I'd be happy to take that, Mr. Chair.
In budget 2019, as was noted, this money was made available. One thing that was very important and we knew at the time was that something as sensitive as this issue should not be something that the federal government simply decides in its own office spaces as to exactly what to do.
There will be many different approaches that indigenous communities want in order to deal with this. It's important to remember that, while the Kamloops school is situated in Kamloops, those children were taken, sometimes, from hundreds of kilometres away. One thing that many indigenous communities have reminded us of again and again is that they will not disturb other communities' ancestors' remains without engaging properly with them.
How to deal with these issues is very sensitive. We know that some communities have told us already that they intend simply to memorialize the location and not do further work. There will be other instances where people want to do deep forensic work, or at least work that resembles forensic work, for different reasons. We knew it was our job to listen to what they had to say. We knew it was our job not to repeat the mistakes that had been made in the past, which, in fact, led to many of these situations in which government simply made its own decisions about what it thought was best. Therefore, we conducted a consultation process.
As you can imagine, many of the people we most needed to speak to were those with living memory of the schools. Many of those are elders. Many of those consultations do not work well in the format we're using today. There were delays as a result of COVID-19, because many of the people you talk to don't have either the technical ability or, frankly, the Internet access to do this type of work. However, we conducted that consultation, and we came up with the approach that was announced yesterday.
The core of that is very much along the lines of what your colleague just asked about in the final question, which is whether we will respect the wishes of indigenous groups, what they want to do and want not to do. We got a universal message that it's what they were asking us, and we will do that.