontario to B.C., there are provincial and territorial opportunities there as opposed to aboriginal and Métis streams.
So are you wanting to be in the aboriginal and Métis streams there, or would you sooner be in the provincial and territorial ones? Can you just clarify some of that for me?