Thank you, Ms. Gill. I can certainly do that.
We published a special issue of the journal Recherches amérindiennes au Québec on the subject. There is little literature in French on this issue; there is a little more in English, but not much.
The idea was really to look at how it is implemented in practice rather than in legislation and declarations. That is the question we were asking ourselves. I don't know if I had time to say it during my presentation. However, when we talk to members of indigenous communities, we find that they consider this to be one of their rights. It is, in fact, because it is in the declaration.
So it is not a question of whether or not they have this right to free, prior and informed consent. They consider that they have it and, de facto, they try to implement it. You see it everywhere. With the Cree, it's very clear, even if they don't use the term in that way. In fact, one of my students conducted interviews not with the Cree, but with people in the Abitibi and Nord-du-Québec region. They said very clearly that if the Cree were opposed to a project, it would not go ahead. It's not a veto; it's just a political reality in which the Cree are a big enough player in the Nord-du-Québec region to decide whether a project is acceptable and whether it will benefit their community.
As mentioned, in other cases, there are obviously more conflicts. In these cases, the players do not have the power relationship that the Cree managed to establish over the years. I am not saying this in a negative way, on the contrary. It is to their credit that they have been able to regain control over their territory.
In other cases, players such as the Wet'suwet'en in British Columbia and the communities of Pond Inlet and Clyde River in Nunavut are taking this consent into their own hands and blocking airports and roads and so on. I think Ms. Exner-Pirot has made a good point about the investment issue. However, the uncertainty is already there; it's not going to be created by the legislation, because it's already there.
In Quebec, there is a pipeline project that would go through the North. The issue of consent is going to come up very quickly. For the time being, we don't really have the tools to deal with the situation. We will have to trust the legislators and those who look at what they do to see how we can implement this consent to increase certainty about the project.
We will have more certainty through the recognition of aboriginal rights. It is not by not recognizing them that we will have more certainty; we will just have more problems. This is a little what we saw in our different case studies, which were more focused on Quebec, but also on Colombia. One of our students wrote about this. If you're interested in this topic, you should read some of these articles.