Thank you for your question.
The Auditor General has been recommending for some time that the department evaluate the impact of land claim agreements, because we've put a fair amount of energy into negotiating and implementing these agreements, so we have developed an approach.
This year, we are taking a look at five candidate comprehensive land claim agreements. The guidelines we received from Treasury Board directed us to look at agreements that had been in place more than ten years and that consequently would have had the opportunity to make some impact. They were also to be comprehensive land claim agreements that were not in the process of being reviewed or renewed, to avoid complicating that particular process.
We have the five candidate land claim agreements in Canada, and this year we have consultants engaged to do what's called an evaluability assessment, which means going to each of the five areas and checking out whether we have the tools to do the measuring--finding out what kinds of data exist. As you can appreciate, if you're doing an assessment of the impact of a comprehensive land claim agreement, you need to know what the situations were at the beginning, and those data don't always exist, so we're doing an assessment this year to determine which of those might be the best candidate for a full-blown evaluation that we hope to do next year. It will be an evaluation of the impacts of the land claim agreement.