Good morning, and thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, committee members, for inviting the Maritime Aboriginal Peoples Council to speak on the very important matter of complementing and enhancing habitat conservation in Canada through a national conservation plan.
Mr. Chair, please forgive me for forcing you to attempt to say Ikanawtiket. That is a Mi’kmaq word for a leader's path toward environmental respect.
I apologize for not being able to provide my seven-page brief in advance. However, it has been delivered to the clerk for translation. I also have with me two books that have already been distributed, which are a more detailed submission on the subject matter. Those were made to the 11th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity this past October in Hyderabad, India. English and French copies have been delivered to the clerk for distribution.
On our website, www.mapcorg.ca, you can also find several other submissions on very similar topics, such as the implementation of the Species at Risk Act. Unfortunately, I do not have hard copies of those to distribute today.
I'm here representing the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy aboriginal peoples continuing on traditional ancestral homelands throughout the maritime provinces. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to give you a background of our family of organizations, but I do have with me a detailed brochure and audio CD. It is only in English, unfortunately, so I can't distribute it to you, but if you want a copy in English, it's here. The website and the brochure should broach your questions you may have for the study about the "who" and the "what".
Respecting the standing committee's wishes, I'll try to keep my presentation to 10 minutes. I apologize if I go over a minute. I encourage the distinguished committee members to read our full seven-page submission in the red and blue booklets. I respectfully suggest that if committee members do not appreciate our history and plight as a collaterally damaged people, then we are talking to each other in different languages, with no translator.
To start, the term “conservation”, at least in the colloquial western definition of the term, is a foreign concept to aboriginal peoples. Also the term “habitat”, to us, means our home, the home of our ancestors, and the future home of our children’s children. From the aboriginal eco-centric world view, it is impossible to consider the protection of something to be separate from using it and sharing it.
We have been trapped before by the settler’s use of words. Although on its face a national conservation plan seems obvious, terms such as “habitat” and “conservation” can be tricky, sticky, and icky, to our way of understanding. Answering your six questions can quickly become a trap, if we are not first conversing in a common language or understanding. Rather than at this time supporting, or not supporting, the recommendation to develop a national conservation plan, I respectfully suggest that the questions posed lead us away from the reality that conservation and sustainable use are inseparable.
The state authors of the Convention on Biological Diversity clearly went out of their way to ensure that the term “conservation” would not be used on its own. In fact, the term has never been defined under the convention. This is for a very good reason. Throughout the convention the words “conservation” and “sustainable use” are used side by side, intending to express a single term, “conservation and sustainable use”, so that no party to the convention would emphasize the preservation of something over the use of it, or attempt to draw lines on maps or in the law between what is conserved or preserved, and the rest of the world governed by business as usual.
To us, the English term “conservation” is misleading because it suggests that the natural world is something separate from our home and ourselves, and that it needs protection from a foreign being that does not belong. Because of this distinction, I dare say it is extremely difficult today for aboriginal peoples with an eco-centric world view, to talk with non-aboriginal peoples with a homocentric world view about conservation. After many generations of settlers living within our homelands on Turtle Island, we are still not talking the same language.
To that thinking, I must add the pivotal preambular aspect of the convention, which affirms that the conservation of biological diversity is a common concern of humankind. That in itself wipes away any notion that the use of natural resources solely falls within the limits of national jurisdiction without regard to other international conventions, accords and protocols, and indeed, internal state supreme laws—in this case the Constitution Act of 1867 and the Constitution Act of 1982.
My presentation is also derived from the fundamental reality just recently manifested in the international community in September 2007, that there is:
...the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of indigenous peoples which derive from their political, economic and social structures and from their cultures, spiritual traditions, histories and philosophies, especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources....
That is from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Even with this recent declaration we raise an unfulfilled principle in Canada, which was agreed to 20 years ago in Rio de Janeiro. It reads:
Indigenous people and their communities and other local communities have a vital role in environmental management and development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognize and duly support their identity, culture and interests and enable their effective participation in the achievement of sustainable development.
We note that in some presentations before the standing committee, the common statement was repeated on how important it was for the government to find opportunities to support local initiatives and link those initiatives into a greater whole, thus providing a basis for long-term and robust solutions.
But what opportunities will the Government of Canada demonstrate as support for the full and effective participation of aboriginal peoples in conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, when Bills C-38 and C-45 strip away vital protections and no thought is given to invite or consult with aboriginal peoples; when aboriginal peoples continue to be denied access to lands, water, and resources due to massive clear-cuts, mega-mining, hydroelectric projects, and other large resource exploitation projects; when Canada does not show respect for the inherent rights of aboriginal peoples and continues to posture at international forums that aboriginal peoples do not have rights to the resources or genetic resources found within their traditional ancestral homelands and territories; when in the majority of instances where indigenous knowledge is invited, decision-makers consider it lesser or an afterthought, or a plug to fill in a few remaining information gaps that western science has not yet answered; when in this past decade, informative and inclusive round tables, stakeholder committees, advisory bodies, and other forums have been reduced to updates-only tables, or are cancelled altogether under the guise of austerity budget slashing—can't this Government of Canada negotiate appropriate royalties to at least accrue money to fund basic public forums?—when the Government of Canada has knelt before corporate resources to allow the abuse of the Metal Mining Effluent Regulations by subsidizing mining companies with capital cost savings, by not requiring the construction of multi-million dollar, engineered, metal mining effluent-holding ponds by virtue of orders in council, which designate natural lakes to be added to a schedule and be listed as a company metal mining effluent-holding pond; and when in 2012, the Government of Canada has taken aboriginal artifacts from our territories against our will and shipped them to Ottawa for deep storage?
The promise to support, respect, preserve, and maintain the knowledge and world view of aboriginal peoples was made by the Government of Canada in 1996 with the release of the Canadian biodiversity strategy. Seventeen years later we are still waiting for Canada to begin to fulfill its promises to aboriginal peoples.
Last week I learned, as many other Canadians did, that Canada has withdrawn from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. A spokesman suggested that the convention was costly for Canadians and showed few results, if any, for the environment. May I respectfully suggest that the Right Hon.Prime Minister and his cabinet take an introductory course on the United Nations as a multilateral discussion forum to learn that the United Nations conventions and protocols represent a culmination of the discussion and discourse of the representatives of seven billion people to formulate a common humankind approach to a problem.
In a global environment and global economy, it is ludicrous to think that Canada, responsible for the second largest land mass in the world, can act alone or not respond to a global call for action, a call that reverberates throughout the Canadian public and most definitely has been raised time and again by generations of aboriginal peoples.