Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you for coming before the committee today.
I have a couple of questions.
One is on the duty to consult that you talked about. I think you're probably well aware that there have been some witnesses before the committee who have some differences with the bill. I go back to the national chiefs assembly in December. My understanding from the national chiefs is that they saw this as an ongoing process so that people could come before the committee and express their concerns or suggested amendments, and that in fact the process that happened was actually not a duty to consult, but rather a facilitated process and dialogue, and that Supreme Court decisions actually say that only the crown can discharge a duty to consult; it can't delegate it out to other companies or whatever.
I'd like you to comment on that.
The second piece I'd like you to comment on is the fact that the tribunal is actually an end result rather than a beginning result. The hope is that negotiation will happen that will actually take a significant number of those specific claims off the table, and they actually won't get to a tribunal.
But the two questions I have on that are whether you have confidence that sufficient resources will go into that negotiation process to actually see that process speeded up. Secondly, the claims that are currently in the system will actually have to be resubmitted. The clock gets set back to zero, and they will then have a three-year period of time in which they can be either negotiated or not and then could possibly end up in a tribunal. I wonder if in your view that will actually help alleviate the backlog, given that, it seems to me, a significant number of people will be disadvantaged because they've already been in the system for 15 years or whatever.
So I wonder if you could comment on those two pieces.