Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm honoured to be here at this committee. I spent a number of years on such a committee. As a matter of fact, when we speak about what happened back in 2013, I was at that table. Of course, we were in the process of going through truth and reconciliation and the development of all the things that were important to our indigenous friends.
I spent some time in the territories and had a chance to meet with quite a few business leaders. That's really where I want to take my comments. I've seen what goes on. I have seen the leadership that we have in our northern communities. I have said to so many people that if you want to have a really good CEO to run your companies, you would find a lot of them in any one of our northern territories.
When the minister was mentioning concerns about our colonialist past, somehow I feel we haven't got past that. Just last week, when we were dealing with natural resources, we had Calvin Helin in. One of the books he has penned is Dances with Dependency. I made sure that everyone who ever came into my office read that, just to make sure that we understood what our responsibility was.
I've listened to quite a few ministers over the last couple of days, and every one of them is saying that our only focus is how we are going to mitigate climate change. How are we going to stop the concerns that exist? We seem to forget that in a lot of our indigenous communities, the strength of those communities is their knowledge and ability to manage the resources that are there. They are looking for that opportunity to manage their resources. As Mr. Helin said, we seem be back into a position of eco-colonialism, where we have governments saying, “I think we know exactly what you need, and because of that, here's how we're going to dole out the options and the opportunities for you.”
How are we ever going to get to the stage where we really give them that opportunity to bring their expertise to the table?