Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today.
I'm an Albertan. I'm going to put something into context. In northern Alberta, we have something called the oil sands and we have some adjacent first nations bands there.
One in particular is the Fort McKay band, which does hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of contracts from the entrepreneurs in the band itself. If you were to take a helicopter ride over the oil sands and you were to take a look, you'd fly over the Fort McKay band and you would think you were flying over a rural residential area somewhere near Toronto, with beautiful big homes being built and so on. That particular band seems to be doing quite well.
Mr. Boor and Mr. Coombes, you've talked about jobs. If these projects are the long-term projects that we think they are, and if we think the Ring of Fire, when the development does happen and goes forward—and I'm optimistic that it will.... I mean, it's one thing to provide somebody with a job, but if you actually give a man a fish, you'll feed him for a day, while if you teach him how to fish, you'll feed him for a lifetime, so my question is from the perspective of training and so on.
Mr. Ferris and Mr. Louttit, you've talked about this as well.
What sorts of agreements are there and what sorts of discussions are going on, not just about providing jobs, but about actually making sure that various people get the training and the experience they need? We're talking about the long term here. The initial tranche will be to just hire people and give them jobs, but what kinds of plans are being put in place? Have any discussions happened with regard to making sure that first nations actually have the ability to start their own businesses and develop those entrepreneurial skills? Is there a utilization of Government of Canada programs in order to train for those entrepreneurial skills? Has any of that come up in any of the discussions?