Evidence of meeting #24 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was community.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
I wanted to remind the chair that we will move my motion before we go in camera, after we've heard the witnesses.
Conservative
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
Mr. Paul, I think it's what we're hearing across the country, jobs without people, people without jobs. This is an amazing human resource, if we could get the training and the apprenticeships and the education.
Chief Maracle, you didn't get a chance to finish Mr. Rickford's question around some of your challenges and the way it is right now. Have you applied to be under the land management act, as opposed...?
Chief, Band No. 38, Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte
On the regulatory gap, I guess the federal and provincial governments have never come to a common understanding on what the laws of general application are. What is the stance of the lawyers and the Department of Justice as it relates to the laws of general application? They have the opinion that it applies to a reserve, so there should be a conference between the federal and provincial government lawyers to come to some kind of understanding and perhaps pass a regulation to make it clear which are the laws of general application that apply to the reserve.
That exercise has never taken place. What they've allowed is just individual opinions that exist in various offices and the whole thing has never gelled. Quite often the provincial government has laws that are developed that seem to regulate and protect the environment to a certain extent, sometimes with an awful lot of input from the public to make them do the right thing. But then again, it's government. I guess that happens everywhere. There is also a need for resources at the community level, because they have to do the coordinating with the reports. They have to schedule the meetings. The environmental experts have to come and do the testing on reserves. There is capacity-building required for the protection of the environment.
I don't think that each community can develop another ministry of the environment with a body of expertise. It would not be cost-effective. There need to be some environmental staff in our community. Currently there is no money at all from the federal or provincial governments for the protection of our environment. I guess the chief and our limited staff are supposed to be experts in all these areas. No other government, municipal or otherwise, functions like that. It's totally unreasonable to expect that a first nations government would function like that.
Conservative
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming.
It's nice to see you again, Chief Maracle. We had an opportunity to have a little visit at lunch. I certainly hope you are going to be careful around the black ice. It sounds like you've had quite an ordeal there.
Anyway, I would just like to ask some questions to the chief in terms of the challenges developing on reserve in the housing market. In fact first nations have had some difficulty in the financing of their own housing because of the mortgage and seizure restrictions found in the Indian Act. Over the past number of years, however, I understand that your community has won several awards in recognition of your progressive housing policies. I would just ask you what challenges your land managers have faced under the provisions of the Indian Act.
Chief, Band No. 38, Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte
It's really a resourcing question. We have a very successful revolving community housing loan fund. We mortgage the houses to our members. We currently have about $17 million in mortgages to our members.
The problem is with the various pieces of legislation that have been passed over the years: Bill C-31 in 1985 and now Bill C-3. The growth of our membership has quadrupled since 1985, and the resources have not kept pace with the growth in the community. Really, the Government of Canada doesn't have any growth funding to deal with growth pressures, oftentimes resulting from the very legislation that it passes of granting membership to additional people to cure the injustices of the Indian Act.
It is true we won a number of national awards. Also, we had an apprenticeship program in the nineties, where we trained 20 people to become licensed carpenters. Many of those people were able to carry on and set up very successful businesses, where they were able to build homes on the reserve through contracts, and off reserve. They're in the business, much like any other off-reserve builder building homes for non-natives and running very reputable companies and also employing a lot of our people.
There needs to be more training done in the area of the trades. We need electricians; we need plumbers. They're always building roads or installing sewers, or repairing them in the municipalities. There would be work opportunity there if there were proper apprenticeship programs set up in our community to train our people to fill those jobs.
Canada does not need to import people from the far ends of the earth. What it needs to do is focus more effort on training people who are unemployed in this country and first nations people to help fill some of those jobs. As I have indicated, 75% of our members live off reserve in various cities and towns. Our people have been engaged historically on building some of the most prominent buildings in the world, the highest skyscrapers. The Mohawk people were high-steel workers. There is plenty of opportunity through adequate training programs. I think they just need to be organized. You need to get people, find out about the labour market, and maybe find out more information on what the labour market need is out there, where the jobs are. You need to provide the training and then help our people relocate and maybe get established in some of these cities and towns where there are good-paying jobs. Our people do go where those jobs are.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Getting back to some of the principles of effective land management, what would you say are some of the key characteristics, and how would we facilitate that on reserve land?
