I would say there are five broad categories of challenges for reserve creation. I've spoken about some of them today.
Environmental site assessments were a challenge. Some of the changes that we've made with the interim guidelines have helped that. There's no longer a requirement to update the ESA if it goes beyond five years and there have been no significant changes to the land. That helps reduce some of the burden there.
For the duty to consult, we are still developing tools and things like that. That's going to be a persistent challenge; not all nations will agree on the boundaries of their territory and whose land should be added or not.
For municipal service agreements, I've spoken a little bit about some of the stuff that we're trying to do there with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. It's also just templating things like creating tools that are really practical for communities to be able to use when they have those conversations. It's letters of support from Canada saying, “We support this and, therefore, when you're engaging with the municipality, please know that Canada is aligned with your vision for reserve creation.”
On third party interests, we're looking at some ability to maybe not have to replace those with Indian Act interests once a reserve is created. That can lead to long delays in reserve creation, so we're looking for some creative solutions there.
We are piloting something we have not discussed yet with the nations that we're hoping to pilot it with. I do not want to speak about it very much here just for fear of getting in front of them, but there's work at play there.
The fifth one is capacity issues. A nation may only do one reserve every 10 years. It's a skill set that takes a lot of time to learn and then you may not get to practise it very often, so we're looking at creative solutions around whether there is an external first nations organization that could come in and provide some of that capacity support to nations, so that they don't have to build up the muscle of knowing how to liaise with the municipality around negotiating those things. They'll have somebody they can go to that isn't the federal government and that they would feel confident in having those conversations with. Then that capacity could be moved around the country a little bit more, rather than trying to develop it in individual nations. We're looking at some models for that sort of thing.
Those are the five major areas of delay around reserve creation. They sound very easy to say in a room like this, but they're very difficult to deal with practically, with the number of players around the table. It is a complex process. Policy reform will help, but it's going to continue to be a complex process.