Thank you. I want to begin by thanking you for the invitation to do a presentation before the committee.
For Yukon first nations, most of our past efforts have been focused on building in our traditional lands and our governments to provide our citizens with the core infrastructure and governance that are enjoyed by the rest of Canada.
With these efforts largely in place we are focusing our attention on economic development, with the goal of reducing our dependency on the crown and the long-term goal of becoming more self-sufficient. In both cases, of building governance capacity and economic development, funding for the most part has been sparse for Yukon first nations. Although the Yukon Territory receives hundreds of millions of dollars in economic development, most of these funds are consumed by the capital of Whitehorse, with limited amounts of money flowing to the smaller communities in the Yukon.
This is becoming a greater concern. An example is that our highway infrastructure and many of the communities are getting older, and if not properly maintained could, once again, create significant barriers for commerce. There was a report not too long ago on the state of the bridges. There is some concern with the bridges coming up north, as that's how we get our food here in the north. That's just one example.
The lack of moneys flowing to our communities also makes it difficult to provide the core essentials of life such as housing, heating, and clean water. Many of our communities receive only enough housing dollars to build a few homes a year, and some have to do it every second year or so because of the limited amount of funds. With substandard housing in these communities already, their world becomes a cyclical environment of continued dependency on the federal government.
With changes in our traditional lifestyle for food and food-gathering caused, for example, by the critically low salmon runs, some of the moneys that could be spent on economic investment to build our economies get shifted to help to provide food, especially for elders. Scientists have yet to clearly identify the cause of these renewable resources disappearing, but they are having a negative impact on our environment both economically and socially.
Again, medicines that our people harvest on the lands, and the lack of meat in the communities are causing hardship because of the limited amount of economic opportunities or employment in the communities. A lot of people depend on moose, for example, to help offset and put food on their table. If there's a limited amount, then they have to spend more money coming into Whitehorse, and there's a limited number of jobs and economic opportunities in the communities.
We struggle to maintain our college graduates in the communities. Like many third world countries, we are experiencing brain drain. We believe this is caused because our communities can never seem to reach critical mass to encounter the paradigm shift where growth and economic development will occur naturally. Essentially, for many Yukon first nation communities, we end up getting just enough funding to survive, but not enough to have an impact on creating an environment where both people and businesses can flourish.
Yet as a people, we remain resilient and committed to making Canada a stronger nation. We have successfully demonstrated that with our limited resources and support. We can create a viable commerce in our communities using our best and brightest. We have identified and developed businesses in low-cost niche markets for building Canadian commerce. Successful examples of these, as was mentioned earlier, can be seen in businesses such as Vuntut Development Corporation and their partnership with Air North, wilderness mountain biking in Carcross, and world-class mountain sheep hunting in Kluane, and these are only a few of the examples that are shining proof that first nations can be successful not only in business but also business designed to attract foreign dollars.
Through the efforts of INAC, the majority of our communities have both community and economic development plans, but limited or no dollars for the implementation of these plans. Of Yukon's current budget for economic development dollars, INAC's contribution to this pool is 2%, which INAC strategically delivers to 14 competing Yukon communities. INAC's regional office approach to distributing their funds has been to select projects that will provide return on investment or have the greatest economic impact on the region of the Yukon.
The larger pools for economic development are the Yukon government, consisting of economic development and tourism dollars at 17%, and Infrastructure Canada at 81%. These two larger dollar pools are delivered largely not by strategic initiatives to make Yukon a better place to attract business, but by political pressure.
Often these projects do an exceptional job of creating economic opportunities and wealth for a few locals in the region, but, like the 2007 Canada Winter Games, once completed tend to leave behind debt, more debt than economic benefit. Over the past several years Ottawa has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the Yukon, with very little impact on creating an environment where both business and people can flourish. This has occurred largely because the moneys are not tied to specific plans for building long-term commerce.
Part of the problem is that INAC dollars distributed for strategic impact are small, and the politically driven dollars for the Yukon government in Canada in infrastructure are too high. To complicate the problem, federal programming is designed in Ottawa by people who often have limited experience or have visited the rural communities in the Yukon. The result is often a disconnect on how program dollars can be used, versus the implementation that will work in our human-resource-limited environment.
We are ever hopeful that the new Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency will help to reduce these program design flaws. We have been invited to have some representation on the committee that's to help to steer this project, so we are grateful for that.
Last, instead of honouring our treaties that give the crown legal and legitimized access to Yukon's non-renewable resources, the crown appears to be focused on bleeding us dry financially by continually challenging our treaties in court. As a case in point, we were recently in Ottawa attending the Little Salmon and Carmacks court case that went to the Supreme Court of Canada. Moneys that could be used to build our communities go to lawyers and others to provide the crown with legal precedents on first nation treaties. This was never the intent of the treaties. The crown's current strategy of constant litigation does not put roofs over the majority of our citizens' heads or food on our tables.
In closing, Canada and the Yukon need to strategically identify specific industries in which the Yukon can compete in a global marketplace. Once identified, we need to build an environment that will attract investors from these industries yet look out for the long-term interest of the nations. An example is environmental issues. An economic development plan needs to be developed that focuses on building an environment where Yukon can compete in a global marketplace for business. Economic development dollars would be strategically assigned for implementing each element of the plan, not allocated by political whim.
Finally, as the second-largest landowners in the Yukon after the crown, Yukon first nations also need to be part of the planning process as crown to first nation governments.
Thank you for hearing my presentation.
