Let me tell you this first. We started off with 19 bands in treaty. Along the way, because of the length of time and the absolute intransigence on the part of the federal mandate to move anything other than throwing something down on the table and not negotiating.... For a lot of these things, there are no negotiations going on. A lot of bands left in frustration, and the whole thing collapsed in 2005. Then six wanted to come back, and Canada insisted that the six had to assume the debt of all the other 13 bands that left or they wouldn't let us come back into the treaty process. We have about a $13-million debt, and it's not even ours, but there is an insistence that we're supposed to pay that. I regard that as highway robbery and absolutely inappropriate behaviour on Canada's part to insist on that. That's the debt load.
Just to tie the debt load into the previous question from Mr. Harvey about the stages, part of the problem is that the stages started out.... I've been in the treaty process for a long time. I started out on the Yukon treaties, then the Northwest Territories treaties, and now in B.C. I've been at this since 1992, through three totally separate treaty processes. I've watched these stages move from ideas. You go to sort of an idea of a framework agreement, and then you move into agreement in principle where the agreement in principle is about 12 pages long. Now they are imbedded in cement. There are like 25-foot walls around each stage. The agreement in principle is no longer an agreement in principle. It is a final agreement. They are not principles anymore, it's the whole agreement in there.
The problem is this: there are different tools, money, and options that are available to you at each stage. As stage four got bigger and became the whole ship, the tools that you can get in stage five become less available to you. This is the rigidity that has sunk into the process. That's why it's damaging. The fact is, that's where the money is all accumulating, because of this instance on virtually getting final agreement in the AIP process so that the final stage, where there's more money available to you to do all the kinds of work that you need to do, where there are possibilities of early transfer of land so you can get some economic development going, is held off until the last stage. None of this is helpful. All of it just creates more debt load. It creates more bureaucratic mess, and it leaves you in this long period of time.
We're in a position where even our Canada negotiator says that our table has been put through more than any other treaty table in this country. They still won't give us an AIP. They keep moving the markers. We have to do this; we have to do that. They're making it virtually impossible for us to get an AIP. This is not fair negotiating, and it's Canada doing it, not B.C.