Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Can you hear me?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's a privilege to appear before this committee. Over the years, I have watched this committee advance first nation initiatives and improve first nation legislation. The research and work you're doing right now is important to first nations and all of Canada. As an introduction

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. First, the research in that paper demonstrated a useful statistic, I think. It's that the municipal boundary expansion process—depending on the circumstances, the ones we compared—was six times shorter than the additions to reserve process. Two reasons seem to demonstrate

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The FSMA would speed it up because it would demonstrate that the first nations have, at least in terms of the institutional gaps, local revenues and local service powers. That's very important for local governments in establishing service agreements. There is support from those i

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Obviously, first, that would have to be optional. First nations have to exercise their freedom of choice, and then it'll be their choice. What it would have to contain is regulatory harmony, as much as possible, within their regional context. A different turnkey framework would e

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think the only way you can establish the turnkey legal framework is through a piece of federal legislation, and that piece of federal legislation is being proposed right now. That might be a good place to put it. I'm not saying it can't be in other places. Can you build admini

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In the brief we provided you, we went through all the aspects of the first nation governance that would be required. We divided it up into three processes. It was based on our research that looked at the beginning of an investment to the end of an investment process. We divided

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm going to give you a different answer. I hope it will eventually get to the answer. I think the answer is that it's always better to have some access to credit than to have none. I want to step back for a second. There are three actors in every single economy. There are gove

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think leaseholds for commercial purposes are pretty common practice, both on and off first nation lands. With leaseholds for residential purposes, depending on the nature of the residential purposes, you can have comparable values. With respect to long-term residential proper

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think that question is directed at me.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The First Nations Land Management Act, the First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act, and the First Nations Commercial and Industrial Development Act were all directed at that particular finding, that the costs of doing business on first nation lands are too high. The r

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Quite often it's opportunity. If there are economic opportunities and these regimes will help them realize those economic opportunities, the probability of their joining is much higher. Sometimes there's an interest in the first nations to want to assert their jurisdiction, and

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The outcomes depend upon your ability to create a climate for investment, if your principal advantage is location. It depends upon what your comparative advantage is. If you're trying to develop your economy through resource development, then there's a different answer to that qu

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  When we did the study, we actually looked at projects that were successful. We looked at developing a project, and the four areas we looked at were Sept-Îles, Siksika, which is outside of—I'm trying to remember the town in Alberta—Squamish, and Kamloops. We looked at four succe

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In almost all of the cases it did involve some infrastructure, but a lot of the biggest cost was creating the property right certainty. Creating the certainty for investment was principally one of the major differences in cost, and it's because of that legal framework that's by a