Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm from the far north and so I think it's very important. I don't know what your process would be, but if there's a chance for this particular committee to get out to the communities, to actually see them and maybe hold one of your meetings in one of the communities.... It cou

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I am not part of the wealth group, but I'm certainly well aware of what trust services they actually provide. Normally trust services are needed whenever there's some sort of land claim agreement or a revenue stream, say, coming from an impact benefit agreement. Basically it's a

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Normally what would happen is that we would serve as a corporate trustee, so you'd actually have independent trustees who would serve as a part of the trust agreement. In some instances, you may actually have someone representing council and so on. I actually think the creation o

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We're a part of the business bank specifically. When we set our goals to say here's how we want to grow, we take the aboriginal market into account as well, taking into account those three major considerations, the strength of the borrower, the ability to service the debt, in ter

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's a great question. The Aboriginal Banking Group is our team within TD Bank. We're actually a part of the TD family, I suppose. We come forward with a significant level of expertise, really focusing in this particular market on trying to identify where the market opportunitie

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, we're out there providing lending facilities, either term loans or operating lines and so on, to communities.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  There is one specific example that I mentioned it in my testimony, which is that we've actually participated in some of the renewable energy projects that we've seen out of Ontario. The interesting thing about these projects is that they're looking at trying to finance equity. No

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  For the question around ATRs, I believe it was stated a while ago by the Auditor General that on average it takes about nine years, or something like that, to transfer land over from non-reserve to reserve. As you can imagine, anything that creates a level of uncertainty around b

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's probably the latter. It usually bubbles up whenever there's a timely issue, that we come together. You may be aware that the Public Policy Forum pulled together a variety of different stakeholders to talk about access to capital and infrastructure financing in October this p

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, of course. The only comment I would make is that it does two things. First of all, it's a migration out of the Indian Act, clearly, for greater control over land management. It also enables, and is an example of, enhanced capacity on the part of the community, thereby demo

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Certainly I'm not an education expert, but I think the low success rates and graduation rates from reserves, as you mentioned, indicate that it clearly is a problem. For us, when I talk about the growing aboriginal market, the largest component of that market, of the $32 billion

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. It's an honour to be here to provide TD's perspective on issues and challenges regarding access to capital. By way of personal background, I'm an Inuk from Nunatsiavut, a region in northern Labrador. Nunatsiavut was the last In