Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to the Member. Congratulations to the Speaker-elect. This is something that, again, my work experience over the last two years has shown me is a real challenge. There's this murky gray area called the designated authority that isn't really -- that's designated by policy but not designated by statute. And that creates this challenge of where -- of how to fund it and where the authority comes from. Does it fall under some things? It falls under federal legislation, like band council elections, and sometimes it's territorial legislation. So we probably -- like, there definitely needs to be a way to come forward that involves working with the community and figuring all those things out. And I think one of the first steps is really getting an inventory of authorities and responsibilities that a designated authority has that's understood by both parties. I'm sure MACA has that information, but I'm not sure if every designated authority understands that clearly as well and every employee of that designated authority does as well. And then we need to go to Ottawa and say we need to solve this problem. We have this bizarre relationship with the federal government that the territorial governments are responsible north of 60, and the funding pots that they develop for on reserve funding is only south of 60. And we have reserves up here that are underfunded that don't get access to that. We have Indigenous communities that don't get access to that. And it's this mentality that's been in place, and it's a very colonial mentality, that we already have these federal creatures up North, we don't need the federal bureaucracy. But that's changed. We've evolved. We've grown. And it's time for the relationship with Ottawa to change as well, especially around these gray areas. So I support the Member's communities. I'd like to do what we can as a government to change that. And I think we need to bring this issue to the table with the Prime Minister, bring the grand chief of the Deh Cho First Nations, the other chiefs of the Deh Cho forward, and the other designated authority chiefs, to really talk about how we can move forward on their terms to meet their needs. Thank you.
Kieron Testart on Questions by Members
On December 7th, 2023. See this statement in context.
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