Mr. Speaker, earlier today the member for Toronto Centre referenced the Liberal government, in which I served under Prime Minister Paul Martin, in a non-partisan way. I wish to recall one particular part that I think bears not only recall today, but in fact acting upon that commitment, which we have failed signally to do, and it is both a government commitment and a parliamentary commitment.
The first day that government, of which I was a part, met, at our first cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister at the time said that at the end of the day, our government would be judged by one issue, what he called the legacy issue, and that would be how we fulfilled our commitments to the aboriginal peoples.
As a result of that, he set a whole-of-government process in motion, which included an aboriginal secretariat out of the cabinet, a cabinet committee on aboriginal affairs and an 18-month process, which began as it did at the time with a Canada-aboriginal peoples round table in Ottawa on April 19, 2004, and then ended with the first ministers meeting in Kelowna on November 24, 2005. An 18-month process—