Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have really enjoyed all the presentations. I think some very good information was presented here today.
I'll continue along the same line of questioning.
Mr. Neumann, you talked about the need to focus on aboriginal people and you talked a lot about impact benefit agreements. I'm from the Northwest Territories, and we just had a mine open up. Gahcho Kué Mine opened up with the support of four aboriginal governments, all of which signed impact benefit agreements. They go such a long way in giving comfort to the communities that they'll have oversight, they'll have training. All of these agreements spell it out. There's too much history of agreements that were not documented, and they go kind of sideways when the mine takes off.
They did a good job. Gahcho Kué has an interesting name. It means place of big rabbits in the aboriginal language. The mines have been an economic driver for us in the Northwest Territories. They do a pretty good job.
Mr. Batise, you said that we need to get indigenous people working. We have huge populations, in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Northwest Territories, Nunavut. We have over 150,000 unemployed aboriginal people sitting in the communities. Most aboriginal peoples don't migrate to where the work is. They'll stay in the communities.
We have a huge challenge. Sometimes the answers lie in small things. A lot of people in the communities can't go to work because they have a criminal record or they are not able to get a pardon. Mobility is also an issue because they can't get from one community to the mine. Perhaps it's literacy, low levels of reading and writing skills, or even basic necessities such as housing. It's all these things.
How do we solve that? How do we work towards resolving that issue?