Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for inviting the commission to appear before the committee of the whole. With your permission, my colleagues and I will take the committee through the commission's report and, hopefully, this will contribute to some debate. To begin, I think it would be useful to do a brief summary of how the commission accomplished their work.
The commission was established in the summer of 1991, with a mandate to recommend principles and institutional options for the new western territory, following division. To stimulate debate and provide some background information, the discussion paper entitled, "How Can We Live Together?" was released in the fall of 1991. Funding was provided to aboriginal organizations and a number of other public interest groups to stimulate input into our report.
Public hearings began in November, 1991, and we visited 12 communities before Christmas. Early in January we held a workshop in Calgary where we brought in constitutional experts and leading lawyers across the country dealing with aboriginal rights. Based on the information we received from the first round of hearings and the results and recommendations from the workshop, we released an interim report in February, 1992. This report was released to the public to test whether we were on track or whether we were hearing accurately what the public have to say.
After that, aboriginal organizations and public interest groups received additional funds to be able to respond in detail. Another round of public hearings was held in March and April in nine communities. I would like to add that some of these smaller communities came to the public hearings in the larger communities. We tried to cover as many communities as possible. During February and March, individual commissioners travelled throughout the territories. At that time we covered every community in the territories, holding informal information sessions to explain what the interim report was all about. The final report was completed and presented to the political leaders in late April.
I would like to say here that the commission did not feel it was our responsibility in any way to lead public opinion. What we sought to do was gather information as much as possible from the public. These are copies of the transcripts of testimony which we received in public hearings. We tried as best as we possibly could to reflect the views of the public in a short report. That was our main objective.
We feel very strongly that leading public opinion is a job of politicians, and we are non-political. We wanted to, as much as possible, relay or convey what we heard at the community level.
Mr. Chairman, with that I would like to ask Mr. Braden to do an overview.