Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm a little bit nervous here, so have a little bit of patience. Now I know how O.J. Simpson felt.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I've prepared an introduction followed by a three-page presentation, and I guess a question and answer period will follow that. I'd like to introduce my associate director of lands, Mrs. Debbie Morris. I ask for your patience beforehand, because I've been elected for almost thr

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Including my father....

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Hello. How are you? What's new?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  With the current system of titles and certificates of possession, in Kahnawake 85% of our lands are private lands, due to whatever happened in the past. We have large parcels of land that people have acquired because there is money in Kahnawake today. People are able to buy 50 ac

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Currently in Kahnawake we have no zoning laws whatsoever. So you can have a beautiful house and then have a pig farm as your neighbour. There's no zoning. There is a movement currently. A zoning law was requested by a community member and we do have in our community what we cal

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Through economic development, we've had many different opportunities over the past few years. You need to have a perspective on the exact location of Kahnawake, on where we're situated. We have every single type of highway, byway, bridge, car bridge, train bridge, St. Lawrence Se

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm sure everybody is aware that Kahnawake just went through a referendum last week in regard to a casino, a yes or no vote. Unfortunately, it was a no, as I'm sure you're all aware, and that's difficult for me. I've been involved in social services for 18 years as a board memb

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It will be returned to us. We don't have to purchase it. It was part of, I guess, the original expropriation for Highway 30 to go through. It was part of our lands, and it was gone.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We would love to see a green light to go ahead and start using that. Let the process continue in the background, but let us use the land immediately. There's no reason that—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, it's logical. If it's coming back to us—and Quebec and Ottawa agree it's coming back to us—why do we need to wait five to ten years to start making a dollar?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, I don't mind telling you that the casino was the big thing, but there are several others. We're looking at pharmaceutical companies to help generate much-needed dollars on the reserve. At the Tewatohnhi’saktha, which is our economic development department, they are really bra

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Adding to what Debbie just said, there is something that we're hopeful about, and that's the possibility of creating a port. The St. Lawrence Seaway system was built through Kahnawake, through the heart of our community. I think thousands of acres were expropriated for the St. La

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Right now I guess it's more like the dispensing of medication. It's not a huge endeavour, but it's something that's being thrown at us.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, I'll share with you that coming back from a trip from Toronto, I met up with a real estate developer with a huge company worldwide with 30,000 employees. We started talking and kicking things around. He was representing a huge U.S. company that was looking for a stretch of