Thank you for inviting us here to share information with you. My main function is to manage the lands prudently and wisely for the benefit of our members of Mississauga First Nation.
As we know, in 1994 Mississauga First Nation, Ontario, and Canada signed an agreement on a land claim involving a dispute on the survey of the northern boundary. This agreement provided Mississauga First Nation with new opportunities in the natural resources sector. This new land fits in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest region, which has some of the most tolerant hardwoods within the north shore region. We were hoping to capitalize on the forestry's economic opportunities.
Prior to the 1994 land settlement agreement, Mississauga First Nations's land base was 1,977 hectares of land; about 1,100 hectares were productive forest lands. Under our existing land base, much of that was depleted due to various circumstances.
Along with that, we have 220 hectares of non-forest land, meaning rock and water. We have protected lands of 136 hectares, which we had to exclude from the annual level cut in our forest management plan. With that, we had a non-productive forest area equivalent to 515 hectares, which was just primary swamp, so there weren't really a whole lot of forestry opportunities on the present land base.
After 1994 the land settlement area increased our land base by an additional 16,000 hectares. Of that, we had approximately 2,400 hectares of fresh water containing both warm water fish species and some deep cold water lake species of fish as well that would promote hunting and fishing.
In addition to that, we had about 2,400 hectares of non-forest land, 350 of non-productive forest land, and on top of that we had about 12,000 hectares of productive forest land, and that's where we were hoping to capitalize on our economic opportunities in the forestry.
With this, we had to establish a 10-year forest benchmark, so in the initial phase from 1994 to 2004 we developed a forest management plan. Again, with the time lags we had to wait out the process to implement our plans because the new reserved lands were not under our control at that time.
We had to spend more dollars updating our forest management plan to bring it to its current state.
We're still waiting to implement our forest management plan, and we lost other opportunities in that section as well in terms of non-timber forest products.
So the timeframes that had an adverse affect on our plans stemmed from 1994. The settlement was agreed to in March 2010, when the order in council was signed giving our new lands official Indian reserve status. In June 2010 we passed a land law under our land code, hoping to add our lands to our land code. As we heard from Jim, in March 2012 the individual agreement was signed by the minister making our lands officially part of our land quota, which we can now implement.
So in that timeframe we lost many opportunities in the forest sector by missing employment opportunities related to harvesting the wood and to value added. We missed opportunities with sawmills and other small contracts that were presented to us. We couldn't make ends meet because of the timelines.
Since that time, Mississauga First Nation has lost $10.5 million in stumpage revenues in the Ontario system in relation to direct jobs and spinoffs.
We lost about $850,000 in land lease opportunities, whether it was through recreational or other types of business entities that wished to lease land from Mississauga First Nation and help stimulate the local economy.
Most recently, we could not make a move on a renewable energy sector because of the same issues; we could not access the lands to implement these projects. In addition to all that stuff, we had hunting and fishing opportunities that some of our members wanted to engage in, and non-timber forest products, but, again, we could not issue any kind of permit forms or leases to these individuals to capitalize on the new lands.
I feel the real losers in this whole process are the many elders who participated in 1994 as the negotiating team, who were present from day one to 1994, and who are no longer here with us. They will not see the full benefit of the new lands and how we can try to prosper and move on to the next seven generations whose futures will have something to look forward to.
In short, the ATR process has to be more effective in order for first nations to become more efficient in economic opportunities. If the Mississauga First Nation had experienced a speedy process, our current economic concerns would be very minimal.