I just want to briefly speak to your comment regarding consultation. We have been consulting internally with our communities on this very question of citizenship ever since 1985—at least in my own memory—about how we overcome the issue of this dichotomy of Indian status versus band membership, versus indigenous citizenship.
When we're talking about timing and whether this is the right time to make substantive change, like monumental, seismic change, to the Indian Act regime, I think we're long overdue. However, I want to also be mindful of the political realities, and this also reflects on the earlier question by Mr. Battiste. It's not going to be easy to disentangle Indian status from indigenous citizenship. If it were, we would have been able to resolve this question back in 1985. We're in this position because Indian status has been a reality in indigenous and first nations communities now since at least 1850.
We're looking at over a century and a half of disentangling colonial legislation from our indigenous citizenship systems. Even for our own members who now use Indian status, many of whom use Indian status as a proxy for their own identity, we are going to be on the path to reinvigorating and exercising our own rights over indigenous citizenship. It's going to be a significant journey for indigenous peoples themselves. That's a journey that we'll undertake. Let's not lose sight of the fact that it's the federal government, it's the Crown, that has legislated indigenous identity, and it's the Crown's responsibility to justify any discrimination under that legislation. Again, I don't want to muddy the waters here.