[Witness speaks in Northern Tutchone language ]
I am Chief Angela Demit of White River First Nation.
Mahsì t'sin’ii to Kwanlin Dün and Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in first nations for our coming to their traditional territory.
Mahsì for the opportunity to present our views about Bill S-6 to the standing committee.
White River First Nation is a Yukon first nation that does not have a final land claim agreement. We are therefore one of the first nations who have never extinguished our aboriginal rights and title to our lands and waters. We participated in meetings with Canada about the changes to YESAA. Through that experience we have understood that the changes being proposed by Canada have much more to do with an agenda made in Ottawa than with the recommendations that came out of the YESAA five-year review process.
The process was agreed to by all parties to the UFA, including Canada. All Yukon first nations, including White River First Nation, invested in the review process and agreed upon a number of recommendations to improve the development and assessment process under YESAA. The recommendations were based on our experience of the YESAA process in Yukon in its first five years.
The changes to YESAA now proposed by Canada came from outside the five-year review. I hope you will listen carefully to our concerns.
I will start by saying that there are a number of amendments that White River First Nation wanted to see, but which Canada chose not to act on and which are not present in Bill S-6. The most important of these for White River First Nation is the definition in YESAA of “territory”, which for our nation is defined as the border boundary outlined in the UFA.
Our traditional territory goes beyond the UFA boundary, and as a result, large areas of our traditional territory are excluded from the consultation process under the YESAA. The UFA was never intended to be a binding document, and we do not agree that the map in the UFA represents our territory.
We have made our concerns known for many years and we are disappointed that Canada did not take this opportunity to remedy the situation. It is important to us to make it clear on the record that White River First Nation continues to strongly object to the definition of “territory” in YESAA.
Like many other Yukon first nations who are speaking to you today, we feel that there are four amendments of particular concern which are a profound intrusion of the federal and territorial governments into the YESAA process. A core value of the YESAA process is that it is a process that is at arm's length from government. As a Yukon first nation, we can only have confidence in the process when we believe it is independent.
The first is that Canada is proposing that the federal minister can give written policy direction to the YESAA board regarding any of the board's powers, duties, and functions under YESAA, and the board must abide by them. In our view, this power will completely undermine the board's ability to run an independent process free of political interference from the minister. It will also undermine the predictability of the process for all parties.
The second amendment that concerns us would allow the minister to delegate any of his powers, duties, and functions under YESAA to the territorial minister. The federal minister has many powers under YESAA, for example, the power to change the number of assessment districts, to approve the budget for the board, and approve of or reject time extensions for assessments. Giving these powers to the territorial minister makes the YESAA process extremely vulnerable to local political pressure. White River First Nation strongly objects to this.
The third amendment we urge you to reject is the imposition of timelines for YESAA assessments. The board currently administers rules for timelines which are appropriate to the YESAA process and to the specific circumstances of the Yukon. We see this proposal as a heavy-handed imposition of Canada's development objectives on the Yukon.
The fourth amendment that we do not wish to see brought into law would give discretion to the government decision-makers, most likely a territorial official, to allow a company to avoid a YESAA assessment in the case of a project amendment and permit renewal. This would create a great deal of uncertainty for White River First Nation when participating in a project assessment process. If a project can be changed or extended beyond the original proposal, we will not know all of the potential impacts when the project is finally assessed. This poses a serious threat to the protection of our aboriginal rights and is unacceptable to us.
I urge you to respond to our concerns and recommendations so that the amendments do not become law. I further urge you to recommend that this government scrap Bill S-6 and continue to consult with the first nations of Yukon to achieve a proposal that all parties can support. This is what reconciliation is all about.
In closing, White River First Nation is a Yukon first nation which has never extinguished aboriginal rights and title to our traditional waters and lands. The YESAA five-year review includes recommendation 58. This recommendation recognizes the needs for all parties to deal with issues specific to Yukon first nations without final agreements. White River First Nation has many outstanding and unique issues in the application of YESAA, as we are a first nation which did not enter into final agreements under the UFA.
Mahsi cho,T'sin'ii for being able to provide our presentation today.