Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'd like to clarify, Mr. Russell, that the trust was just a mechanism to transfer the money from the federal government at that time. The provinces could draw down from that trust for the housing purposes. It was the mechanism that had to be utilized to get the money out of it, as opposed to there being a direct payment to the province.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, the transfer was a general one of the money, but it was for aboriginal housing, so it was meant to be inclusive of first nations, Inuit, and Métis.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We can get clarification on this for you, but as I understand it, it's an unconditional transfer, so that once the money's transferred to the provinces--and the federal government has stated that it is certainly the federal government's volition that it be used for that purpose--we have no enforcement mechanism.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  There are provisions in the Indian Act that allow for the sale. It has to be approved by a certain percentage of the community as a whole, not just a band. So it's possible to sell reserve land, but it does take a fairly significant majority of community members to do that.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The problem is, once the land is sold, it's no longer reserve land, so if it's sold, even to an Indian individual, it loses its status as reserve land. Normally they make arrangements short of a sale so the land remains within a reserve base. But it's certainly possible to alienate land to individual members.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If I may address the question on off-reserve housing, there was no specific target set, so the money was just transferred for this general purpose. But certain provinces have started discussions with the aboriginal groups on the ground in terms of how that money would be spent.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  On the urban off-reserve...those developments have been more recent. In particular, there's a growing number of aboriginal students in urban schools, and so on. There were federal government programs that related indirectly to education, such as health, head start, the human resources development strategy, and so on.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'll add, just very briefly, to what my colleague, Mr. LeBlanc, has said. As he mentioned, the primary role of the department has been with respect to on-reserve education, given its responsibilities for activities on reserve. Off reserve, the provincial governments are the administrators of the education system, so the department doesn't have any direct program role at this point in off-reserve education.