Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, they can. Any first nation that's under the Indian Act at the current time can access loans from us. There is a process. They need to request scheduling. It's a voluntary process to work under the act. From there, they need to have a financial performance certificate that'

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We do have a credit enhancement fund. As I mentioned at the beginning, certain safeguards under the act anticipated one or two first nations defaulting and going bad. With the pandemic, it could have been all of them, and it just couldn't sustain that. That's what the credit enha

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Recently there was a study done in southern Manitoba that looked at leakage. This is for every dollar that's spent. When they did their study, they looked at net contribution to the economy. The first nations in Manitoba are net contributors to the economy. I think the general po

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. That's correct. That's what we call “monetization”. It's a leveraging of dollars.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. What happens is that there's usually an agreement with the Government of Canada. I'm just going to digress a bit. Right now, the majority of the loans that first nations have are backed by revenue-sharing agreements with provinces. Through Ontario, the lotteries share reven

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. We're aware of a few communities in the Atlantic in particular. The snow crab industry especially is highly affected, simply because the restaurants are not open. Delivering their products to restaurants was not available over the last few months. We definitely have seen tha

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, we are.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Powlowski, for that question. We actually make loans for pretty well anything a first nation wants to do. It's kind of a running joke we have that it just has to be legal. It can be anything socially or economically. It can do equity into revenue-generating operat

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Arnold. That's a very good question. The best return we see on the investments, the money the first nations have borrowed from us, is from alternative energy, anything in regulated resources. Dare I say a pipeline, because they are regulated and they bring a retur

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In terms of what we do with our process, when a first nation borrows with us, they aren't actually determining for what purposes they would like to use the loan. It has to meet a certain program eligibility. It could be social development or economic development. A lot of the bor

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I played drums.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's why I became a CPA.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. Richard Van Camp is from my community.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's not so much under the model we're working on, because we are trying to get first nations to get into managing wealth. Our communities need wealth, right?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We don't have enough in our communities.