Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 27th, 2007

[Ronnie Campbell]

Mr. Chairman, the access of the Inuvialuit to government contracting has not been a success in this report. That's not to say that there isn't healthy economic activity accounting beyond this particular agreement. One of the provisions in the agreement required the government to inform the Inuvialuit of contracts that were being let in that region. As the audit report points out, for over ten years that wasn't happening. The government's records are not good enough to be able to give us assurance that's happening in all cases now. They were of a view that it was, but the auditors found ones that had slipped through the cracks. There's a lot of room for improvement there.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

I'm trying to understand whether this is a common element that has run through other examinations you've made of comprehensive claims, or is this specifically towards the Inuvialuit claim? Do you have any information in that regard?

[Ronnie Campbell]

The specifics relate only to this agreement, but it speaks to a broader issue, Mr. Chair, that when the Government of Canada negotiates a land claim agreement, it can often obligate other parts of government to behave in a certain way. It's really important that when we sign a land claims agreement that communication happens and Public Works and Treasury Board are informed, so that people know what has been agreed to by the Government of Canada and how that must affect their behaviour.

It took some time for the Treasury Board policy to catch up with the reality of the agreement, and it's taken even longer for behaviour of departments, including Public Works, to catch up with that. I think that's one thing that is really important. When the Government of Canada signs an agreement, it has to make sure that all the different parts of government know how that affects them.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

The other thing about your report--

[The Chair, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

You have 15 seconds, Mr. Bevington.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

The other thing about your report is that you refer consistently to INAC. We don't get any further into the bureaucratic maze than that in your report. Is there any way we could identify the responsible elements within INAC that should have done the planning and notification?

[Frank Barrett]

There were six departments in the report. Specifically with respect to INAC, right now, as the department is organized, the majority of the responsibility for implementing the agreement rests with the implementation branch. We did a fair bit of work within that branch. Mind you, we generally will not speak beyond the department level because they could choose to organize and move it around in the department, as they would see appropriate.

[The Chair, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Thanks, Mr. Bevington, Mr. Barrett.

Mr. Bruinooge, for seven minutes.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank you both for this important audit. Clearly, it indicates a lot of areas where the federal government needs to continue to work to make this agreement work for the people in that region.

It reminds me, as a parliamentarian, that not only do we have to endeavour to sign these important land claims agreements, but of course implementation is by far the most important part. It reminds me of the days of being an entrepreneur. The idea is the easiest part, but implementation of the idea is always the challenge.

I'd like to ask a few specific questions. First, when was the audit actually done? What period of time did the audit occur over?

[Frank Barrett]

Mr. Chair, we began our audit in approximately April 2006, and completed the substantive examination work by May 2007.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

How did the audit actually unfold? I imagine most of it occurred within the department itself, but were there also a number of meetings and various trips to the region itself?

[Frank Barrett]

Certainly there were, Mr. Chair. We visited Inuvik and the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation at least three times, I believe, over the course of the audit. We visited five of the six communities that were included within the audit itself. A fair bit of the audit examination work in the files was done in Yellowknife, where INAC has a regional office. As well, we met with officials of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, and the territorial government to obtain some context in Yellowknife. Of course, there was a lot of work done in Ottawa and Gatineau.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

Did you have a particular focus? Of all those nodes you said you looked at, was there a particular focus on which you spent most of the audit's time?

[Ronnie Campbell]

Yes, the focus of the audit was to understand the agreement, first of all. So we talked with Inuvialuit and we talked with Indian and Northern Affairs officials. Then we selected, I believe, 29 of the significant obligations and simply audited the extent to which the federal government had met its obligations.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

One of the items you raised I felt was quite interesting. It was on page 10 of the report, paragraph 3.24, where you commented how numerous assets, and a couple of land plots as well, were transferred in error to the Inuvialuit, and that the territorial government was in fact being billed by the Inuvialuit. Could you maybe talk a bit about that particular case? I find that to be quite interesting.

[Frank Barrett]

Certainly.

One of the aspects we did find in the course of the audit was that in the original transfer of land, there were some errors. The way these were described to us, and the easiest visual of them I can provide you, is that when they were looking at the communities, they drew donuts around the communities and said, well, this land continues to belong to the territorial government, but the land around it will be part of the settlement for the Inuvialuit. Of course, as one official put it to us, they drew the donuts too small, so you then had sewage lagoons and other properties outside the area of territorial control being transferred to the Inuvialuit. There was then an awkward situation where the territorial officials would have to be going onto the land claim area and accessing their buildings and facilities that were actually part of the land claims settlement area. That's where disputes emerged about rental charges, etc.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

So how were these disputes launched initially? Was it simply by communication between the two parties, or did they go to court at all to begin levying these charges?

[Frank Barrett]

To my knowledge, they did not go to court. There certainly is a reasonably thick paper trail of correspondence back and forth and concerns that have been expressed. I believe there's a provision in the agreement saying that extra costs to the territorial government arising out of a land claim agreement would be borne or supported by the federal government. The question centred around whether this was considered one of those costs or not. That's why INAC was very much involved in the discussion.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

In the responses of the departmental officials you spoke to, was there any indication of a compensation payment being made for these bills that the territorial government is getting from Inuvialuit?

[Frank Barrett]

My understanding to the end of our audit was that the correspondence was quite clear that the federal government did not intend to absorb the costs or see them as legitimate costs. So to my knowledge there was no reaching of an agreement in terms of compensation.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

Is there is a process for the settlement of this outstanding issue?

[Frank Barrett]

I have not heard of one.

[Rod Bruinooge, Conservative, Winnipeg South, MB]

No? Okay.

As I said, I had a lot of interest in that one case because it particularly highlighted some of the issues just dealing with cross-jurisdictional government when land claims like this are being settled.

One of your recommendations that is particularly interesting to me is of course coming up with an implementation plan. Going back to my entrepreneurial reference, you need the business plan.

Maybe I'll leave it there, because it sounds as though I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Bruinooge.

Now we're going to begin our second round, which is five minutes.

Mr. Russell.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

If I have some time, I'll share it with my colleague Ms. Karetak-Lindell.

These agreements are really tough for aboriginal people to sign as well because of the finality that comes with them, the sense that you give up undefined rights for some defined rights and privileges, forever and ever, and this is the way it's going to be.

There has been a lot of litigation around implementation and what the agreement meant or didn't mean. With the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, there's been litigation on top of litigation with the Cree people. There have been some disputes as well under this particular agreement that you've highlighted.

Do you assess how much of an impact or what type of impact these disputes are having on the lack of progress that's being made? When you get bogged down in what this or that clause means or the usefulness of a particular part of the agreement, are there a lot of disputes between the Inuvialuit, or the IRC, and the various levels of government; and was there any assessment done on maybe what type of impact? It drains resources—human, financial, and otherwise.

Secondly, is there any possibility of opening up these types of agreements? I'm not sure if there is not. The one thing I'm sort of edging towards is the whole impact of climate change and the type of stress and the challenges that many of these northern communities are going to face as a result of climate change, which wasn't contemplated, I don't believe, back 23 years ago to the same extent.

So I have two questions: What impact are the disputes having; and is there any room for opening up these types of agreements to account for circumstances that weren't seen a quarter of a century ago?