Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 3rd, 2016

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, David Yurdiga]

I call to order the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are having a briefing from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here today. I understand they have a very busy schedule, and I'm sure that the information we receive from them will be appreciated. In the first hour we'll be hearing from Ry Moran, the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, the vice-provost of aboriginal initiatives at Lakehead University.

Welcome. You will have approximately 10 minutes to make a submission, and we will then take questions from the committee members. In the final minute, I'll notify you that you have one minute left to end your submission.

Okay, you may start.

[Ry Moran, Director, University of Manitoba, National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation]

Thank you very much, everyone, for having us.

Good afternoon. My name is Ry Moran. I'm the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation located at the University of Manitoba.

I'm joined here today by Dr. Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, vice-provost of aboriginal initiatives at Lakehead University. Cynthia is also a member of the centre's governing circle and is an intergenerational survivor. The governing circle ensures that we approach our work in a respectful and appropriate manner, and provides excellent guidance to the centre.

In the next 10 minutes I intend to discuss both the activities and mandate of the centre, in addition to concluding with some thoughts and observations on the efforts of reconciliation broadly under way across the country.

I will make my presentation in English, but you can put your questions to me in French.

Before we begin, however, for context I will give you a little more information about myself. I'm a Métis of the Red River Métis. I was raised in Victoria, B.C., and relocated to Winnipeg in 2010 to work for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I'll now turn to the mandate of the centre. The mandate of the NCTR is derived from the Indian residential schools settlement agreement. This was the broad agreement that established the common experience payment, the independent assessment process, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now our organization.

The centre was awarded to the University of Manitoba and its partners by the TRC on National Aboriginal Day, in 2013, after a lengthy consultation and a call for proposals process. We carry all of the statements, all documents, and other materials collected by the TRC.

In addition to this, we also carry a number of significant responsibilities related to education, ensuring that the material and survivor statements find their way into the hands of educators and students across the country, in addition to ongoing public education activities; research, stimulating new insights into our history through use of the collection, while also continuing to advance understandings of reconciliation; and lastly, community and survivor engagement.

While the archives are the foundation of our work, our forward looking mandate places us at the centre of many conversations on reconciliation. We hold the TRC's eagle staff, the ceremonial rattle for missing children, and the vessel that carried the sacred ashes from fire to fire across the country.

The start-up of the centre, without a doubt, has been challenging, as, while we take on responsibility for the issues above, we have also gone through the wind down of the TRC, the transfer of documents and responsibility between the TRC and our organization, and finally, the start-up, staffing, and related activities necessary to build a new national institution. That said, I am pleased to draw your attention to a number of significant accomplishments of the centre.

In November 2014, we moved into a freshly renovated building on the University of Manitoba campus. This high profile heritage building, on the banks of the Red River, is intended to mark the deep commitment of the university to the centre. As a former home for a number of university presidents, it also reminds us that the creation of a sense of home is what is asked of all of us in this work of reconciliation. We must help rebuild those homes and families attacked and hurt through the residential school system, while making every effort to ensure Canada is a safe place for indigenous peoples.

In November 2015, we officially opened our doors and launched the public databases of the centre. The launch of these databases marks the first time that site specific information on every residential school is available in one place. Information on the schools is combined with close to 20,000 photographs, in addition to thousands hours of survivor statements.

We launched this database as part of a two-day opening ceremony at the university and the Winnipeg convention centre. We were thrilled to launch this to close to 2,000 middle and high school students, with over 350 educators from across the province of Manitoba as part of a province-wide education day on residential schools.

We launched to students because this is what survivors asked us to do, to ensure their statements and histories got into the hands of young learners so that we, as a country, could never again repeat the terrible failings of the residential schools. Since that point, we held a subsequent education day in Regina, again with thousands of students attending.

I'm also pleased to say that we ran a very inspiring initiative recently entitled “Imagine a Canada”. This national essay and art initiative saw indigenous and non-indigenous students from kindergarten to post-secondary levels share their vision on the future of the country through a lens of reconciliation. His Excellency Governor General David Johnson hosted the top 10 students at Rideau Hall in a ceremony involving many of the TRC honorary witnesses and other dignitaries from across the country.

We were also successful in bringing together representatives from ministries of education and teachers federations across the country for a focused workshop on implementing the call to action on education. This meeting was intended to lay a foundation for a national reconciliation education framework, and included individuals such as former Prime Minister Paul Martin and education partners such as the Canadian Teachers' Federation and the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada.

Working in close collaboration with a number of education partners across the country is critical because, as was so often stated by Senator Murray Sinclair, “education is what got us into this mess, and education is also what's going to get us out of it”.

