Thank you for the opportunity. I will speak quickly. We want to leave plenty of time for questions.
I'm very fortunately with one of the 24 self-governing indigenous governments that have been working over the last two years on a model under the collaborative fiscal process with Canada that we've been working on since 2017. It's very much in keeping with all the modern treaties that we have with Canada—the obligations and so forth.
I want to emphasize that language courses, as we've just heard, are essential to indigenous peoples' identities and a key basis of our well-being. A big issue related to the negative social indicators that our people are sometimes challenged with is the lack of their knowledge of our languages.
Language, culture and identity are essential foundations for our self-government. That was the premise of entering into modern treaties with Canada, but is one of the most weakly funded parts that we have.
It is a critical time for self-governing indigenous languages. Most of the 26 have only a few remaining speakers—very few. The model draws on expertise researched about approaches that truly support languages by creating speakers and how these approaches should be implemented.
I was kind of tossed up between just saying what I wanted to say versus what I was told to give you.
With that, I'll turn it over to Mark.