Welcome. I would like to call to order the 21st meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.
We will be continuing today with our hearings regarding Bill C-30, an act to establish the Specific Claims Tribunal and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
Before I introduce our witness for today, I just wanted to make a couple of housekeeping comments for members of the committee.
First of all, during this three-week section that we're beginning now and will continue with for two more weeks, we had invited relatively large numbers of witnesses for each of the six meetings, on the expectation that some would be able to make it and some would not. We thought if we invited ten per meeting that five would say yes. Our 50% average is about right, only we have ten for some and one for others. Our witness today will have our undivided attention, which is a good thing.
But seriously, committee members, we have done our best to try to even this out, with limited success. I ask you to indulge us over the next couple of weeks. We're going to have a couple of meetings with one or two witnesses, and we're going to have a couple of meetings with larger groups. We'll just have to manage through that. We have tried to redistribute the witnesses into some of these other meetings, but again have had limited success, given that people have made travel plans, and a week away it's hard to do these things. I ask you to indulge me in that regard.
The second point I'd like to make is that today we will have bells at 5:15. The meeting will end a little bit early anyway, and we'll try to make our way through two rounds of questions today. I anticipate we will have time to do that. Recently some members have pointed out to me that when we have so many witnesses, we only get one round per questioner, and for some of the members they haven't had the opportunity to speak in those sessions. Hopefully we're going to be able to deal with that today.
Having said that, I would like to welcome our witness for today, Professor Bryan Schwartz, from the University of Manitoba.
Professor Schwartz, I wanted you to know that about a month ago, when we asked committee members to put forward names of who they thought would be strong witnesses and would have something to offer us, your name showed up on several lists, from several different caucuses, as a matter of fact. I know I'm looking forward to hearing what you have today. You can make an opening presentation to us of about ten minutes, and then we will follow that with rounds of questions from our committee members.
Professor Schwartz.