Thank you, honourable members of the House of Commons.
It's been a while now that I haven't been around, but I have learned to enjoy being part of the overall system. At the same time, I have specific issues that I would like to address, matters that may be of concern to you and that are certainly of concern to the Inuit in the Arctic. That's probably one of the reasons I was inside the system and decided to get out of the system and do what I can from the outside to continuously raise the importance of issues that all of us face today, especially with the climate change that is taking place. The country is not the same as it used to be.
As you know, very recently, I think only about a week ago, we got hit with something that I have never witnessed in Canada before—the tornado that passed through Ottawa. It went through Gatineau and also Laval, which I witnessed when I went to Montreal.
That said, for many years I've been here in Ottawa. I remember the first time I came here was, I think, two weeks after I addressed the issue that is coming, which the Inuit already were living with—that is, climate change. We see every day that a big change has taken place. The Inuit in the north live with that on a daily basis. I thought I would just cover that as a preamble to what I have to say.
Good afternoon, honourable members. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I'm not sure whether I recognize some people here. I was going to say that I'm glad to see the familiar faces, but I see a very limited number of familiar faces here. Anyway, time goes by and changes take place. The new people come and go.
Honourable members, my name is Charlie Watt, as you know. Until the spring, as the chair mentioned, I was a sitting senator for the region of Inkerman, Quebec. I was on the job for 34 years, as the chair mentioned. I was Canada's only Inuit senator. I was not the only Inuit senator when I first came here. Senator Willie Adams was already here when I arrived in the Senate chamber. I did work with him on a number of different fronts. When he left, when his time to go came, then it was a bit of a lonely place for me as an Inuk speaking fluently in my own language. Willie was also fluent in this language. Willie was a great contributor towards what I have learned within the system.
As Canada's only Inuit senator, I focused on issues important to the Inuit. Arctic sovereignty is a subject that is very important to me and my people. The Senate financed several studies on this issue while I was here. As a matter of fact, the study that we undertook took us, I would say, maybe six to seven years. We concentrated on where the Inuit sit on this whole issue of sovereignty. We looked into domestic rights, which had been built for some years, and also looked at international rights. We came up with three sets of reports that we tabled to the government. I believe you have a copy of those.
The first one was done in the year 2012, and the title of it is “Inuit: Canada’s Treaty Partners or Free Agents?” You might be wondering why we added on the free agents. That indicates where we belong, who we are, who owns the Arctic, who lives in the Arctic, who relies on the Arctic, for social, economic, educational and cultural purposes. As you know, we have lived in the Arctic for many years, long before any other society came to Canada, and I think that is very well known.
When you're facing a subject like Arctic sovereignty, knowing that there is a great deal of interest from outside Canada in the international communities makes you nervous. It makes you nervous that there's going to be an influx of people who have money, political clout, moving in. At times when I see the requests that are made by various countries wanting to become observers, to get observer status within the Arctic Council, I say to myself, “Well, it's observer status now, but it will be more than observer status later on down the road.”
When people come in from different parts of the world and they have money, they will definitely have an influence over what happens to Canada. This worries me a great deal. On that account, I'm here to try to emphasize how important it is for the Inuit people to engage in this process. I see the rationale behind government's intention in terms of the way that they're engineering this and structuring it out to allow seven Arctic countries to be able to highlight what their concerns are, but at the same time they are also dealing with the continental shelfs and so on, by way of trying to extend their jurisdiction beyond their jurisdiction. I'm talking about the seven Arctic countries.
At the same time those people probably will be given an absolute power and the rights to do whatever they want to do if they do manage to succeed in establishing the boundary on the continental shelf. What does that mean to us? It means that the countries from the outside world that have an interest in extracting resources will have an access. They're going to have a large role to play within our society, definitely within the Inuit society, because they're going to be extracting certain things under our feet.
I also would like to mention that the Inuit in the north live not only on the land. This is probably hard to understand. How can any human being live on the ice? As you know, in wintertime when the Inuit are travelling, they travel by ice, by water, and by land.