Partnership and collaboration are woven throughout the fabric at the centre. We now list over 20 national partners that include organizations such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the National Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres. We are directly partnered with a number of large universities in the country that include the University of British Columbia and Dalhousie University, giving the NCTR reach from coast to coast. We are actively building a network of reconciliation-focused researchers that will further enhance the collective understanding and path forward on reconciliation. New partner institutions continue to join the centre on a nearly daily basis.

Building and strengthening these relationships is the foundation for a national framework for reconciliation across the country. Through all of this exciting work, we can never forget where the centre derives its original mandate. That original mandate comes from survivors who fought hard to have their voices heard and to make the country aware of what they experienced and suffered through in the residential schools. Connecting communities, survivors, and intergenerational survivors with their records is a critical part of the reconciliation process.

To ensure that we are able to deliver upon the complex mandate given to us to protect and to provide access to the information, we worked closely with the Province of Manitoba to develop a National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Act. This act provides us with the tools we need to ensure that survivors and their families can gain access to the collection when they need to.

We also held a series of 18 community engagement sessions across the country, visiting survivors and intergenerational survivors in remote and urban locations to discuss their hopes and dreams for the centre. Central among these discussions was an in-depth conversation around privacy and access to the collection of materials amassed.

Emerging from these and other discussions is an ever-widening desire for communities, organizations, and individuals to share additional records with the centre. While ambitious, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the centre will grow into Canada's indigenous archive and the agency that will hold materials in a respectful manner by and for indigenous peoples, in accordance with indigenous principles and protocols.

Central to the work in front of us are a few fundamental questions. Where are we going? How are we doing? Will we know when we have arrived? These questions are at the heart of an important conference we are partnering on called Pathways to Reconciliation. This conference, taking place in Winnipeg this June, will bring together a diverse audience to discuss three core topics: understanding reconciliation, measuring reconciliation, and implementing reconciliation.

Without a doubt, this conference is intended to be a catalyst for a coordinated approach to future national action on reconciliation. This event will be framed by a soon to be released national public survey detailing perceptions of non-indigenous peoples towards indigenous peoples. While not yet released, the report highlights many positive developments, but also the significant amount of work that is yet to be done in this country.

It's in regard to this last point that I will use my remaining time to make concluding statements.

Friends, the path of reconciliation that lies ahead of us is not a straight line, and it will not be easy. It will take real care and attention to bring it about. The TRC issued 94 calls to action, in addition to giving us 10 principles of reconciliation. Some of these, such as call to action 78, call for core funding for the centre. I would hope that this call to action is implemented immediately. Calls to action 72 and 76 discuss the need for ongoing efforts to identify and name those children who never returned home from those schools and are buried in unknown locations across the country. This work squarely involves the centre. The centre has begun tracking uptake and activity around each call to action, in addition to laying the foundation for a national reconciliation report on the state of affairs in this country.

Without a doubt, there's much much more work to be done on this front. Through the TRC's work, we have seen the power of survivors' voices. They have moved this country to a new understanding of who it is and what it is, but even now we are actively discussing destroying the evidence of the abuse that occurred in the residential schools. A recent Court of Appeals decision ruled that all survivor statements given during the IAP process will be destroyed in 15 years following an enhanced notice program. There is an option to appeal this decision before June 3 to the Supreme Court. Canada supported preservation in the first two rounds, and I ask that you give serious consideration to an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Reconciliation is a national effort and bigger than anything we have undertaken before in this country. It demands that we think of our history and our future in new ways. We need to ask ourselves what information we need to create and track in the present to set us on a path for success. There are a number of specific calls to action that point us in this direction.

If we're serious about reconciliation, we need to take real action on establishing frameworks that will allow reconciliation to flourish and succeed. None of us can do this on our own, but it is my sincere hope that, through coordinated and committing action, we will look back on this time and be amazed at what we have accomplished.

I want to state that we are willing and able to assist in the realization of this national framework. We have the partners, we have the potential, we have the leadership of a fantastic governing circle, and we have the truth that our centre rests upon. We have much to contribute from the centre, but we'll need your help in bringing this to reality.

Thank you. Meegwetch. Merci.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you very much, Mr. Moran, for your comments. I know the committee appreciates them very much.

We're going to move to some questions by committee members. In the first round of questions, we will have five questioners with seven minutes each. I'll be interrupting to let people know when there's one minute left and again when it's time to wrap it right up.

The first questions are from Michael McLeod.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

Thank you for your presentation. This is a really important issue.

I represent the Northwest Territories and I come from a family of eight, all of whom attended residential school. This is not a new issue to us. Half of the Northwest Territories is aboriginal and almost all of the people there are connected somehow to the whole residential school issue that has been getting a lot of attention in the last while. In the Northwest Territories we probably have the most people who attended residential school per capita. This is an issue that is still very recent in our history and society. A lot of people who went to school, like me, are still alive and still around, but we also have children of people who went to school who are struggling with issues and the fallout and some of the dilemmas resulting from the residential schools.

