Canadian Lawyer InHouse

Building future wealth for First Nations Consortium of professionals comes together to advance wealth generation for aboriginals. BY JENNIFER BROWN MAY 2017 34 INHOUSE saw was that the numbers weren't suffi cient for them to do what they needed to do to get ahead and for quality of life," he says. "In order for First Nations to advance their sov- ereign wealth, they need outside supports. They need to build a portfolio that includes fi nancial and commercial assets such as in- frastructure, real estate, etc." In many remote communities, he saw it was diffi cult for the people to move ahead even within the tax governance structures he had helped them put in place. "I would go back to the community a few years later and not a lot had changed," says Morry, a partner with Pitblado LLP and chairman of the board, CEO and president of EDIP Sovereign Wealth Solutions — a roster of advisers working together to pro- vide expertise to help First Nations commu- nities achieve fi nancial independence. He says resources and capacity to build effective economic development and sov- ereign wealth management and investment platforms are limited for First Nations. Most communities have not diversifi ed their own- source revenues or put a plan in place to build community wealth in a systematic manner. Morry started thinking about how to provide a way to streamline the wealth- generation process for First Nations and then scale it across the country. He came up with EDIP — a multi- disciplinary platform of advisers to assist First Nations in building and growing their own revenue streams. It includes lawyers, accountants, economists, fi nancial advisers and others working in a systematic manner. The platform includes tools such as vir- tual data rooms and project management applications so the service provider advisers can design and build and support sovereign wealth institutions that would be owned and controlled by the First Nations. EDIP invites service providers on to the platform and they in turn invite their clients to join them. There are currently 102 First Nations clients being served by providers on the platform. It is anticipated that more than 250 clients will eventually be part of the platform representing First Nations HOWARD MORRY HAS been associ- ated with First Nations work since the 1980s in the early days of his career. Often, he was focused on economic development projects and occasionally observing the ob- stacles First Nations faced in trying to grow their economic base. Over time, as a tax lawyer working with First Nations doing the fi rst joint ventures and settlement trusts, he started to see the market growing, in part due to some Su- preme Court Cases related to the duty to consult and impact benefi t agreements. In these instances, First Nations were starting to be "dealt into" resource de- velopment in Canada. In setting up economic develop- ment structures for First Nations both upstream and downstream, he saw how diffi cult it was for these communities to use the structures he helped them create for their own wealth-generating opportu- nities that would ideally allow them to improve their lives and move beyond just operat- ing on the often insuffi cient funds they received from federal transfers. In many cases, there were insti- tutional problems get- ting in the way. "One of the big- gest problems I

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