I will be the first to respond to that.

First of all, sitting here as first nations, as the indigenous, original peoples of this land, everything that you have reported in the last six minutes we have been born into. We know all of these statistics. We live it every day.

In the legal system, people will say what they need to say in order to win. That is the type of legal system we have. It is not a justice system; it is a legal system.

As the original peoples of this land, what we have been told through treaty—and I'm speaking from a treaty perspective—is that with this covenant, which has been there from the newcomers or the Crown and the original peoples, as well as the Creator, we must work together.

We acknowledge that we were born into genocidal policies. We still are subjected to them. We still bury so many children and many more people than any other Canadian or people who live in what is now Canada. We know this because we go to the wakes and funerals. We understand the chronic underfunding.

What we do state here today, at least for myself, is that while this is going on, we have an opportunity with this bill, even if the government is currently faced with having to do the right thing. Yes, we acknowledge that the court has stated that they do the right thing, but we must still work together to ensure that the death toll goes down, that we have safe drinking water, that we have adequate funding and that there are legal tools in our tool box with the provincial, federal and first nations jurisdictional fight.

Thank you for the question. I don't think you'd need to have one without the other, or that only one is the right way to go. I think that the time is now for us to act and work together to get this legislation passed.

Thank you very much.

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