We're looking with a lot of interest at the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We're hoping that they will improve the quality of living in our communities and start moving us forward to allow us to build healthier communities, build healthy people, and deal with our many social ills that are challenging us. I'm glad that we are looking at a centre that would serve as a permanent resource for all Canadians.

I'm not clear how we decided where it's going to be located and how the governing circle is going to be made up of seven people. You mentioned that you're going to have partners. I'm not familiar with your partners and how it was decided that Winnipeg would host the national centre.

[Ry Moran]

Those are very important, very legitimate questions.

The TRC that was established as a result of the Indian residential school settlement agreement was instructed in its mandate to establish the then-called National Research Centre. In 2011, the TRC hosted a significant international conference bringing together scholars and practitioners from across the world to explore what the centre could be, what it should be, and best practices from across the world.

We distilled that conference into a series of questions that we then presented to the country. We circulated 10 questions in a fairly significant engagement process that asked bidders to tell us their vision of the centre; their partners; and how they were going to pay for it, because the funding was not yet totally certain or clear; their experience in managing very sensitive collections of materials; and where they were going to put it. That call for proposals resulted in a number of very strong applications, from which the University of Manitoba and its partner's bid emerged as the winning bid.

However, without a doubt, this is not the national centre of the University of Manitoba; this is the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation for this country. We just happen to have a great partner that believes in this and has stepped up to the plate and has provided core funding, a home, staffing and resources, legal help, access and privacy help, which has enabled us to get going out of the gate.

The continued growth of the network of partners is critical, and the partnerships we have are developed through a series of conversations. We have a legal agreement that's signed between partners. While I list 20 or so that we have right now, we work with a number of other agencies on a regular basis, including the ITK, the AFN, the national churches, a whole host of organizations that we're actively collaborating with. Through this concept of partnership, of collaboration, the centre is going to be able to achieve its full mandate.

The governing circle is composed of seven members selected from across the country: three members representing first nations, Inuit, Métis, survivors or their families; two members representing partners of the centre; and two members from the University of Manitoba itself to assist in the administrative discussions and everything related to the operations of the centre.

We're also about to create a survivor circle, which is another advisory circle that we need to create.

Certainly, we see a whole series of other circles coming down the road, other tables, some of which were created through the TRC's processes and others we will need to create to bring communities of like-minded individuals together around matters of national importance.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

In the event that we lose all funding for the national organization, you have all this information that you have gathered and will continue to gather, and we want to have a safe storage place where people can see it, I have two questions. I've seen this firsthand, which is why I raise it.

In the Northwest Territories two institutions were set up, the Dene Cultural Institute and the Métis Cultural Institute, which gathered all the archives of documents and clothing and all of these types of things that they set up for presentation. One institution lost all its funding and walked away, left everything in one room, and when the movers came they threw it all out the door.

I'm nervous that at some point, if we ever lose funding 10 or 20 years from now, about what the plan would be to protect that information and how we would ensure that we have plan B in the event that....

[Ry Moran]

That's a critical question.

Without a doubt, this is a concern I share. One of my efforts as the director of the centre is to create as much stability for the centre as humanly possible.

This concern was directly addressed in the trust agreement, the administrative agreement that was signed between the TRC and the University of Manitoba, which binds the university to host this for a time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

We're out of time. If you want to, just hit one final sentence there.

[Ry Moran]

Call to action number 76, which I referred to, is also going to be a good help for that. Stability is king.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Cathy McLeod, please.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you for your presentation and some very important information and updates.

I guess the first thing that rather startled me was that we've heard from the Prime Minister and this government that they have a solemn commitment to implement the 94 recommendations, but you said you don't know whether you have a budget. You said that this is a recommendation and you don't know whether you have any budget to do the important work you've been tasked to do, in spite of this promise by the Prime Minister.

Is that accurate?

[Ry Moran]

So far we've enjoyed a really strong working relationship with the Government of Canada, and the Government of Canada has flowed money to us in a number of different installments. There was an announcement made at the closing ceremonies of the TRC last year of $1 million, with additional funds flowed to us at the end of the year.

The one challenge is that, as we're starting this organization up, what would be really helpful for us is to get the money in advance so that we know what we're actually working with and spend it.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

There was nothing in the budget, then, about your having the ability to make a five-year plan of what you're doing and where you're going. It's pretty well a big void, then.

[Ry Moran]

It remains uncertain, at this point. I believe there is general good will, but certainty around this is, truthfully, going to help me sleep better at night.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you.

My next question relates to the whole issue you alluded to quickly of privacy. Some of this material is intensely private and sensitive. I have a health care background; there, the confidentiality of the people who confide in you is absolutely critical. I want you to flesh out for me in a little better way how you are ensuring protection of the privacy of the people who might not want their stories shared.

