Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, everybody, for being here today and for the work that you've been doing with your own respective organizations to move this legislation forward.
I think everybody agrees that there are very good components to this legislation and that it's going to make a big difference in the lives of people across the country.
Mr. Daniels, I want to start with you for a minute.
You and I started having a conversation about the concept of monetization way back in 2021. I know that seems like forever ago with COVID and all that stuff in between, but we started the conversation back in 2021. We talked about all kinds of things, like how the multiplier effect of leveraging could create upfront investments to really work at closing the infrastructure gap. We talked about the fact that inflation didn't allow the increase in capital grants that are provided at, say, a 2% per year increase to keep up with inflation. We talked about own-source revenue definitions and how the expansion of those could actually lead to more opportunity to leverage some of those revenues to attack that infrastructure deficit.
Today, in one of the presentations, it was already mentioned about the report on barriers to end indigenous economic development and how this committee unanimously endorsed the idea of testing this concept out with a pilot project of some kind.
Could you expand on that just a little bit? Just take a couple of minutes and talk about how this concept of monetization is really a huge opportunity to close that infrastructure gap in indigenous communities.