Strength Through Working Together
Progressively more First Nations communities across Canada are exercising self-determination and building capacity within administration, , finance, and investment management, as they pursue their goals of economic and social prosperity.
Many First Nations communities are pursuing new opportunities and achieving greater success as a result of working together with other First Nations communities. This has resulted in First Nations communities gaining competitive advantages due to combining resources, increasing efficiency, reducing expenses, and creating economies of scale which has led to improved negotiating power.
Working alone, many First Nations communities simply would not have the size and scale to achieve economic and social prosperity.
Economic Regulator of the Atlantic First Nations Water Authority
On June 23, 2020, the Minister of Indigenous Services Canada (ISC), Marc Miller, and the Atlantic First Nations Water Authority (AFNWA) announced the signing of a Framework Agreement that created a path for the transfer of service responsibility for water and wastewater systems within 15 First Nations communities across Atlantic Canada from ISC to the AFNWA.
The AFNWA assumed responsibility and authority for the delivery of water and wastewater services to over 4,500 on-reserve households and businesses, which represents approximately 60 per cent of First Nations people who live on reserves in Atlantic Canada.
Why is the FMB Involved?
Established under the FMA, the FMB supports opportunities for greater collaboration among like-minded First Nations communities that see the benefit of strength through working together. Following recent amendments to the FMA, the FMB can work with a wider range of organizations including First Nations not-for-profit organizations and tribal councils. Based on a track record of the FMB’s successful implementation of other initiatives in the past, the FMB was engaged by the AFNWA to provide economic oversight of water and wastewater service delivery.
Future Possibilities
The success of this project may serve as an oversight model for future First Nations-led initiatives that seek to transfer responsibility or combine resources to achieve scale through aggregation.
Economic Regulator: Area of Regulatory Oversight
In joint collaboration with AFNWA and ISC, the FMB has developed a regulatory framework (contained within the Practice Directives) allowing the FMB to provide economic oversight over the AFNWA’s mandate to deliver clean water and wastewater services to Indigenous peoples across Atlantic Canada.
Applications and Information Requests
The FMB’s Commitment to Transparency.
The FMB, within the context of an economic regulator, ensures that all Applications and Information Requests it receives be handled in a transparent manner. To this end, the FMB has created a set of regulatory rules cited as the Board Regulatory Rules. Each Application and Information Request will be considered and reviewed through a transparent process. AFNWA applicants, members of the public and media outlets will see their requests processed in a timely manner while complying with established record keeping, confidentiality and procedural .