First of all, thank you and all the panel members very much for allowing us to come and address these issues.
In answer to your question on what I see for first nations young people, it's not just in Six Nations, but in a lot of first nations territories all throughout Ontario and Quebec I see confusion. I see constant struggle over jurisdiction, over land claims issues.
I'll give you one example. First of all, I happen to be a proud member of Wahta Mohawk, which is in northern Ontario. I conduct my business on Six Nations. Young kids are going to high schools. We don't have a high school. We had one that was a bilingual high school on a reserve, but they were trucked in there. There's really no warm reception for young first nations individuals when you're in the middle of a land claim dispute. There's a lot of fear-mongering amongst other people telling them what's going to happen to them. The way they strive to get ahead is economically. If the only tools you have to get ahead economically are perceived to be illegal, basically it doesn't give you much opportunity, does it? That's where I'm trying to get to the meat of the problem.
When you ask, what's our solution, I really truly believe in my heart that a very first step is what's happening here in this room. A second step is that if you get involved with the raw material aspect of the business, then we'll all have a true, transparent number of what we're working with. Then we can look at revenue-sharing to first nations communities. Who has the jurisdiction to tax the product? How somebody can choose to pay it into their own community...how they have that option. That option was explored 23 years ago. I can remember coming up to this same building. I had every first nations member in the community saying, “Don't sell me out or don't come home”. I went up to the Minister of Finance and asked if we could work on some kind of revenue-sharing. I remember Mr. Anderson's name as if I'm looking at this microphone. I said, “Is there was any way it can benefit our people?” Basically he sent me packing.
Here we are, 23 years later, and we have to start tackling these issues. I know everybody may not agree with me on the raw material perspective, but let's face it, I'm in the industry and I'm a native manufacturer, so I have a pretty good insight as to what I believe will control the issue.