Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the officials.
As we figure this whole thing out, I appreciate the answers.
Hearing what was just said, just so everyone knows, whether watching or listening at home or in this room, the goal through the testimony is to hear the pros of this bill, as well as some of the concerns we've received from different groups. When we hear a critique or criticism, and you can see this in our amendments, we're trying to alleviate some of those concerns so that we could have maybe a broader acceptance of this piece of legislation that seems to be raising a bit of conflict, if you will.
What my friend and colleague just mentioned was this definition. Perhaps it comes later on when we actually define it, if that's possible. You touched on it a bit, and I just want to drill down a little more into that.
Could the wording be specific of Métis governments? I recognize they are an indigenous government, but I think that's what the settlements were really concerned about, saying it has the potential, I guess, for the Métis Nation of Alberta to require that settlement members be part of MNA, even if they may want to. Maybe they don't want to, but there was that potential flag raised that it could impact the settlements.
I wonder if we might be best to potentially get a definition or even change the wording to specifically mention.... If you want to use “Indigenous governing body”, I get that. Maybe we should take the time to define that.
Again, I go back to when we were implementing the UN declaration. One issue we saw was that “free, prior and informed consent” was not defined. I still maintain that if we had taken the time to drill down in this committee to define that, or if we had even brought in experts, such as yourselves, to help further define that language, we might have avoided some of the issues we've run into now. I think there's a question in there. I'm pretty sure there was.
Could we either further define it or switch the language to “Métis governing body” or something to that effect?