It's great to be able to talk to you, Mr. May. I appreciate this opportunity.
Among the things you mentioned, I was curious about the criteria that you outlined. No doubt they were well intentioned, but the concept of residency, where you are living in or around a particular region or having frequent communications...and of course you are there promoting the Mi'kmaq interests. You have all these different levels of involvement, but I think as you're rightly saying, it got to the stage where people's interpretation was such that the expectations became somewhat difficult to deal with.
I think of my own situations in Alberta. Of course it's an entirely different case, but simply because your grandparents had dealings with the Indians in central Alberta when it was in the Northwest Territories or with fur traders and so on or you'd set things up to help aboriginals in your communities, those things don't tie into the same level of involvement that perhaps some of the 100,000 people whose names are there are expecting.
One of the other things you said was that they had all these decades of litigation as they tried to sort things out and come up with a solution. You had to work closely with the Government of Canada in order to make this work. I'm just wondering if you can speak to some of that collaboration. You mentioned how the FNI and the government have gone to great lengths to communicate with the founding members. Perhaps you could expand on that for a moment.