Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the witnesses for coming before us today.
I want to talk about consultation, and I'm glad to see that you raised it. When the minister came before the committee on March 22, in a response to a question I asked about consultation, he indicated that lots of consultation had gone on. He specifically quoted the human rights review that happened in 2000 with Justice La Forest. I went back to the actual recommendations from that report, and it's quite interesting that in this review it talks about the importance of consultation. I just want to quote a couple of things.
It says, under “Consultations and Submissions”:
Any effort to deal with the section 67 issue must ensure adequate input from Aboriginal people themselves.
Then later in the report there's a great deal of discussion, raising some of the points that you have raised. He goes on to talk about the complexities, and he says:
These points raise huge questions about the social and economic structure of Aboriginal life and its legal underpinnings. Such matters deserve far more study than we have been able to give them.
So I take it, from the words of this report, entitled “The Report of the Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel--Promoting Equality: A New Vision”, that the panel itself determined that this was not adequate consultation for a repeal of a section of the Canadian Human Rights Act that would have far-reaching impacts, and I think you've outlined some of those.
In your view, if we were to develop something around a repeal of section 67, what would that consultation look like?