I was able to get myself a very credible individual from Dalhousie University a few years ago, and we did the mapping of the Inuit trail from the northern Quebec side, which is called Nunavik, on up to Nunavut, on up to the Northwest Passage to Greenland, and also towards Alaska and Siberia. The part that's already completed is on the Canadian side, but we still have to push for countries like Greenland to work something out with the Danish government to be able to do the same thing—map out exactly how they live and how they travel, what they relied on. That information is very important, especially when you're going to be having people coming in from outside Canada, wanting to know. They're probably not even going to care too much about wanting to know. They'll be wanting to extract, take something, and take it home, and turn it into a dollar.
Honourable members, I have a tendency at times to go on and on, and I like to try to limit myself as much as possible, because I only have so much time.
What I wanted to say to you is to stretch it to the point is where hopefully everybody will understand. The Inuit are the backbones of Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic. Another fact, to tell you the truth, is some of my people from the Quebec side, from the Nunavik side, have been moved—the whole family, that is—by boat, by ship, to the Resolute Bay area, into the high Arctic with no facilities, no assistance. They were just literally dropped on the shore under the name of sovereignty.
Those were placed there by the Canadian government, and at that time, during the years of the 1950s, government mobility in the north were limited. They were basically represented by the RCMP at the time. The directions were given by the government, but the RCMP would have to take action to enforce certain things that were given to the RCMP by the government.
As you can see, we have reasons that we want to be a part of it, and not only to be a part in terms of knowing what's happening but also to have a full right to take part. If there is going to be something economically, which there will be, it should not only be going outside of our country. We'd like to tap into those resources, because we need to live, the same as everybody else. We have to survive, so the economy is very important to us.
Right now we have a traditional economy. There is not too much of an economy, other than the traditional economy. The traditional economy is to seek out and do your harvesting in the same sort of similar way that you harvest as a farmer. We don't have farms, but we do go out, whether it's on the boat, whether it's in the canoe, or whether it's on the plane or snow machine or whatever. In the old days it used to be the dog teams. That was the only transportation we had in the old days. That no longer exists. For your information, those dogs were also slaughtered in the early years by the RCMP.
What was the rationale behind the actions that were taken by them? Nobody really wanted to come out publicly and describe exactly why that happened. This isn't really related to Arctic sovereignty, but it's one of the issues that make me tend to believe that we have to be involved in the whole thing.
The Inuit have been present in the Arctic for thousands of years and were sovereign people long before Canada's existence, as I mentioned to you. Since time immemorial we have lived on the land and ice-covered water in the Arctic and used the resources of the land and water to grow as a people. We are deeply connected to not just the land, but also the Arctic Ocean and all the Arctic wildlife. The Inuit are the people who occupied marine areas. The Inuit live on the ice and hunt and travel across it.
Also, we have a different land claims agreement in each of our four land claims regions. The Inuit of Canada are taxpayers. Sometimes people have forgotten that the Inuit too pay taxes. We're not the same as first nations. We have been full-fledged taxpayers from day one up to now.
We always feel as Inuit that we have to also help to put an input into the bigger society with the people who live in the south. Hopefully, the fact that we decided to become taxpayers in the early years will be appreciated by Canada. For that reason, we are contributors to the needs of Canada. On top of that I'd just like to mention to you that before...after I was...no, not really.
Take a look at the Nunavik corporation that I represent, Makivik. We've done well as Inuit, but then again, we still need to do more. We've been able to succeed and have done quite well in the aviation sector. We own the two big airline companies. One is called Air Inuit and the other one is First Air. This coming Friday, we are about to merge another airline company into us, which is Canadian North. Those are the types of arrangements taking place, and we are quite capable of administering and running companies and producing economic opportunities on our own, which are very limited today.
When you look at the payload of goods that flow from the south to the north, it's a one-way flow in terms of economic viability. What's coming out of the north is very limited. For that reason, we are now going through the exercise on the aviation side of amalgamating the two airline companies. There is not enough room for two. This is one of the things we're doing, just to show you what we deal with. We know what we deal with.
When you look at the needs of the many companies that are trying to make ends meet, at times everyone doesn't benefit because there are limited economic opportunities. Let me go a step further.
Am I going a little too slow or spending too much time?
