Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Dec. 5th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

I call everyone to order. Let's get started. We have a lot of presenters.

Hi, folks back home. Thanks for waiting.

Welcome everybody.

This is the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs. We're in the midst of a study on fire safety and emergency management in indigenous communities.

Those of us in committee here are on the unceded territory of the Algonquin people. It's important for us to recognize Canada's initiative. All of us are moving to understand truth and reconciliation with the people who invited us to this generous and beautiful country.

We have five presenters, so the agenda is very heavy, with a very short time frame.

In terms of quick comments on committee business, I see that MP Anandasangaree is indicating that he would like to present something.

[Gary Anandasangaree, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge Park, ON]

No, Madam Chair, I think we had initially scheduled 15 minutes for planning. I propose that we vacate that today and go to the witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Is there concurrence?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

That still does not give us enough time for the regular procedure. I understand there may be agreement for presentations and one question per party, and that we'll do it for the two panels. We'll take the first panel, and then we'll have one question from each party. Then we'll do the second panel.

Is there agreement? Is everyone good with that?

All right, let's get started.

On our first panel, we have Ryan Day and Ann Louie. Welcome.

[Chief Ryan Day, Chief, Bonaparte Indian Band]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

I'm going to ask members to always remember to indicate to whom you want to ask your question.

I open it up to you. Have you decided who's going to go first?

[Chief Ann Louie, Chief, Williams Lake Indian Band]

I will.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Very good.

Go ahead, Chief.

[Chief Ann Louie]

[Witness speaks in Shuswap]

My name is Ann Louie. I'm the chief of the Williams Lake Indian Band. We're part of the Secwepemc organization. I will be presenting the events that occurred for us on July 7 and the following month.

The fire started in our community at approximately 3 p.m. due to a lightning strike. There were issues with trying to get through to report fires. Many community members also had issues with calling in to report the fire, as the Cariboo Fire Centre was apparently overwhelmed during the 148 lightning strikes that day. When staff got through, they would be referred to another agency. During that time, there were automated answering machines which were of no assistance, and 911 was actually glitching out at this time.

Williams Lake Band has an agreement with the 150 Mile House centre, which was also overwhelmed. I sat in my vehicle making calls as well during this time, which I found extremely frustrating. I reached the CRD director chair, who told me then that I was in a better position to make a decision because I could see what was happening.

There should have been a person from the fire centre with expertise sent out to assess the situation, which was not done at any time. As chief of the community, I sat outside my band office with many community members who stayed, watching the aggressive fire coming over the hill within a very short period of time. People were beginning to panic, and I directed them to leave the community for their safety. Some had already left through back roads on the opposite side of the lake from the fire. This was at approximately 6 p.m., three hours after the fire began.

While this was happening, community members began going to Highway 97. They were then turned back by the RCMP who had the road blocked. They came back and told me this, and just then an RCMP officer in a pick-up truck came up to me while I was in the vehicle still trying to make calls. I said to him, “What the hell are you guys doing? You guys now have us blocked in.” His response was, “No, I don't think so.” I said, “Yes, you do. Our people are going up to the highway and being turned back.” He said “I will go check” and left.

He went up to the main highway and within a couple of minutes came back down with his red and blue lights flashing. Then he said, “They can get through now.” By this time, the vehicles were lined up to the bridge past the main reserve, which included people from the Onward Ranch. Then they were allowed to leave the community by the highway to get to a registration centre at the Ramada Inn in Williams Lake.

We received assistance from Jeff Eustache of First Nations' Emergency Service Society on Sunday, July 9, and for the week following this. We will be forever grateful to him. He came in and assisted staff in setting up the required documents and contacts for us to deal with the ongoing emergency. We did not get proper assistance from forestry until day three after the fire started, even though the Caribou Fire Centre is less than 10 kilometres from our community, right over the hill, and the fire was only a couple of kilometres from the fire centre.

