Thank you.
I'll be as brief as possible. Forgive me if I'm going to switch hats as I go along.
First, I have a message from the executive board of the Treaty 8 chiefs of Alberta. We are fundamentally opposed to Bill C-428 for reasons of process. We are first nations with a treaty. A treaty is an agreement signed between sovereign nations and is the prima facie evidence that we have sovereignty. It is impractical or insulting to have changes made to an Indian Act that affects us, without proper consultation with the holders of the rights.
As far as the specifics of the question are concerned about the removal of these archaic, old-type provisions, yes, some of them should be removed. However, removing some of them would leave a vacuum. An example in our reserve is that if some of these provisions were removed, the next day there would be no ministerial approval for somebody to log the reserve. If one of the band members were to decide to log off the reserve and sell the logs and keep it to themselves, what's to stop them?
I've heard that you can pass a bylaw. What use is it to a first nation to pass bylaws, when there is no enforcement agency for those bylaws? You can give the RCMP your bylaws, in which the officer has the authority to use discretion as to whether or not he's going to enforce them. The RCMP have no connection to a chief and council, and as part of a justice system are not influenced by the chief and council. So again, what is the use of passing a bylaw?
Even the publication of bylaws in the First Nations Gazette—I've never even heard of it. If I ever wanted to pass a bylaw that I wanted to hide from my members, that's where I would publish it. Not one of them has probably ever heard of or even seen one. That in itself is a strange one, for my part.
Taking off the hat of grand chief and throwing on the hat of chief of the Sawridge First Nation, I say we're done with bylaws, as far as we are concerned. We understand section 35 of the Canadian Constitution Act, 1982. We have the inherent right to govern ourselves and we have exercised that right. As a matter of what we've done with that right, we have spent six years developing our constitution for our first nation. It was passed on August 24, 2009. Out of it has come our own laws. I am a four-year term chief—not under the Indian Act but under the Sawridge election act, as born out of our constitution, which has been recognized by the Government of Canada by way of an order in council removing our first nation from the election sections of the Indian Act.
Another issue is that even with some of these changes and the making of bylaws, there is no proper consultation, in my view, when you read what the act actually says. The preamble talks about consultation with first nations, but once you get past that it says the minister will consult with interested parties and organizations. I have a problem with that.
Our people seem to be the most represented people in this country, yet we're not heard. I'm the official, elected chief of our first nation. Our people are represented by me, two council members, AFN, CAP—the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples—and NWAC. Yet none of those organizations has come to our reserve and asked what we wanted. Is that really proper consultation? Do they really represent us? Where is the respect for our government-to-government relationship?
That's where I think we need to go, and speaking as the grand chief of Treaty 8, we have presented a document to the Prime Minister of Canada to talk about the treaty relationship and to deal with some of these issues. There needs to be a recognition of our sovereignty, our jurisdiction and authorities, and our powers, so that we can come to a negotiated agreement that will answer the questions you're trying to answer.
It is not really up to the Government of Canada to fix all our problems. We at the first nation level have recognized that we have our own responsibilities and we're moving forward in that manner. The government should be making resources available for first nations who want to go down this road and consider it an investment in the future, so that we are not a “burden” on the Canadian taxpayers. Nobody wants to be a burden.
There needs to be some healing within the community so that we can rise up and take our rightful place in this country, which we agreed to share. On our part, my great-grandfather signed the treaty in 1899 at Willow Point on Lesser Slave Lake on June 21. That was Treaty No. 8. He was an original signatory.
I'm the seventh chief since then, so we follow our customs and traditions. We've had maybe 10 elections in the last 115 years, if that, and that's all been by acclamation. We follow our own traditional ways and we want to continue that way without any interference.
Thank you.