I'm going to couch my answer based on the situation we had in the early 2000s. For about 90 years, our community, the Serpent River First Nation, where I was the chief for 10 years, was faced with an encroachment of development. First it was forestry, then it was a sulphuric acid plant on 99 acres of land. It was in a very strategic location where there was a port, Aird Bay, where ships came in for timber in the early 1900s. In the 1940s, to facilitate the uranium mining industry, they built a sulphuric acid plant.
The issue for us was the value that was lost in the land. It became part of the claim process. Earlier on in the submission of our claim the federal government said this claim is worth under $3 million, so there's only so much we're going to be able to do with your claim. To us, the loss of use, the impact on the environment, the emotional health impacts that resulted from the sulphuric acid, we deemed a much greater cost that should have been awarded. We're still going through that process right now in our community. Clearly, it's an unjust situation, but we view the land as where we would co-exist, live, and hunt and fish, but there's nothing but a clear, open space there now.
For us, I think it would be important to suggest to the committee that for the people living there, more consideration needs to be given to the true value of that land, not just based on the budget that the specific claims process has with regard to awarding those claims. Much greater fairness needs to be weighed in on valuation.