I'll use an example from health. I've participated in three provincial transformation initiatives, one of which included the Saskatchewan surgical initiative that decreased wait times by 40%. We came together in a conference with 200 participants, started off with 250 items that we wanted to address, and received a report that had four pillars. All we wanted to talk about was the four pillars. We don't know what happened to the 250 items that needed to be addressed. When we're talking about issues within indigenous communities, I think there's probably a set limit of the number of issues that are out there, but what differs from community to community are the priorities of which issues cause the biggest problems. If we're going to create a consultation process, and we've applied this within the alliance framework, we need to find a way to capture all those issues in a way that they remain there. They don't get distilled into four pillars that structure the way you move forward.
You need a clear process that takes the priorities from groups within the community so they can internally find alignment before they externally find alignment with federal and provincial regulatory processes. The communities can figure out a way forward, but there are different voices, and sometimes the only voices that get heard are the loudest. That doesn't necessarily represent the large majority of the community or the opinion of the elders, those are just the people who are getting on TV yelling at the top of their lungs.
When we're talking about how to move forward with resource development, we have to rethink how we collect and ensure these issues stay at the forefront. Communities need to know that they're heard. They need to see that they're heard in the reports and other things that are published, and they need to be engaged at a level where people recognize that these issues are out there and they can see them as well.