Yes, thank you very much.
I'd like to start off by acknowledging my indigenous co-panellists and thanking the MPs who are on this standing committee for organizing this at this very important time for not just indigenous people but everybody in Canada, and indeed the world.
I'd like not so much to address the immediate needs during this crisis but to look at the post-COVID-19 needs of indigenous people. I'd like to put those into the context of who indigenous people were in North America.
There's a common notion out there that indigenous people weren't involved in any economics whatsoever. That is a false narrative. For thousands of years we'd been trading with each other. Over 2,000 years ago the Hopewell culture, as it was called, had a trading network that extended across the continent. Indeed, when the Hudson's Bay Company first came into Canada, the reason it prospered was that it plugged into the indigenous trade networks. If it hadn't done that, it's very unlikely Canada would be a country. That prevented the Americans from coming into the western territories.
In the territory I'm from, our people were, like a lot of indigenous people across Canada, very, very astute traders. We were referred to as the Phoenicians of the Northwest Coast by the first Europeans because we out-traded them. This is really important to understand in the context of what's happened in the last couple of hundred years, when we were basically marginalized and shoved off to remote reserves where we couldn't earn any kind of income and we were very economically limited.
Basically, we were put into a situation of what I'd call an economic dependency trap, in which we were unable to prosecute the kinds of economic things we used to do. That's led to all of these problems, social and economic problems that are well known to everybody. The statistics are horrendous.
Recently, Premier Jason Kenney pointed out that Alberta was, in general, likely going to end up with 25% unemployment. That's comparable to the highest unemployment during the Great Depression in the U.S. What most people don't understand is that is the unemployment rate across all first nations in Canada all the time. We're in a great depression and a lot of our people want to get out of it. We want to go back to the big-risk trading culture that we originally had. In some northern communities there's over 90% unemployment. That's there all the time, whether we have COVID-19 or not.
We would like to go back to generating our own sources of revenue. We've been in a situation in which most of our communities are located in remote areas where there has been a lot of natural resources development, but by and large, we haven't been able to participate in that.
Right now there is an openness and a real desire in a lot of indigenous people across Canada to participate in various natural resources industries. It's really critical that we be given that opportunity. Unfortunately, the policy of government has been to put up various kinds of blockades to resource development in most of the indigenous areas.
This is really important for Canada, for several reasons. First, the rapidly growing indigenous population is going to result in a very high percentage of the population in western and northern Canada, where most of the natural resource sector operates. For the health of Canada, with this huge growing number of young people, we need to have jobs for them in the economy. Given that our population is aging, we need those young people in the economy.
We need to have policies that are aimed at allowing the open participation of indigenous people in various kinds of economic activity, and a lot of that is natural resource-based. It's critically important. I think that a lot of the energy policies that have arisen in western Canada are basically savaging the provinces. It's gutting the population in these provinces. Indigenous people have an opportunity to set the environmental rules for these projects. We want to take those opportunities, and we want to be able to create wealth that will lift the boats of not only the most impoverished people in Canada, but all Canadians.
That's my brief statement. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.