Thank you.
Good morning to the people in the west. To people in the east, I guess it's good afternoon.
I want to, as part of this conversation, reiterate that we have a partnership we've worked on for many years. We work under a restorative justice program that started in 1997, and we came on board full time as a tribal council in 1999. We have tried to work closely with the RCMP creating partnerships. When we come to law enforcement, we need that involvement, and by “involvement”, I mean first nations committees and police management boards. They're very important. These are the people from the communities who relay issues and concerns to our local RCMP detachments. It creates a little bit of a closer working relationship.
I'm saying that in all parts of these developments, we need first nations involvement, close participation from our people. We know what's needed in the communities, as outlined by Chief Bellerose. Those partnerships are very important to us. We can address a lot of the issues that are there in jurisdiction, enforcement, prosecution and law development. Our communities are on the path of developing laws, but when it comes to the enforcement part of the first nation laws, we run into some problems with the prosecution. Again, work needs to be done there on developing a process that's going to benefit the work that's being done in first nations communities. For us, with targeted funding for enforcement, we need to look at self-administered policing, security programs, and community safety officers whereby we can have that involvement and promote safety in our communities.
The First Nations Land Management Act enables us to enact the laws that we have developed and enables us to work more closely in fulfilling the needs of our people in our communities.
I want to jump a little forward to the prosecution of first nations violations and tickets. We feel that when that time comes, it will enable us to enhance our programming financially, but I'll leave it there.
If we're going to be brought back on to be given an opportunity to speak again, a recommendation from us, the Touchwood Tribal Council, is the possibility.... We've been working and submitting proposals in the area of first nations self-administered policing. It's very important that we be able to fulfill wholly the safety needs in our communities through community safety officers working hand in hand with the RCMP. These are the programs, the things that we request funding for, and we have been doing it, in our case, for many years.