Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Not dissimilar to our competitors, we're also involved in the Martin Family Initiative, AFOA, and The Journal of Aboriginal Management. We've started to have conversations to work at the high school level in a lot of the same opportunities that they talked about. In addition, w

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Based on our hiring, and Jacques will be able to reinforce this, there are CPAs who typically end up being manager level or above after about 10 years of experience, and certainly from there they would have a two-year training program to get up to speed.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's not just at the band management level, but also at the leadership level. You're freshly elected. These rules are complicated. I tried to explain some aspects of the aboriginal ecosystem to my colleagues, and I decided to make a presentation deck. I stopped at 90 pages in

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I would echo what Mr. Campbell said on the capacity side. These first nations operate, we tend to say, one of the most complex financial ecosystems in the world. We take experienced CPAs with 10 years' experience, and it takes them two years to get trained on how to do this stuff

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  To add to Jacques' point, there is a concern. The counter-argument to that is that bands will voluntarily go into default management so they can get expert support. Probably the likely longer-term solution is some type of cost-sharing, I would have thought.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In terms of increasing the capacity of that first nation, you might think about looking beyond geography. There's enough modern technology that might allow members of that first nation to do the first nation's work from a remote location using some of the more modern accounting s

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In order to improve the approach to default management, we feel that the following items should be considered: First is a single funding agreement. The federal government needs to simplify the management and administration for first nations by moving to a single funding agreemen

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning. My name is Harry Lake. I am a partner with BDO Canada. I lead the aboriginal consulting services nationwide for BDO. Before we begin, I want to thank the standing committee for inviting BDO to present today. As an introduction, BDO is one