Thank you very much for the question.
I was wondering when this was going to happen, when I was going to run into a former student. Yes, there are great memories from that experience. It was the very first cohort we did. I was quite proud of what we achieved and what all the students went on to do.
It might not have come across in my introduction, as I was trying to keep it within the five minutes, but getting to where we are now in the new relationship agreement we have, the Cree self-governance agreement with Canada, wasn't an easy path. When I first started working, we had 25 lawsuits going. Every single chapter of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was subject to litigation.
When things really changed was when there was an honest conversation. Oddly enough, related to the previous question, we had started our discussions under—I think Paul Martin was prime minister back then—the Liberal government. We made significant headway in coming up with an agreement. Then there was an election. There was a change, and we ended up signing the agreement with the Conservatives. I'm especially proud of the fact that it transcended two different governments. I think this was because everybody agreed: the leadership on the indigenous side, the leadership on the Canadian side and, more importantly, the civil servants on both sides. It's something we tend to forget. I have civil servants as well. I have an executive director who just retired, and he was executive director for 35 years. We do have professional civil servants.
It's about holding both of us accountable. That's what I meant by shoulder to shoulder. It was when Canada recognized, “Okay, we can't do this on our own; we're actually no good at implementing treaties on our own.” When you think of the concept of a treaty as a document that enshrines a relationship, if you assume that you're going to take responsibility for the whole thing and you're going to do the whole thing on your own, you're going to be accountable on your own, of course it's not going to work. It's a relationship. It's not a transaction.
This is why I was more complimentary about the process of arriving at Bill C-10. It's very important that the mechanism put in place operates in parallel to the existing treaty relationship. If the relationship is poor, well, the parallel vehicle will be that much more important. If the relationship is working well, then the parallel path can be complementary.
This is how I see Bill C-10 working in our modern context.