Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his question and for his great work as the chair of the aboriginal affairs committee. He is certainly a valuable member of Parliament who brings a great deal of knowledge on this file.
As I said in my speech, when we look at the numbers presented here, we had 101,000 applicants when they were initially looking at around 10,000. The number of applications was 10 times higher, representing over 10% of the total number of status Indians in Canada.
With that many applications far exceeding the original expectation, it simply was not possible to review all of them, as was laid out in the original agreement. There were too many to review by the deadline.
The original assessment of those guidelines was not sufficiently clear, obviously. The supplementary agreement seeks to tighten that up, to make sure that all applications will be reviewed based on the original intent of the agreement.