Thank you, Madam Chair, for the invitation to present to the committee.
My name is Merrell-Ann Phare. I'm based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba. I'm the founding executive director of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources, which is a national first nation charitable environmental organization. Working together in 1994 with 10 chiefs from across Canada, including Phil Fontaine, Matthew Coon Come, and Manny Jules, whose names some of you will know, we built CIER. Since that time we've implemented across Canada more than 400 environmental capacity-building projects in as many first nations.
I'm a lawyer. I work and write on environmental indigenous law, water and water governance, and treaty land entitlement issues. In 2016, on behalf of the Government of the Northwest Territories, I negotiated two transboundary water agreements in the Mackenzie River basin, between the governments of NWT and Alberta and between the governments of the Northwest Territories and British Columbia.
I want to applaud both Mr. Saganash for his tireless work and the current government for their commitments to the United Nations declaration and on building nation-to-nation relationships. No government in Canadian history has made such important statements. However, to be more than aspirational goals, they must be enforced in law.
I've read the transcripts of evidence given to the committee to date. I'm going to assist you by trying to focus on just one thing—namely, the free, prior, and informed consent piece. I want to start by saying that it does not, in my view, mean a veto, but it does mean some very important process and substance elements, which I will explain.
Here's the issue as I see it. Indigenous nations were original partners in Confederation and should have been recognized as such. We should have, from the beginning, worked together as collaborating nations to build Canada. But we didn't. For example, we made treaties and then ignored them. This is the problem.
The solution, the one that would greatly prevent or reduce project-based disputes—think of pipelines when I say that—and the one that would also result in real reconciliation, lies in a government-to-government approach to consent. This is mutual consent between governments in Canada—federal, provincial, territorial, and indigenous. My colleagues and I call this “collaborative consent”. We believe it's a nation-to-nation mechanism to achieving the United Nations declaration.
Full reconciliation will happen when indigenous nations are recognized as partners in Confederation and Canada's system of governance is structured accordingly. Yes, this sounds high-minded, abstract, and theoretical, but it isn't. It's happening already. We have not only proof of possibility; I will share with you some examples. We just need to provide more oxygen to these examples. Bill C-262 can make that happen.
Collaborative consent is how you get to the United Nations declaration. It's simple to understand and hard to do, because it means a different attitude and a real change in practice, and also in institutions and governance. We first wrote about the collaborative consent concept in 2016. It was the approach we'd been using in the Northwest Territories since 2005 and more recently in negotiating the water agreements I spoke to you about.
You have an executive summary in front of you setting out the details of our seven hallmarks of collaborative consent. It's written in the context of a B.C. water application, but it applies to all situations.
A nation-to-nation approach to consent, to what we call collaborative consent, already operates on a daily basis in our own country, and it has worked well. Today federal, provincial, and territorial governments co-operate, collaborate, negotiate, and plan many things that are of common, overlapping, or even conflicting interest through a process called “co-operative federalism”. This process is ongoing, is not time-bound, is rarely ever perfect, and is necessary to make a complex society like Canada work. There's no real other way to do it. It's the way we do democracy in Canada.
Over the last 151 years, this approach has been tested well. We have grown and evolved as a country. We know how disputes occur and how they're resolved. We also know that they are very rare. Health care is a prime example of where conflicts can arise, as is anything to do with oil and gas, as we see from our headlines daily. But extreme conflict, such as intergovernmental litigation, is actually very rare. If you think about this, at co-operative federalism tables, jurisdictions are actually achieving each other's free, prior, and informed consent to proposals on the table. Collaborative consent is co-operative federalism as if indigenous nations had been participants from the beginning as part of the governance of Canada. We're partway there. We just need to go a bit further.
The day after this bill is passed into law, federal and indigenous governments should start formal transition to collaborative governance arrangements, as per co-operative federalism. I'll give you an example of an immediate change that could occur. In the 2016-17 fiscal year, there were 141 FPT—federal-provincial-territorial—intergovernmental meetings. Five of them were between premiers, 44 of them were between ministers, and 85 of them were between deputy ministers. This is where all of the work is done to set or partner on the policy and program directions for Canada about almost every aspect of Canadian society, regardless of who holds jurisdiction. This is where the real work of governing this country happens. Levels of governments bring their jurisdictional authorities to the table, and then they negotiate how they're going to work together on any given issue.
None of these meetings involved indigenous governments, and only one of them had anything to do with indigenous issues. These FPT meetings should include indigenous nations. They should be FPTI tables. It is clear that indigenous nations would have to self-organize in a way that is conducive to permanent participation. Many are in governance transition, it's true, but that's a solvable problem. The most important thing is that these tables of co-operative federalism must include permanent chairs for indigenous nations.
We need to achieve consensus at FPTI tables about broad directions, policies, and agreements that drive Canada. Think water and energy policy, climate change, and conservation targets. These are the upstream discussions necessary to preclude end-of-process or project-based disputes. Under co-operative federalism, agreement isn't always reached, and governments must or do flex when diplomacy and negotiations fail. This is unlikely to change. Governments will always have the things that they can resort to if other jurisdictions don't agree, such as legal action. Collaborative consent doesn't mean that indigenous governments won't sue other governments over specific disagreements. I just believe that it's less likely to occur.
I'll give you three examples of where collaborative consent is already happening in Canada. One example is in Manitoba. We are developing a collaborative governance table in southern Manitoba, involving 17 mayors, 10 first nations chiefs and, hopefully, the Métis. This is a collaborative consent process resulting in a permanent governance table. It covers 70% of the population of Manitoba and 68% of the GDP. Collaborative decisions can have a huge impact at this scale.
The NWT is another example. It has a territorial resource revenue-sharing agreement with all indigenous governments. What this means is that, regardless of where resource development happens anywhere in the Northwest Territories, 25% of all the revenues that the Government of the Northwest Territories receives from resource development is shared among all indigenous governments according to a sharing formula that the indigenous governments themselves developed. This is in addition to whatever local impact benefit agreement might be negotiated with the directly impacted community. This is the kind of solution needed to deal with linear projects like pipelines.
The NWT also created two laws, the Wildlife Act and the Species at Risk (NWT) Act, through a co-drafting process where all hands were on the pen, rather than a co-development process where, at the end of the day, justice holds the pen over the text.
To conclude, we are in the middle of rebuilding our nation, starting with nation-to-nation relationships. There are 150 years of work that should have been started long ago, yet the opportunity sits before us. We all will, by necessity, need to change.
I want to leave you with an image. Think of our FPTI governments as beams. We all need governments to bend towards the space where we can work co-operatively together at a fully occupied table of Confederation. We have had three of the four beams work, bend, and build for 151 years, but we need the final beam to be in place in order to achieve reconciliation of all Confederation. Bill C-262 gives us the focus and fortitude to bend all the beams and be more explicit about the necessity, not the luxury, of indigenous participation. The collaborative consent examples that I've shared show that it is happening in small places.
Bill C-262 will mandate that this thinking be mainstream, and will require everyone, no matter what their place in the system, to look at their role through the lens of compliance with the UN declaration. This committee needs to think about how we accelerate this whole thing so that it will happen everywhere, from top to bottom to top. This path we're on may seem very difficult. It's certainly complex.
However, as the Maori say, we have worked too hard not to work harder; we have come too far not to go further.
Thank you.