Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much to all of our witnesses for very thoughtful and substantive opening statements that I think will significantly advance our work. I want to thank you, in particular, for some of the different witnesses shining a light on this issue of indigenous identity fraud.
As we've gotten into the issue of indigenous procurement policies, what I've been hearing from different community leaders and businesses is that there is a broader category of a problem with indigenous identity fraud. I wish the government would take this issue seriously, because what we often hear back from the government on this is, “Well, indigenous identity is complicated and there are disputes about it; there are different organizations who define it in different ways, and how can we really, as the federal government, resolve these issues?”
However, the problem is that if you don't take identity fraud seriously, then you risk undermining all of the structures and supports that exist for indigenous peoples. You end up with assimilation in the other direction, which means anybody and everybody can pretend to be indigenous. If you allow that reality to exist, then you've essentially got an assimilationist reality in terms of policies and programs where no distinction is being made, so I would hope and challenge the government to take up your comments on this and really take seriously the issue of indigenous identity fraud, because it's impacting, in a significant way, the contracting and procurement world, but I think it's a broader issue than that.
Minister Patty Hajdu was at the indigenous affairs committee on Monday, and all opposition parties found her testimony very frustrating. She didn't answer basic questions. In fact, this morning, the committee passed a motion to ask her to come back for two hours, essentially to try again at getting responses to the serious questions that were asked.
During my time with the minister, I asked her about issues around indigenous identity fraud, in particular some high-profile cases of businesses that were on the federal government's indigenous business list and then were removed from that list. In particular, Dalian and Canadian health care agency organizations got over $100 million each in government contracts. I haven't seen the documentation about whether they are, or aren't, indigenous, but what I know is that they were on the indigenous business list and then later they were off that list. The minister could not and would not provide an explanation as to why they were removed and what the process was for that.
If they were removed because they weren't indigenous, or they hadn't been indigenous or weren't indigenous at the time they got those contracts, surely they should be expected to pay back the money they got through representing themselves as being indigenous.
I'd like to ask all of our witnesses if they can comment on how the federal government should deal with these kinds of instances of abuse. Should there be penalties? Should there be stronger penalties around misrepresentation of indigenous identity or misrepresentation around joint ventures?
What kinds of structures and penalties should there be to deter and to respond to these kinds of instances where a company is on the list benefiting from these types of programs and then is off the list and there's no explanation for why they were taken off the list?
I'll open it up to whoever wants to comment on this issue.