Thank you to Senator Tannas for bringing up the amendment. I do support it. I wanted to talk about the chamber dictating an order of reference.

The reason I brought this forward was that, when I arrived in the Senate I noticed that there were very few Indigenous issues brought to the floor, and that I had to start raising my concerns, especially around resource extraction. I want to quote from my speech:

. . . I feel it is up to us as senators to take an unencumbered, neutral look at this massive issue to try and make sense of it all.

When the Energy Committee met, 80% of the witnesses were from industry and 4% were from Indigenous peoples, so there wasn’t a fair distribution of views with C-69.

Honourable senators, it is with this in mind that I’m hopeful that a balanced neutrality and mutual respect will rule when considering this order of reference. My hope is for a final report that will be fully reflective of all points of view. My final hope would be for a resulting balance, equity and understanding in public policy moving forward. Problems dealing with natural resources and land remain the top issue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups and people, resulting in confrontation and fraught relationships. If we who are here to be representative of our regions and the people within them will not undertake a balanced and thorough study on this subject matter, then who will?

As I said, I support Senator Tannas and the amendment he has made. Thank you.