If I can start, I'm sure everyone will have some other answers. I think what Debra talked about is a need for a high-level group to be able to sit down and sift through the many recommendations that have been made from the many studies and come up with some examples and some ideas of what practically could be done, and use some of the best practices that Bev talked about, use some of the best practices from the First Nations Land Management Act and other places where people are struggling with this and are legislating in their own communities with respect to issues like matrimonial real property.
Then there has to be a consultation, and some of it, for the reasons Bev articulated, may have to be in Ottawa or other major centres. Some of it has to be in our communities. It's a community issue and it also has to be dealt with in our communities, by the leadership there and by the people in the communities. So it has to happen in both ways.
I'm not confident that a legislative solution, for the reasons that we've articulated, is going to be an effective solution, whether it's a stopgap or long term. It's going to require something else in terms of being able to deal with issues that each community has, and some are very different. There are some communities where women were the property owners, period. Is the solution to go back to where women are the property owners? I don't know. It may be in some places. Some people just laughed at the idea that this Indian Act was going to change things, because they said “We know what the real story is: women are the property owners. But over time and through court cases and through divorce battles and everything else, that changed.”
So there are things that need to be examined in that regard, and it can't be done in isolation. We put forward, with other aboriginal leadership last November, some ideas to deal with closing the gap, to deal with the issue of poverty. Some of the issues we're talking about are manifestations of poverty, and the issue of poverty has to be dealt with. And that was done at the first ministers meeting in Kelowna in November of last year. To pretend that we can deal with matrimonial real property issues in isolation of other issues that are real in the community, including violence.... Why are first nation women's shelters funded at a lower level than the provincial women's shelters?
There are a lot of good questions we need to ask ourselves in terms of the system our people are living in.