[Ry Moran]

We're taking a very risk-cautious approach to every step we take regarding release of any material out of the centre. The material that is found online right now on the centre's database is largely already available in other public sources. We've just made it more accessible, better presented, and easier to find. All of the statements that we find on the centre's website as well are in the public domain and are from the national events or other public hearings wherein they were webcast, and survivors were well informed that these were public events with cameras present everywhere.

We take the issue of privacy extraordinarily seriously, and this goes right into the actual fabric of how we breathe, eat, and sleep at the centre. We don't see this as a collection of material; we see that we've been given a sacred obligation to maintain what we believe is a sacred bundle. That can and must rest on principles of trust.

We have highly secure databases. We allow very limited access to the material. We are fully working with the Access and Privacy Office of the University of Manitoba on a daily basis, ensuring that all of our access protocols and guidelines are top-notch, and we're proceeding cautiously. This is very much a matter of “walk before you run”.

One last thing I'll say is that we face an interesting tension, though. There's the collective right to know. There's the collective obligation we have to educate the public and expose the truth of the residential schools. Survivors have a real interest in seeing this. Also, certainly the community engagement sessions we had have told us that survivors do not want the truth covered. However, there is the individual right to privacy inside of this. Every single record that sits on the centre's website right now therefore sits there, but we have a button attached to it that allows a person to request that the record be removed from the public domain, and we can pull that record right off-line immediately.

We try, then, to have important checks and balances, and that's the area in which the governing circle and other members we have advising us really help give us....

[Dr. Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, Vice-Provost, Aboriginal Initiatives, Lakehead University]

We work very closely with the survivors themselves. We have elders on the council sitting with us who are very clear about what is there, what is released, what should not be released, and how we should approach it, which is why we're also setting up a survivors' circle, so that they have direct input into this. We've had conversations right across the country with people about how they want to see these documents handled.

We understand that from the perspective of the survivors there's a lot of information about the survivors but not a whole lot of information about the perpetrators here. That's also an issue that people have not really thought about: that much of the other side of this equation is walking away without any records actually being handed over whatsoever, or even being in existence.

In our and the elders' opinions, this is not just about the indigenous community; it's about Canada and what has happened over the course of time and how it needs to be better represented.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I do think you have a very challenging balancing act there. There are a lot of issues that I think need to be very carefully worked through. Just out of curiosity, how big is the centre? How many square feet is it? You said it was the home of the prior president.

[Ry Moran]

Our current centre is a beautiful space. It's about 8,600 square feet. It's an old home. We see ourselves growing out of it quite soon, and we have an active fundraising campaign that has already been launched, through the University of Manitoba's front and centre campaign, to build a new and dedicated space. We already have land secured for that building, and that's something we're going to be moving into as we move out of the startup phase, and as soon as possible.

Currently the staff is about 15 or 17 people, depending on how you count it, between full-time and part-time people, with additional growth coming in this future year. As we are able to create some stability around budget, we understand how much capital and revenue we're actually working with. That's been one of the challenges through startup, just understanding how much operating cash we have. It's something that I'm definitely trying to secure and stabilize immediately.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

The next question is from Charlie Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you for coming here and thank you for your excellent work.

I want to start off by talking about St. Anne's Residential School. Edmund Metatawabin, one of the spokespeople for the survivors, says in regard to the suicide crisis among the young that there's a direct highway to that from the trauma inflicted in that institution. Next week, St. Anne's survivors will go back to the Ontario Superior Court again over the fact that the federal Government of Canada suppressed thousands of pages of police testimony, kept the names of over 180 perpetrators hidden, lied in hearings, and denied people their right to justice.

Justice Perell ordered those documents to be turned over. Have they been turned over to your centre? Do you have all the documents that relate to the St. Anne's police investigation?

[Ry Moran]

We've constantly been in the challenging position that we only really know what we've received, and we only really know what we've been allowed to see. We have received a fairly significant production of materials related to the OPP investigations. Off the top of my head, and this is just in round numbers, I believe it's about 13,000 documents or so, in unredacted form, that came into the centre. Of course, these are highly sensitive documents that need to be treated with the utmost of care and concern. Whether there are more documents, to tell you the truth, I don't know.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Are they redacted?

[Ry Moran]

They are not redacted.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

See, this is the interesting thing. The federal government's been blocking me for three years from finding internal government documents—nothing to do with St. Anne's—and yet they gave me a document dump that included documents they were refusing to turn over to claimants, and they were not redacted. They sent me names of witnesses, names of perpetrators, names of who was involved in the abuse, and yet the survivors are going into hearings against the federal government, and those names are being blocked out. I just don't understand why you would have access to the names, while those who are trying to get justice from the federal government are being told that they have no right to see the names of the perpetrators, as though the government is protecting the perpetrators in these hearings.

You have unredacted versions.