The value is in the billions. What we have done is we have taken the revenue streams that have been presented in financial statements. The Financial Management Board receives five years of financial statements from about 280 clients across the country. What we have begun to do is an analysis of those, because I don't think this information is widely known by anybody: What is the value of the economic activity in first nation communities and how would you measure that? When you get to the point that it's a billion dollars a year and you look at how you monetize that and ask what is the impact, that's really what our intention is.
We hope that in the future we will be able to do all 300 communities that we have financial information for. It really points to the need for a statistics institution to be able to provide this kind of data and information. We were quite surprised, in the 75 communities that we picked at random, by how big it was, and I don't think that many of us really understood that and understood that the first nation economy plays a lot of value in the gross national product of Canada and surrounding regional economies.
It's in the billions, Mr. Schmale.