Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Graham, for that comment about putting so much store on accountability that you can have an adverse impact on productivity or results.
Of course, accountability and transparency are principles that everyone around this table considers to be important. However, I want to go back to this own-source revenue.
I'm familiar with first nations in urban areas who have chosen to utilize some of the properties they own to invest in businesses that can produce wealth and benefits for their community. That seems very parallel to a private sector business. The shareholders are the band members. They have management that on their behalf is creating wealth for the community. If I'm a private sector business owner, I am accountable to the shareholders—the minority shareholders, the partners. I am not accountable to the public for what investment I'm making and the funds that are being made by that investment.
What you're advocating for here, with this own-source revenue being posted for anyone in the world to see, appears to me to be a completely different standard than would make sense in a case where the band has their own business that they have purchased or invested in with their own assets, not a transfer from government.
I'm still trying to understand how that makes sense. You, yourself, have acknowledged that can actually impact on productivity. If one of the keys to addressing the gap of first nations versus non-first nations, in terms of economic measures and all of the measures surrounding that, is the ability to have an attachment to the 21st century economy, how are we helping that by putting on this level of scrutiny, which is above and beyond what we would do with that kind of enterprise in non-aboriginal hands?