Good afternoon, honourable members and colleague chiefs. Good afternoon everybody.
I'm here on short notice, so excuse my tardiness. I don't have a presentation that's formal, but I could submit one when I get back home.
I want to thank my colleague chief for having me as part of this, going back to 2009, and being here today. So thank you, Chief Evans.
I don't know where to begin because, as I said, this was a last-minute thing last night. So I'm going to speak off the cuff, and that's fine that it's on record.
Where do I begin? Our community had a referendum in 2009 on whether we should have an election code and whether it should be every four years. It was unanimous. Our community endorsed it and supported it. Over 80%, I do believe, supported a change to our two-year term. I also supported the resolutions at the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs level, which Chief Evans just spoke about, so there was a good consensus and a good group there.
That group is not there today, but the resolution is still there, and the mandate that the current grand chief has must respect those past resolutions. To say whether or not he's in favour of this is a moot point. He has to be driven by those resolutions.
Obviously we're here for Bill C-9. We're here because of the election system that we didn't create. I don't want to call it a mess, but I didn't create the system; I was elected into it. Our community signed a treaty in 1871. It was a hereditary chief, and then his son took over for another 27 years, so I don't know when the amendments were made. You have to excuse my chronology of events here, but there were amendments to the Indian Act, and then we had elections in the community. That's the system we have been under since.
I support this for the very reasons you heard my colleague talk about: stability and continuity in community, so you can advance community comprehensive planning and you can advance economic development. That's the primary reason I support that.
But the catch here—and I think it's a catch-22—is that if I support this, and if leadership supports and drives these initiatives, it's pretty quickly turned around by people saying we're self-serving, we're looking after ourselves, we want a four-year term, we want to be in office longer, and we want power longer. So we turn it and we give it back to the grassroots. We give it back to the people and say, “You develop the code; you develop the process”. More often than not, these things sit on the shelf. We had about three or four election codes, and they sat on a shelf for years. We got funding from the government to develop these, produce them, and take them to our community. They weren't perfect by any means. Neither is this bill. There is some good and there is some bad in here, but at least it's taken us out of the two-year system.
Can you imagine the U.S. government—Canada even—being in constant election mode every second year? I've watched the American channels. It's crazy. They are already talking about elections, the year right after the election. It's just crazy. In our communities where there are families, close ties, and factions in groups, I would say it's even more confrontational. There's bitterness. It's not healthy for communities to be in constant election mode every second year.
You want to talk about austerity budgets. You want to talk about tightening the belt. Every second year in our community is election year. What do you think our leadership's going to do? Will they say no to every request? They become more laissez-faire and more lax, and they say yes to requests. Otherwise they're out the door, right? That's not to take away from the good leadership that does say no and just drives the community economic development plan and gets elected based on its track record of success.
But there are some out there who can't do it, so they spend, and keep putting the community back to square one again the next year. It's just a vicious cycle. Here we are trying to administer poverty...administer social programs. For me to keep track of all these bills, I can't do it. I can't go to my community and consult on every bill. I was inundated with all these bills coming through from the government in the last three or four years. I can't take every bill to the community—the omnibus bill, this, that, the water bill, everything else. My hands are tied with administering the crumbs, so to speak.
I can't consult on every line here, and I can't read between the lines on everything, but I do know there are some good things in here. I like the recall mechanism. I think we do need a recall mechanism.
How do we handle this? For example, if you have a community of 300 people, 60% of them are one family. You're probably going to have that person from that family elected all the time, but that's no different from the government system. You've got your corporate people, that's a family; you've got your middle-class taxpayers, that's a family; and you've got your lower-end poor people, that's a family too. They're elected based on certain things, so you can't say the big families. There are corporate families in Canada and they drive the political agenda.
I don't know what the appeal mechanism would be, what the answer is, but I do know if there is room in here for communities to fine-tune it themselves, have a recall mechanism, perhaps have a review after two years, saying, “Here's the plan you were elected on, here's the community vision you said you were going to deliver”. Two years later we'll have a look at it and if they didn't deliver, sorry, they're out the door.
There has to be some kind of mechanism because the community can be handcuffed for four years with incompetent leadership. That's the danger I see. It puts the onus back on the electorate. You have to put good people in there. But then if you have big families putting the people in, you could say it's their own choice. They're living in the community.
So it fixes itself, in other words. We don't have to worry about how these people are elected as long as it's fair, it's democratic, and they respect Corbiere and Gull Bay. I'm okay with it.
Chief Evans talked about custom. That system is good as well. As I said, we had our hereditary chief. It's not to say that those systems weren't democratic in our communities. We had patriarchal, matriarchal societies throughout this land and those were really good democratic models. Women took a lead role in leadership. There were ways to whip your leadership into line, so to speak. I don't think it's any different from what we're proposing here.
To give a little historical context. I talked about imposition on all these amendments, where we had no say, or at least involvement, in drafting them. it goes back right to day one when we signed our treaties. We had trading posts in our community: Hudson's Bay, the North West, these people had a very strong influence on our community. Our people couldn't leave the reserve to make a living. You were bound and at the mercy of the trading companies. Fort Maurepas, Fort Alexander, Port at Morris, about four or five forts in our community controlled everything. On top of that we had the church: Anglican, Catholic, and again, controlling families, based on family names, and there were competitions. They also played roles in our leadership. They drove the agenda. If you weren't a churchgoing, devout Catholic they were going to support somebody else behind the scenes.
So there is always that outside influence in our community. This, again, I see as an imposition. However, is it better than what we have now? I would say so, based on having four years' stability, putting the onus back on the community to put good people in there.
So thank you all.