I went to a meeting at the fire centre, which involved INAC regional director general Catherine Lappe, Grand Chief Ed John, Robert Chamberlin from UBCIC, chiefs, and me, where I stated the above. I also let them know that our community members were fighting the fire with garden hoses and shovels and that we required support. I asked for piss cans and fire hoses for the fire to be fought properly. I also let them know that we had lost a house during the night and that we would have lost a lot more had our community members not returned to the community during the night to fight the fire.

Cantex were contractors working on Highway 97 doing four-laning. They were also instrumental in firefighting and saving our businesses and one house along the highway corridor. Members of the fire centre said, “You do have an agreement with the 150 department. Obviously, they were not able to assist you. We can now assist with structural integrity, which we will set up.” One of the other chiefs said to me, “Why did it have to come to you saying you lost a house before you were offered anything?”

Further to the above, we were categorized as an alert rather than an evacuation, which caused us many more issues for getting assistance with food and accommodation for our members. They also listed the fire as “human-caused”. I demanded they change this, as it was not accurate.

These two situations alone caused our members to not get assistance until the night before the city of Williams Lake was evacuated, which was one week later. We had three separate meetings at Williams Lake, where the reception centre was, on July 14, trying to get proper assistance for community members who were being turned away.

We were also informed that there were no forms there. It was eventually Dave Dixon from the community policing who told me, “Chief Ann, go back up there. I guarantee you, the forms are there.” I sent out the information to members, and we began getting food vouchers that night until about 7:30. Many community members were not able to use their vouchers, as the city of Williams Lake was then evacuated the very next day.

The improper classification of the fire evacuation caused ongoing issues, and the Williams Lake Indian Band's mailing address being under the city of Williams Lake along with the postal codes also caused confusion with the Red Cross assistance, because of the city being evacuated one week later than the Williams Lake Indian Band.

The results of all of the above have caused so many ongoing issues that we recommend strongly that we be engaged at all levels of planning in the future. It brought to light for us that, as first nations, we are totally invisible when these events occur. The municipal, regional district, and provincial levels all have funding to respond. First nations were totally forgotten during this crisis, and it was not until we asserted ourselves that we were included in the ongoing follow-up calls and planning meetings. The province must ensure that we are involved in all planning in the future.

We had to request funding from the RDG to assist us with the ongoing work that resulted due to the wildfires. Fortunately for us, Catherine Lappe, RDG of INAC, responded quickly to this request.

We have stated that we require an emergency fund to be set up for first nations in the amount of $200 million, to deal with all future emergencies that occur. We are now demanding emergency planning funding, integrations with local governments, fire prevention funding for fuel management, interface projects, and equipment for fire prevention.

We are now faced with huge economic impacts, such as a delay to a major project we were dealing with in building the Coyote Rock development along the highway; reduction in our land value due to visual impacts and reduced recreational value; challenges for business attractions, retention, and tourism; loss of our forestry resource—approximately 350,000 cubic metres on Williams Lake Indian Band and private lands; loss for our forestry company in our territory; and forestry effects on hydrology, drainage, wildlife habitat, and heritage sites.

In terms of social impacts, many have been traumatized by the fire, and elders and others have been displaced. Some members and a lot of non-members have also left their communities. We are now left to deal with educating the community about emergency response, fire prevention, ensuring that assets are properly insured, and assisting those who had insurance in dealing with insurance companies, who in some cases are being unrealistic and demanding receipts for items as far back as 40 years. An individual who was a mechanic was expected to have receipts for tools he had purchased several years ago.

With all of the above, it will be years before we can have a feeling that we are returning to any normal situation within our community.

We have held recent meetings with the ministers in B.C. to discuss some of the issues. As a result, in the last couple of days, for the first time ever, we received an invitation from the provincial firefighting training program to be included in training prior to the fire season. This has been great news for first nations in the Cariboo.

That's the end of my presentation, but I just need to say again that it's been an extremely painful experience for our community.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Thank you, Chief. That was well articulated and thought out. We really appreciate your presentation.

Now we have our second presenter, also a chief, Ryan Day from the Bonaparte Indian Band.

Welcome.

