Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Here, we examined the funding of negotiation processes, but we did not study other projects that could be funded by the federal government in this chapter specifically. The problem is caused by the fact that this is annual funding. Year after year, the funding has to be reviewed and approvals obtained. There are certain requirements, including I believe that of producing an audited financial statement from the previous year. It obviously takes some time to obtain these documents, then the department must proceed with the approval, which slows down the granting of the funding to aboriginal people for the negotiations.
As a result, we recommended that the department reconsider the possibility of granting multi-year funding and ensure that aboriginal people obtain more certain funding that would cover several years, so that they will not be obliged to assume interest costs as well as the other difficulties that I mentioned in my opening statement.