Finance committee  You can't. It would be but you can't piggyback. For example, I ran the MFA of British Columbia, which is parallel to the Alberta Capital Financing Authority. It's black and white in its act who its members are. Its members are municipalities, regional governments—

Finance committee  They could change the legislation. In terms of the reason they created our legislation, providing low-rate loans was only the first part. The second part of our act is to increase internal governance because we want to transition away from managing grant monies from the federal g

Finance committee  To answer the first part, when we have a client come onboard, we review five years of audited financial statements to ensure there are certain revenue streams—and we get contracts of what the revenue streams are—that are leveragable into loans. We supply a letter to chief and cou

Finance committee  Good morning, everybody. The infrastructure and economic needs have grown to the point at which first nations have said that rather than stand in line and hope the federal government points at you and says “It's your turn“, they have said they're willing to start putting up thei

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  With regard to residential, that's usually the people who are non-community members who choose to live on the reserve.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's usually not taxation on the first nation members themselves. It's the people from outside of the community who come to live on the reserve lands who pay the property taxes. Those rules are legally required to be quite complex to protect the ratepayers.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I can provide the numbers. The $1 billion in capital that INAC spends is not what we're tapping into. They have a subheading called “major capital”. The major capital fund has $240 million in it as of last year's budget. That fund is not stable, because it is accessed for emerge

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If you look at section 3 of the act, it says that nothing the FNFA does abrogates or derogates INAC's responsibilities.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The rating agencies will always look at what you have as security or equity. The second thing they will look at is what happens when something goes wrong. Is there a mechanism in place that will rectify the problem? If we have a member who defaults on a loan payment to us, the

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The FNFA's board has the final vote or the right to say no to a loan request. When you have a cooperative borrowing model you are only as strong as each member within that cooperative area. The revenue streams that a first nation will identify to repay the loans are not in shadow

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Sure. I've dealt in the financial market since 1991, and it's very clear to me that when you're building regulations you'd better build something that the end-users--the rating agencies, the investors--like. We did not build this upon our dreams in the hope that the end-users

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In 2008 and 2009, our year-end that just finished, the focus was on the 52 first nations that were doing property tax. The first nations in Quebec aren't interested in that. What we have done since April 1 this year is put into our budget and our agenda for this year a focus on

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's correct, because the focus was at that time property taxation. They were not interested in property taxation. The moneys we received this year allow us to focus on the other revenues, which is where their economies will be built from.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's not our number; that's from the banking syndicate. We have supplied letters to the Minister of INAC, and it's also based on feedback from the investors about what they're comfortable with. Thirty times is not unusual. The MFA is up to 70 to 80 times right now.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The 30-times leverage is not something that would happen in year one. If we received $100 million, it's most likely we would borrow $200 million to $300 million in the first year, a factor of two or three times. The second year, depending on client demand, we might end up with