Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Chief Whiteduck. It's great to be back with you again. We had a couple of meetings at the crown and first nations gathering, and we had a chance to visit your community in a previous version of this committee. It was great to be up there with our colleague from the Bloc.
To you, Mr. Alcantara, welcome to our study. I just want to say that your literary contributions to this subject are relevant and highly regarded. I look forward to your forthcoming book, Negotiating the Deal: Comprehensive Land Claim Agreements in Canada. It seems to me you may be back.
Gentlemen, in the spirit of fair use of time, my colleagues have evenly and fairly allocated our time to different witnesses.
Chief Whiteduck, I'm going to go into something rather specific with you around additions to reserves. You alluded to the subject in your speech, and indeed we spoke briefly about it. I was struck by a couple of things in your speech. One concerns your discussions with the province affected. This wasn't tied to a land claim. We deal, as you can imagine, with these in other jurisdictions.
The second thing was that cooperation is important. We heard Matthew Coon Come speak about the importance of this, particularly as it pertains to the province of Quebec and the success you've had with the Plan Nord, etc. This collaborative exercise with the private sector, BDC, the province, and now the federal government is important.
I'd like you to reflect, if you would, sir—and I'll leave you the time to do so—your experience and your observations about ATR, additions to reserves. There has been plenty of discussion here at committee. It hasn't all been good, I have to say, but it hasn't all been bad. Can you reflect and share your experience to this point and reiterate some of your important observations about this process?