Senator McCallum: Senator Cotter, there are a lot of unresolved issues here for rights holders in this bill. How will the lived experiences of rights holders in the Prairie provinces be meaningfully addressed when you see Alberta and Saskatchewan, with Manitoba not far behind, ignoring the rights holders in the acts that they are bringing forward? How do you see that being addressed in this bill?

Senator Cotter: As you will see in the bill, Senator McCallum, there is a requirement of consultation and dialogue with Indigenous leadership in the Prairies. That’s a mandate imposed upon the minister who coordinates this work, and, I presume, the other ministers who will have a role here.

Maybe I could answer this with an example of what I think is an opportunity lost in the past, but may be there in the future.

When you think about economic opportunity — let me focus on that first — the opportunities for Indigenous people, but particularly First Nations, have been badly circumscribed by treaties, treaty lands and reserves. I think you and I are on the same wavelength there. In fact, a lot of those, if you look at the maps — Saskatchewan is, perhaps, the worst case — are not just being put on small, postage stamp-sized reserves, but also at the margins of a productive economy in the province, at least in the days when agriculture seemed like the story. So Indigenous people and communities never had a chance to get off the ground.

The place where those conversations have been the richest have been in relation to traditional territories. Not the postage stamp-sized reserves, but the areas where First Nations tended to live traditionally, which often covered vast areas.

One of the ways of trying to build an economy is to create opportunities for Indigenous people and communities to tap into those resources. It’s tricky if you’re a provincial government because usually tapping into those resources — which conventionally provincial governments have understood to be theirs or belonging to all the people — are a source of revenue to run the programs of the province. What you need is a partnership with the province and the Government of Canada because in the Constitution Indians and land reserved for Indians are the constitutional responsibility of Ottawa. It’s possible for the Government of Canada to support those developments, sometimes with support for equity, but also support for sharing the constraints or the opportunity costs for the provinces.

Ottawa has not always been open to that. I don’t know where this will go. I am hoping that imaginative ideas to unlock that potential that was taken away will occur. There are people a lot smarter than me coming up with these ideas, but I think there is a remarkable amount of potential to do that if the goodwill is there.

Provinces are vulnerable in some respects. Sometimes when oil revenues and others are really good, it looks pretty good, but provinces are vulnerable to having to give up large amounts of their tax base. But partnerships with the Government of Canada, which has a fiduciary obligation here and was the mechanism for taking away that opportunity, I think there is a duty that rests with Canada.

I hope that is at least partly helpful.