Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'll start with you, Mr. Ferguson, and then I'd like to hear Mr. Tremblay on some of the issues.
We're talking about...and you just mentioned it, so it's actually a wonderful segue into what I'd like to talk about.
This is about nation-to-nations—plural. This is clearly not something that is done with the federal government and one group, or even the federal government and one province. This is with a multitude of interlocutors who need to be brought to the table as full partners in this negotiation, if I understand this correctly.
However, once the agreements happen, and you have the B.C. example, where do we go with the accountability? My understanding is that once you have a nation-to-nation agreement, like you have with the provinces, the federal government stops having any accountability expectations, except, for example, with regard to the Canada Health Act. You expect the provinces to respect the framework of the Canada Health Act, but you're not asking them to show you, the federal government, how exactly each dollar of the health transfer is spent. They decide how they do it. It's the same thing with education or whatever other national program.
Once you have these agreements, you're going to be negotiating one by one, and there are going to be quite a few. Right now we don't have complete data to actually look at whether it's been closed or improved in any way. However, once it's done, how do we keep on tracking this data? If the first nations are going to be solely responsible for the management of the programs, be they in education, health, culture or all the other factors that you actually did say should be taken into account, how do we do that?