Hon. Patty Hajdu, P.C., M.P., Minister of Indigenous Services and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario: Thank you. I am afraid I wouldn’t be able to answer that question because I am often not in those conversations and wouldn’t have a direct line of sight in terms of how some of those decisions have been made.

I’ll start with this: Our government has been clear that we would prefer not to litigate and that negotiated solutions are the best way to pursue reconciliation, quite frankly. This is an agenda of my colleague Minister Miller in his role within Crown‑Indigenous Relations to settle, for example, land claims and treaty claims in a way that is built on the principles of negotiation rather than litigation. He has had some tremendous success over the last year, as did his predecessor. I am grateful for a Prime Minister who understands that this is the approach we should be taking.

Having said that, there are times when the legal advice to the Government of Canada is that there are questions that need to be answered from a legal perspective. In those cases, the government chooses a litigious path.

From my perspective in the work I am doing now — for example, with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, or CHRT — the door always has to be open to negotiated solutions, even if there are questions on particular rulings. That will be my direction as minister, and I will certainly work closely with my colleagues in that respect.