Good afternoon, and welcome to the 23rd meeting of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.
Today we are continuing with our hearings on Bill C-30, an act to establish the Specific Claims Tribunal and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
I have a couple of quick housekeeping notes. As I've said a couple of times recently, we have a few meetings this month with only a couple of witnesses and a couple of meetings with many witnesses. Today we're going to have many witnesses and many presentations, so we're going to need to move along briskly in order to get done.
We have two panels. There will be three presentations from each panel. The presentations will be severely limited to ten minutes. In fact, I'll give you a one-minute warning. So at some point I'll chime in and just say “one minute”. You don't need to stop, but that's just to let you know, and that is because we have one hour, and we need to get through three of these presentations. We'll have time for only one round of questioning, and I'm thinking that five minutes for each questioner will be all we will be able to do. That's because we have bells at 5:30 today for votes, and we have many votes tonight, so I'm going to try to get through both of these panels in one hour each.
With that, I'd like to welcome our guests here today: Christopher Devlin from the Canadian Bar Association, Kathleen Lickers from the Indigenous Bar Association, and Alan Pratt from the Alan Pratt law firm.
As I said, you could give us a presentation of ten minutes or less, following which we will do a round of questions, and the individual members will be able to direct their questions to whichever of you they wish.
I'd like to begin with Mr. Devlin. Welcome. You have ten minutes.