[Chief Ryan Day]

[Witness speaks in Secwepemctsin]

My name is Ryan Day. I'm the chief of Bonaparte Indian Band, also part of the Secwepemc Nation. We're located about an hour west of Kamloops, B.C.

I'll speak to a few things that are similar to those that Kukpi7 Ann spoke about, but we have a little bit of different circumstances. I'll also talk a little bit about solutions and moving forward.

On July 7 there was a fire in our neighbouring community of the Ashcroft Indian Band, or just outside of their reserve. I heard about it at around 12:30 in the afternoon. By three o'clock that fire was on our doorstep—and we're about 10 miles away—because it was extremely windy that day. We had no time to prepare, but we had enough people with the wherewithal in our community to evacuate everyone who wasn't going to stay and fight the fire. We got our handful of hoses and just got ready for the flames.

I should note that we didn't have an emergency plan to enact, but we had enough people with experience so that we got organized pretty quickly. Our reservoir can be used to fight fire for about 20 minutes at the most, so we were in an extremely precarious situation with virtually no supplies. These were not young fellows either. These guys with the firefighting experience are in their sixties.

We were able to stop the fire from wiping out our community. There were walls of flames coming down both sides of the highway, but we were able to do some strategic burns at just the right moment and stop the fire from wiping out our community. We lost one home, but it was derelict and hadn't been used for quite a number of years, so we were lucky that was the only real damage that happened there.

We have three populated reserves, and our main reserve we evacuated right away. Then we also evacuated a second reserve just because of the winds and the unpredictable nature of the fire. We were able to bring people home after a couple of weeks but then had to evacuate again because some inexperienced forest firefighters who were doing a back-burn did not understand the winds in the area, and the fire actually came back onto our community from the back-burn, so we had to evacuate again for another couple of weeks.

At any rate, that was kind of the nature of the fire. We just did what we needed to do without a real plan, although you wouldn't know it because we did so well. As Kukpi7 Ann mentioned, we would have been invisible as well had we not asserted ourselves and had some help from First Nations' Emergency Services Society as well through that experience.

As she mentioned, it was very traumatizing for our people, both those who were evacuated and those who stayed back, but at the same time we did an extremely good job of coping with that. I will talk shortly about our ability to cope with compounded trauma.

That is an extremely brief review. To give some context, the fire burned more than half of the territory that my band depends on for our subsistence living. We are caretakers of the Bonaparte River watershed, and well over half of the Bonaparte watershed was razed to the ground, so we're in pretty dire straits moving forward as well.

I'll try to break it down into three parts: prevention, managing the crisis, and post-crisis.

In terms of prevention, many of our reserves, not just my community but others, were surrounded by forest and we need to do the field management that Kukpi7 Ann mentioned. We need to have sustained funding in order to do that, and to ensure that the forests that surround our communities are doing fuel reduction and that there aren't huge hazards there. We can do that work. We have the experienced firefighters. It would be good to have a bit of training and some equipment to do that each year. We do grass fires around our homes every year on our own, but that needs to be expanded into the surrounding forests. That will help a bit. Prevention is really everything.

The other thing with prevention is that the province has mismanaged the forest for many decades. We can create some buffers around our communities directly on reserve, but the problem is that the forest is a mess around our reserves as well. The province needs to be held to account for that, because it creates a liability. It creates a liability for our communities and infrastructure, and it creates a liability for the department.

The province is doing another study. They did the Filmon report back in 2003, and they didn't implement what was needed and what was discussed there. They're going to do another study, but they need to be held to account.

I don't know if the angle that needs to be taken is that they've created a liability for all of our communities and need to be doing their part in terms of mitigating that liability. We can do that together. Because our people are used to doing the fuel management and so on, we can do that for them.

In terms of managing the crisis or managing disasters, as you know, with nearly ever sector, there are jurisdictional issues. We've definitely had big jurisdictional problems on our reserves and in our neighbouring communities. Disasters like this, fires and floods, are landscape-level disasters, and they're regional.

