Procedure and House Affairs committee  As we told the royal commission in 1992.... Senator Marchand was the chair and has now passed on. He was the first indigenous person to sit in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet. I've been around for the last eight prime ministers or 18 ministers of indigenous affairs. I've been trying to find a way to increase the number of indigenous people.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We started by trying to increase representation in the national political parties. Back in the day, I was involved in writing the policy for the Liberal Party to guarantee representation of aboriginal people in that party. That came into effect in the election between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin—the first one.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think in theory it's gotten better, but in practice—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are challenges, yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  One of the things we've been advocating for is more use of our registries, where we have a good number of people. I know that in Manitoba, for example, there are 40,000 registered Métis citizens. That's not including the children. The information is confidential, but there are ways for us to use the registries to make sure that those people, particularly in the hinterland, receive the ballots so they can get them back in.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, Mark. We just had an election in British Columbia amongst the Métis. In our election there, we found no evidence of any problem with the mail-in ballots whatsoever.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm sure the Chief Electoral Officer and the systems we have in place now—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  What we find is that the Métis turnout is pretty good. In fact, during this last federal election, we had our governing members working to turn the Métis vote out. We had staff who were looking after that in each of the governing members. We have a pretty good civic participation rate.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, but we did send him a letter, which we haven't received an answer to.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's just in Manitoba. We're spread throughout the prairies. We were pushed off the lands in Manitoba and moved right up through to the Northwest Territories and Peace River. We went wherever the work was and that's why we're spread throughout.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Our hope is that it was just somebody putting something together quickly and...we've turned the page a little bit at the national level on what the responsibilities are by the federal government for the Métis nation.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's not going in the right direction at the moment, as everybody knows. I think all the parties just need to make sure that it's going to be safe to hold the election if it's done. You guys play a big role in that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Our national organization and our governing members play a role in this. It's really important the better we are able to communicate what the approaches of all the parties are—for us to be able to communicate that to our citizens. That's why I'm saying that we want to make sure that anything your party leader says goes unfiltered to our people, so they can make the right choice for them.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think I can. This has been an endemic problem in the electoral system. When we looked at that system to increase indigenous representation in Parliament, in 1992 there were only 12 indigenous people elected to Parliament of the 11,000 other members who came before that. We've had increases since then, but it's mainly because we've changed the electoral system to provide for majority indigenous districts, like Churchill and Churchill River—and we have Nunavut now, and NWT has a majority.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's hard to say, because the census questions have not been accurate. We've actually just reached an agreement with the chief statistician on how to ask the question about who is or who is not a Métis. Roughly speaking, we're 100,000 in Manitoba, 75,000 in Saskatchewan, close to 100,000 in Alberta and about 75,000 in British Columbia.