First, thank you very much, Mr. Chair and committee, for the invitation to come and present this morning. It is wonderful to be here, but I have to extend the apologies of our vice-chair, Judy White, who was intending to be here. Unfortunately, she was coming in from the east coast and was stuck yet again at another airport. I think this was the third trip when she has tried to get out to somewhere other than the east coast and couldn't make it, so I am passing along her apologies to the committee.
I'll introduce Carla Di Giusto, who is one of our staff members for the First Nations Statistical Institute. She is here to assist.
I don't have a written presentation for the committee. I thought I would give a verbal update as to where we are as an organization.
The First Nations Statistical Institute, or FNSI, the acronym most people refer to us by, is a brand-new organization. Last year at this time we did not yet have a full board. We've only had a full board and been legally constituted as an organization for one year. I thought I would take a few minutes of your time to give you an update as to where we are, where we have come from, and our relationship with Statistics Canada.
As I mentioned, last year at this time we had yet to have our full board appointed. I was appointed in the spring of 2007, and I'm a part-time chair. A year later the board was fully constituted, and we have met four times in the last year to get the business of the organization up and operating; that is, to become legally constituted as an organization, to pass our bylaws, to appoint our officers with the requirements in the legislation, to get our audit committee up and operating, and essentially to get us to the position where we could develop and then pass our first corporate plan, which we did. We put that into the Treasury Board submission process. Our corporate plan and Treasury Board submission went in front of Treasury Board in November of last year and we received our funding this year. We are now in the process of developing and passing our second corporate plan and putting that into the Treasury Board submission process as well.
Up until this point in the development of FNSI, we have received interim funding from Statistics Canada and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, where they were expending moneys on behalf of FNSI. We have secured our own budget only recently and are operating with that.
From the perspective of accomplishments of the board to date, the board has been very active to get us up and operating. Again, it's unique to be a crown corporation and not to have been an organization before. There wasn't an organization in place where we just changed the name to FNSI. We are essentially starting from the ground up. There was no infrastructure, no organization, and the staff we have been working with--and we have three or four staff at this point--have been on loan from other organizations through various measures within the government.
Essentially we've accomplished everything we have with a very limited budget, a small number of staff, and no outside consultants. We are a very active and a very small organization, but one that, at this point, is just starting to build the organization with its own budget and to look into our future development.
Looking to the future, our next big task is to hire our chief statistician. Under the legislation, the First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act, the chief statistician first has to be hired in order for us to then hire our staff. Until then, we're still essentially an interim organization with interim staffing arrangements. Once our chief statistician is hired, and that will be a thorough and transparent national competition, we can then start hiring our staff and become operational as an organization.
In the meantime, the board and the staffing that we do have on an interim basis are very active in building the organization, building the crown corporation, in order to ensure that when we get to the point of hiring our chief statistician, the organization will be in place and everything that we require will be there for us, as an organization, to meet the challenges that we find in front of us.
It has been a very active year for the board, in summary. We have, I think, accomplished a lot with a minimal amount of funding, with a very small number of staff and with little outside assistance from consultants. We've had our full slate of four board meetings in one year to pass the corporate plan and get it accepted into the Treasury Board submission process.
We do have in front of us, as a board, a number of very important challenges in building the organization. Our next board meeting is to take a breath somewhat and go back and look at some of the things that we had to rush through as a matter of necessity to get to this point, such as what the organization will look like and the details of how we will work with our partners such as Statistics Canada, Indian and Northern Affairs, the Assembly of First Nations, and other organizations that we will be developing strong partnerships with.
That is a very brief update of a newly formed crown corporation that has a very active board and has accomplished a great deal in the last year to get us to the point that we are at right now.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.