Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here to listen to this spirited debate.
I'm the special adviser to CIER. Before I became the special adviser, I did 20 years in the legislature in the Northwest Territories. I did 14 years in cabinet and nine as an environment minister, and in those nine years, I was finance minister for seven at the same time. It's a pleasure to be back inside the ropes briefly.
CIER is a national organization headquartered in Winnipeg. It was formed by eight first nation chiefs about 30 years ago, chiefs like Phil Fontaine, Manny Jules, Matthew Coon Come and Roger Augustine. It has completed in its time and continues to complete hundreds of programs with indigenous communities across the country, projects such as climate change planning, species-at-risk management, energy literacy, watershed planning, ecological restoration and natural infrastructure, to name some.
The project I will be focusing on today is about collaborative water governance.
Currently in our country, our systems of water governance are inadequate. The status quo is not working. No one government can do it alone, especially when it comes to water. Existing decision-making over water is fragmented and siloed. Federal, provincial and territorial governments make their decisions about water within their respective jurisdictions without processes in place to collaborate with indigenous governments, which are on the front lines of combatting the ongoing water crisis and hold inherent rights over the water in their territories.
Collaborative governance structures are critical to good water governance and to recognizing the inherent rights and authorities of indigenous nations. The collaborative leadership initiative is a process developed by CIER to build collaboration on shared water challenges between indigenous and non-indigenous elected leaders and their administrations. It focuses on two orders of government, indigenous and municipal, because most water decisions are made at the local level, and these two orders of government often have no structured mechanism for collaboration.
When first implemented in Manitoba in 2017, when the idea was presented to the chiefs, 11 indigenous governments and 16 municipal leaders agreed to engage in coming together for the first time in 150 years. Through a series of gatherings, the leaders built trust, learned about each others' communities and water challenges and began to think like a region.
CLI Manitoba advanced the development of a reconciliation framework while building a co-governance table where government-to-government decisions are made. Having elected decision-makers at the table was a critical factor in its success. The leaders collaboratively worked towards a range of shared priorities, particularly the health of Lake Winnipeg, with water at the centre of these efforts. After the CLI process carried on for a series of meetings, in 2019 there was a historic MOU signed between all the parties—the elected municipal leaders and chiefs—at Lower Fort Garry. I will direct you to a very powerful 20-minute documentary that summarizes the CLI Manitoba process on the CIER website.
Building off of this, the national CIER project, which was based on the success of the CLI process in Manitoba, allowed us to secure funding from the BHP Foundation to implement the CLI process with partners in other regions across Canada. This is a five-year project that recently passed its midway point and is generating valuable learnings and building collaborative water governance rooted in reconciliation. We're working with partners across Canada, including the Northwest Territories and British Columbia, as well as further parties in the Northwest Territories and elsewhere, to help create the conditions to change the way water is governed. Our goal is to scale up this work significantly, so we are also creating the resources, tools and learning networks to enable the growth of the CLI model on a big scale.
In the brief we have provided, we have recommendations on how the federal government can better support these collaborate governance initiatives, which I'd be happy to discuss in the questions and answers.