Mr. Speaker, I thought private land was the discussion, and to the best of my recollection, most of the houses being built in Canada are built on private land. If we are going to talk about private land, we also have to talk about the plan to take private land out of the land base. I think it is totally directed. In fact, of all the promises we are talking about here, I think housing should be addressed if we are talking about taking private land out of the land base. I think it is totally related.
As a first nation, when we were trying to conserve land, all these promises were made by telling us that if we conserved land, a whole different economy was going to be brought to us. There would be tourism. Everybody would get a job. Everybody was going to have a house of their own. First nations would be well off. Kitlope was protected in the same manner as we are talking about here. Who got wealthy and benefited under that? The environmental organizations did. Their offices got bigger. They hired more staff. They had offices in San Francisco and Vancouver. I visited them. One in particular had 150 staff members.
What did my band get? For all the work that we did to preserve land, we got nothing. All we got was a $30,000-a-year funding option from the B.C. government. That was all we got. It was not even enough to hire anybody. It was good enough for administrative purposes, but that was it. I think the timing of this motion is not right, considering all the different pressures Canadians are facing, as well as the housing crisis and many other issues, but I am running out of time, so I will sit down.