Chief, Band No. 38, Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte
You're asking about challenges. Every community has poor people, people who are very marginalized in their income, who do need social housing. If a person falls into a situation of no longer being able to afford their mortgage payment, there has to be an alternative place to put them, not just in the street, or overcrowding in some other person's home. If there were an adequate social housing program, then people who could no longer afford to pay a mortgage could then move into something in the community that is low rent, and maybe those homes could be bought out by somebody who has a better income and could afford to pay a mortgage.
With our mortgage program, 90% of the people pay on time, all the time. There's never been one default loan at the Bank of Montreal where our people do business. We've guaranteed 30 mortgages there, and there have never been any defaults.
Our people do have good jobs. We have relatively low unemployment in our community. But the challenge is that there are also a lot of people who are just making minimum wage. They're the working poor, as we call them.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Thank you.
Continuing under the land management piece, Chief Maracle, how do land management programs affect doing business on the reserve?
Chief, Band No. 38, Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte
I think what investors are looking for is certainty, and I guess what first nations are looking for is that if there's development occuring on land, our people are going to have jobs.
What is the benefit of locating business on the reserve? Perhaps there could be longer-term leases for development without the requirement to surrender or cause an alienation. Maybe the Minister of Indian Affairs could grant a longer-term lease or an economic development lease and call it that. Keep it simple. When you start getting into surrenders and allienation, you embark on a very large consultation process, particularly when we have so many people who have been added on to the band list under Bill C-31 and now Bill C-3 who are not very well informed about the Indian Act or the regulations or the land regime. So there's a whole extensive public education process that has to go out there to consult with the members on anything that resembles land alienation.
Mohawk people generally do not support land alienation of any kind, simply because we've lost so much of our historic land. But maybe if there were a long-term economic development lease that the Minister of Indian Affairs could approve, that might be more palatable to the people to allow development.
We have more of a private enterpreneurship model of economic development. A lot of our members start their own businesses on their own land and employ people.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Chief, we've heard it before, and you've just mentioned about keeping it simple in terms of the—
Chief, Band No. 38, Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte
There are about 150 businesses on our reserve.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
We've heard from other witnesses about doing it at the speed of business. I'm kind of making that connection between keeping it simple and doing things at the speed of business. I'm sure that would be appropriate for your reserve.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Chris Warkentin
You're out of time.
I got an assurance. It looked like the Chief was agreeing with you, but if he wants to elaborate, I'm sure he will make that known.
Monsieur Genest-Jourdain, for five minutes.
NDP
Jonathan Genest-Jourdain NDP Manicouagan, QC
I will share my time with Ms. Hughes.
Mr. Paul, during your presentation, you often mentioned elders' knowledge and the sharing of traditional knowledge.
I would like to know what you think about the use of traditional knowledge and of the patent on traditional knowledge by the pharmaceutical industry, among others. That use is often detrimental to aboriginals because the nations have had very little financial benefit from those patents.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Chris Warkentin
Monsieur Genest-Jourdain, I think we may be having difficulty with the translation.
Conservative
Conservative
Executive Director, Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs Secretariat
I guess one of the important things is our traditional knowledge and expertise. I always tell people that even in today's world, where you have MRIs and modern things, a lot of things that come from our traditional knowledge of plants and practices still override a lot of those different things. They're not complicated things. As you said about the way they've been used, people with the knowledge have been given trust by the community to sustain that knowledge and use it in the best interest of the community to help people.
At no time did anybody think of it in a dollar-value scenario as something we secured from nature that would become a pill, a prescription, or whatever. I think many of our communities have provided their knowledge in a lot of cases more as a contribution to try to help and benefit others than anything. They weren't really thinking about its economic value, a patent, or anything like that. I think that still exists today. We need to fundamentally follow the teachings of our elders in recognizing this traditional knowledge as an important part of our cultural beliefs in terms of where we go now and in the future.
It goes back to the issue of coexistence between ourselves and everybody else in what we do. It's being your friend or cooperating with you. It's like we should have sold it to Champlain instead of giving him the sap from the tree that time. Maybe we should have made him sign a contract to give us all of North America for the sap. But our people were not like that at the time and never thought of it that way. They just thought of helping a friend, or helping somebody, basically.
