There's a shortage of planners. I served a couple of terms in local government myself, and for our municipality, as you said, we had one planner covering a territory about one-fiftieth of the territory of my own first nation, which doesn't even have a professional planner on staff, so there's a huge deficit there. In planning in general, there's no designated funding outside of the land code process, the Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management, for funding and support for first nations planners or land managers, so that's a big challenge.
I also think that planning in indigenous communities is very different from planning for municipalities. Of course, we're looking at different paradigms depending on what community you're talking about. We all have different customs. The Wet'suwet'en issues up in north central B.C. highlight different ideas of jurisdiction between hereditary leaders, elected leaders and staff—competing levels of jurisdiction.
I think there's a need to train planners who understand these complexities and are prepared to go into indigenous communities and work with the needs of a specific community. There are very few planning programs in general in Canada, almost none. I think UBC is the only one on the west coast that has an indigenous community planning stream, and I believe there are only eight students in that program. I'm a practicum supervisor there. Vancouver Island University has a professional planning program with a first nations focus as well, but that's it for western Canada, aside from Manitoba, which has some great programs, and then there's the east coast.
There's absolutely a shortage there, so planning often falls to folks who are economic development coordinators or capital managers, or it doesn't happen at all—or you're bringing in consultants like me, which is not necessarily cost-effective for the community, so more funding and support would be great.