Thank you very much, Chief St-Denis, for the introduction.
Good evening, Madam Chair and distinguished committee members. I appreciate the opportunity to be here to discuss this important matter.
As chief of my community, Kebaowek, I represent approximately 1,000 Algonquin members. Although our reserve lands are in Quebec, our traditional territory lies on both sides of the Ottawa River basin, where our members live, work, and exercise aboriginal rights including title in both Ontario and Quebec. Our jurisdiction is transborder.
Before starting, for the record I would like to address some procedural concerns in regard to this hearing. The short time frames, short notices, insufficient funding, and very tight timelines for aboriginal communities like my own have made it very difficult to present comments.
For your reference, Kebaowek and Wolf Lake first nations did prepare comments on all environmental and regulatory environmental act reform requests by your government and participated in two expert panel sessions. We also fully participated in the AFN's technical review of Bill C-69, and we give our full support to its 25-page submission and clause-by-clause recommendations for amendments.
Regardless of our combined effort, Bill C-69 appears to have not included our key messages and resorted to a matter of tweaking CEAA 2012 over modernization. In our view, true modernization of the act does require reconciling the wrongs of previous legislation and policies that have worked against indigenous people in Canada.