Mahsi.
[Witness speaks in Dene]
I've just said that my name is Joseph Kochon and I'm from Colville Lake. I've been doing this work for the last 24 years. I have many roles in my community, and one new role is being the chief negotiator. I'm grateful to be here to present to you some ideas that might help in future deliberations.
We are part of the Sahtu land claim agreement and are negotiating a community-based self-government agreement with Canada and the GNWT.
I am going to start by stating that Canada's self-government policy has been the same since 1995. Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of studies by Parliament, the Senate, and the Auditor General, and commissions about indigenous people, but we still have the same problems facing us. We want your committee to produce an action plan, not a report. Our community has motto: don't talk, just do it. We'd be pleased to lend this motto to your committee.
Canada still has a colonial relationship with us. What would help would be for you to test your policies against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Use that as your guide for what should change.
This government wants to reset the relationship with us. We are glad to see that the Prime Minister has taken action, but we are not seeing that change at the negotiating table. There's a big gap between what the politicians say and what the negotiators say. Somewhere in this big government machine, the people who are supposed to change what is being said at the negotiating table are not doing their job.
We want your action plan to tell the bureaucrats to change their negotiating mandates. Today we are focusing on three areas we see that need to change.
The first is about cultural competency: training for government officials. Government people make decisions that affect our lives. Few of them know about or have been in our community. I can give you examples of problems that has created, with everything from someone in Ottawa trying to shut down our post office because they did not understand the geography of the N.W.T., to houses sitting empty in our community while we have families that are homeless or living in overcrowded houses.
To try to fix that at our negotiations, we have asked for a culturally competent approach to implementing our self-government agreement. What this means is that everyone from government who is dealing with our community should take training to understand us and our context.
Recommendation 57 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission also approached government to do this. So far, the reaction from both governments to include this in our self-government agreement has been to put it on the “too hard” pile and to prepare us to hear that the answer is no. Saying no is unacceptable.
In health systems across Canada, this training is a priority, because in the health system when doctors and nurses don't have cultural understanding, or if they act on stereotypes, people die. It happened in an emergency room in Winnipeg. There have been similar incidents in N.W.T. and Nunavut. In the health system, people might die right there. It is obvious that they have died because someone was making decisions based on stereotypes instead of knowledge. That's why health systems are changing.
In other systems, such as housing, the suffering is not so obvious, but the suffering happens. People who are homeless because of bad housing policies also die, or families break up or their kids fail at school. It's good to start with health care, but don't stop there. There are ways to kill or harm people other than by denying them immediate health care.
Our first recommendation to you is to give your self-government negotiators a mandate to include cultural competency obligations in land claims and self-government agreements. Require your officials to understand who they are working with.
The second is to change funding policies so that we can speed up the negotiating process. Negotiations with Canada are set up to keep us negotiating for an entire generation—20 or 30 years. This does not help us to rebuild our community, which has been damaged by colonization, and it does not serve taxpayers in Canada well. As you know, we also pay taxes in Canada.
We want an agreement in five years. We are negotiating chapters, including those on governance, housing, and lands. After we have done those things well, we will come back to the table to negotiate more authorities. We can call this a modular or stepping-stone approach. After completing module one, with about 12 chapters, we can focus on implementing and negotiate other authorities later. We are building our government at our own pace.
Canada and the GNWT have committed to completing a final module one agreement with us by 2018. We have one year left to complete our agreement. Canada, the GNWT negotiators, and the bureaucrats are all supporting this accelerated pace as best they can. However, Colville Lake is severely held back by the INAC funding policy.
INAC's negotiating funding policies assume that we will spend 20 years negotiating everything in one agreement. As a result, we cannot get the resources we need to finish in five years because the funding policy assumes that we are going to take 20 years. The funding policy uses the size of our population to also restrict the amount of funding; however, the number of people in our membership does not dictate the amount of work that is necessary for us to complete each chapter that we must negotiate. To serve the needs of all people in Canada and to fulfill the government's commitment to allow us to negotiate from a position of equality, the funding policy needs to change to reflect the actual costs of negotiations.
Our second recommendation is that negotiations and negotiation funding must be flexible. The flexibility must provide resources needed to negotiate an agreement in five years instead of 20 years.
I'll get right to our third recommendation, since we're running out of time. If Canada is committed to renewing the relationship in which crown and indigenous governments work together on matters of mutual importance and concern, the self-government agreement, instead of requiring “certainty”, must recognize that we will evolve and take up all our rights and responsibilities.
Thank you. I think you all have a copy of the presentation.