Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to all who presented today. This is a very complicated issue before us.
I'm from the Northwest Territories. I've had the opportunity to work as a band manager for my community, and I've also been the mayor of my hometown in the Northwest Territories. In my experience, I've watched as the municipal government develops, with a lot of support from the Government of the Northwest Territories, an integrated community plan. They get together, they do town planning, they plan for infrastructure complemented with an energy plan, they have emergency plans, they do financial planning, and they have ongoing training for their councillors, for their managers.
On the flip side, with the aboriginal governments, there is relatively nothing. The federal government and the regional office don't really do a whole lot. There is core funding provided, with some money for management, and they're kind of left to fend for themselves.
I really appreciate the comments by the Canadian Executive Service Organization on capacity development because that is a real weakness.
I see two areas that are causes for entering a situation where you need to have intervention. One is being underfunded. We've seen funding reduce over the last 10 years or so to a point where it has become almost impossible to operate. The core funding has been reduced to just bare-bones funding. Really, who can they hire to manage it? They sometimes have the chief try to manage it, or they bring in somebody they can't afford, or they'll just hire somebody in the area who knows a little bit about financial management. They are always either underfunded or under-managed, or both.
How we deal with recovery and with developing a recovery plan is a question that I have today. Should we, as a government, send in outside consultants to just take over to try to salvage what they can and keep things moving forward? Or should the community be the one to develop a recovery plan and a way to get out of the mess it ends up in?
I'll just give each organization a few minutes to answer.