Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would really like to start off by congratulating and acknowledging the leadership of Regional Chief Woodhouse in getting the historic agreement-in-principle on child and family services and Jordan's principle. I know that she worked hard on that, and I want to congratulate her for her efforts on that before I get to the questions.
Also, I would like to acknowledge that I'm really happy to hear that there is an AFN chiefs committee on housing. I know that six minutes often isn't enough time to get your interventions in place, but we would be more than happy as a committee, if you have innovative approaches to housing, if you would please share that. For the next four meetings we will be doing this study, so you would have a bit of time—I would say a month—to prepare a document that can help us make better recommendations for those on reserve.
My first question is around many of the challenges on the reserve that I'm hearing about from many of my constituents, such as Chief Leroy Denny. They talk about reserves being in place for sometimes 100 years, sometimes more than 80 years, where indigenous communities were centralized in the areas by government programs and now, many years later, they're running out of land. It's hard to find land on reserve to build houses even if they have the money.
Chiefs, do you believe that a part of the solution is additions to reserve? How can we speed up the process of additions to reserve to reflect the growing population increases of first nations?
Chief Haymond, I'll start with you.