Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That would be up to first nations. As governments, first nations would naturally want and need to get into new intergovernmental agreements. On the majority of the research I've seen where first nations have done it, once they have the authorities.... Actually, that's the basic p

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. Provide the first nations with sufficient authority that they come to the table as equals. The provinces and the municipalities, in any of the cases I've seen where that's occurred, are quite willing to do the deal.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm not sure there's much I can add. I'm not completely up to date on the FNLMA. There recently has been a lot of discussion that I'm not completely familiar with around it and around some of these issues. The difficulty is that I don't think it was ever fully appreciated what

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  First, just to set the record straight, I didn't say there was anything wrong with fee simple. The witnesses who appeared before you said it was an issue that was going to apply to a few or ten first nations, and I'm worried about the other 600. If we go beyond FNLM, I'm actually

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm sorry. I hope that answered your question. I got off on a bit of a tangent there.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  To expand it nationally, to apply it to all additions to reserve, and to pick up a whole range of these points, like the section 35 easements...if you could couple that with some improvements in the designation process and whatever, which first nations might be quite willing to a

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  There's a whole range of them. The addition to reserve discussion paper that was made available to the committee is a fairly lengthy paper, as you can see. As an example, one simple thing that most people respect, and I know first nations do, is just saying no. Letting something

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Unfortunately, as you may have seen from my remarks, this legislation only applies in those three provinces, and only to claim settlements. If you're looking for a way to help out the ATR process nationally, as I said in my remarks, there's one area to look at. Not to oversimpl

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It gets a little difficult, depending on the situation and the cause of the contamination, but as a general rule it's a federal liability. It's federal land. It was under federal watch that the lands were contaminated, even if the contaminant is often a federal undertaking. The m

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  At the point of the first nation taking over responsibility for land management under FNLMA, that is where the federal liability ends. Anything that happened before that is a federal liability. There is a federal obligation under the FNLMA to clean that up. I would have to check

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The issue here is that it's difficult for many first nations to find land for the purpose they're looking for it that doesn't already have some kind of encumbrance on it. That encumbrance can be a hydro line, it can be a railway right of way. Some of it's not even registered on t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's the whole process. I don't think you can single out any one part of it. My own opinion is that the department is spread far too thin. I really like the way the participants in the reserve land and economic development study, those first nations that I quoted at the end, pos

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Not that I'm aware of, but I think there are other ways of making the third-party interest issue easier to deal with. The specific example I'd use is to think of yourself as the third party. You have some right on the land. The land is going to be purchased by someone else, in t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In dealing with an antiquated process, a process that doesn't have any other comparison outside of this environment...the federal government actually has to take ownership of the land to make it reserve, to transfer it, to worry about third-party interests and all that. These are