Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the presenters. I come from the Northwest Territories, and I work a lot with the band councils. Even to this day, as an MP, I have a lot of discussions with the aboriginal population in my riding. I was very happy to hear your presentations. At the same time, I can relate to your situation. Almost every band council in my riding is in a deficit situation, unless they're in a land claims...have settled land claims and self-government.
I certainly agree that the funding was insufficient right from the start. I worked as a band manager way back. At that time there were two pots of money, one for core funding and one for the band manager. When we'd get together, it was a standing joke that our salaries were more than the core funding. Over the years I watched the funding cuts happen, and they pretty much brought any council business or activities to a standstill. They were barely able to keep the lights on. I met with one of our chiefs yesterday. He talked about one of our band councils being $750,000 in deficit, with just no way out. It's a similar situation to almost every other band council in the north.
I want to poke at this a little bit, at the root cause. We talked about insufficient funding, but maybe that was the case all the way through. We didn't have tribal councils in deficit situations, even though when we first started the funding was insufficient. What are maybe some of the causes of that? Is it maybe because of financial administration? Could it be that we don't have the resources within our funding to properly manage and report, with the large amount of reporting that's required? As well, Chief Dumas talked a little bit about the inability to participate in economic development.
Perhaps I could get you to expand on some of these issues, starting with Mr. Yesno.