Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question about an outstanding issue. This bill does not deal with the provincial resource issue as the member described.
In my home province of British Columbia, I believe there are 100 or 120 separate resource management agreements that have been struck over the last few years with first nations communities to help them get a piece of the resource revenue that is in their traditional territories and so on, but that is a different issue. It is an important issue and it needs to be talked about, whether we are talking about, in the case of B.C., comprehensive land claims treaties and other issues or whether we are talking about consultation and accommodation issues. Those are all important, but on the specific claims tribunal, we wanted to be quite clear that we did not want to mix the specific claims process with either section 35 rights that might be negotiated, or the treaty process itself on comprehensive land and other treaties.
This is specific claims. It deals with the outstanding obligations of the Crown. In some cases it might involve resources. For example, there might be a case where years ago some resources were sold off from an Indian reserve and the first nation was not properly compensated at the time. They may have had for many years an outstanding claim, a specific claim about that resource that was unfairly treated at the time because of the actions of an Indian agent, perhaps, or some other unscrupulous character the government had used to negotiate something--