That's a very good question, Madam Idlout. I think you know that the challenge has always been the trust factor when somebody else creates an entity that, at the end of the day, we recognize doesn't work.
I'll go back to my original comments. As you know, the things that the government tends to develop, they do for a specific purpose—a specific reality and an objective they want to achieve. As the shortcomings of the current process have been explicitly highlighted, we should look at this as an opportunity for a reset, rather than having government dictating and telling us what the rules of the game are in federal procurement. Many bright and intelligent first nation citizens have already been before this committee—and others will be coming after me today—and they have spoken to what some of those solutions could be. Those all have to be, as I will mention continually, first nation-developed, first nation-led and first nation-implemented. What that ultimately looks like will be determined once we've had an opportunity to come together, have the discussions and bring forward an option that meets the needs of first nations better than the regime that's currently in place.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's important that we have programs like the procurement set-aside to give advantage to first nation businesses that have been disadvantaged in all other aspects, but we must do so in a way that ensures contracts are going to legitimate first nation individuals and businesses, not to individuals who can claim status on the basis of a policy.
At the end of the day, if you want to determine who is indigenous, first nation, Inuit or Métis, we all need to play by the same rules. Governments should not be in a position to create Indians when it's convenient, as they have done with Algonquins of Ontario. What it does is sets us, the real Algonquins, on the sidelines while Canada negotiates a treaty with, essentially, 7,000 non-indigenous people who were given the right to call themselves Algonquin through a government policy, not through the same standard that I have to follow to be called an Algonquin by the same government.