To illustrate what we need at a regional level, I'll give the example of a war chief. In wartime, the peace chief steps aside and is no longer responsible for what goes on. The war chief is activated in times of war because he's an expert. The same thing should go for emergencies. For our communities, for neighbouring communities, when a state of emergency is called, there's a whole subset of people who are then activated in order to deal with that crisis. They are experts who are trained and who maintain relationships with one another so that when an emergency happens there's no wasted time, no inefficient communication. They're ready to go so that lives are not lost and so that less damage occurs.

That was an issue we had. We had to deal with the regional district—a bunch of mayors who know nothing about the land, who know nothing about emergencies. In the same way, I'm not an expert in emergencies, yet I was required to do a bunch that I shouldn't have been doing. It was really helpful that I had the emergency services person to help me out, but what we really need in the community is an emergency chief, and a regional plan that gets activated when a state of emergency is called, where everybody's on the same playing field and is used to working with one another.

What we found was that because we have so much knowledge of the land, the winds, and the hills, when it came to a fire, we were the most valuable asset out there in terms of knowledge. When it came to an emergency, there was a respect between the firefighters we had and the ones from the province and elsewhere. In my mind, that's one thing that needs to happen. We need to have that annual funding, not just to have a plan but to keep that plan updated and to practise doing drills for floods, and so on and so forth. That is critical.

In terms of evacuations, we had a lot of problems with racism. When people are evacuated, the volunteer pool is typically the pool of the town, or whatever. Unfortunately, racism is a problem that's not going to be solved overnight, so we need our own people, our own teams to deal with our evacuees. We need them to perhaps come from outside the region in order to help out.

I see I need to begin wrapping up.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Yes, please.

[Chief Ryan Day]

I will just talk about post-crisis. We know global warming is a fact and these things are going to continue to happen. We already have a traumatized population and we are just compounding that trauma. Hopefully, we will be able to deal with it thoroughly by the time flood season starts, but it's going to happen again. We have to be able to deal with the mental health stuff and the resilience, because that's the thing that was created by the Government of Canada. The poverty, the land dispossession, the residential schools have created a vulnerability in our communities and that's what we need to work on in order to be resilient. We need to be able to manage our lands and prevent these issues from happening, and we're the best ones to do it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

Thank you.

We'll now go into a series of questions. It's going to be one from every party. We'll start with MP Amos.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you, Chief Day and Chief Louie. It's very appreciated, your taking the time today and explaining your first-hand experience with this summer's really challenging events. I can only imagine what difficulties you've been through as a community.

I wanted to pick up on Chief Day's comment around the need for different types of leadership. You made the analogy of the war chief, the need to have distinct leadership at the time of a fire catastrophe. If you're here suggesting that there needs to be a regional approach and there needs to be a very specific indigenous community approach to dealing with these circumstances, does it not indicate that there ought to be further emergency preparedness planning within your community and within the entire region, both indigenous and non-indigenous communities, and if it does, what does that kind of planning look like between indigenous and non-indigenous communities?

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

You're directing the questions.

[Chief Ryan Day]

We live about five kilometres away from the next municipality of Cache Creek. What I was trying to get at is that it shouldn't matter whether it's in town or it's on reserve. When it comes to an emergency and we're in that proximity, we should be completely on the same page. It shouldn't be my dealing with the mayor of Cache Creek. There should be two people who are trained in emergency management who are in contact throughout the year and have coordinated drills or whatever it is ongoing each year. It's not dependent upon election cycles or whatever else because you just don't have time in an emergency to be dealing with those types of things. They just need to be ready to go.

It's one thing to build a plan, but you have to be exercising that and updating that every year, without fail. That's been the history of, I guess, the funding issues. You get funding to make a plan and then that's it. Implementation has always been the struggle.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Okay, so it's ongoing exercises, integrating towns and reserve communities.

Chief Louie, could you comment on that? We've heard it loud and clear that funding is necessary. Beyond the funding issue, what kinds of mechanisms to integrate indigenous and the non-indigenous communities are required in order to have a more effective regional approach to natural disasters like fire and flood?

[Chief Ann Louie]

For me, it would be full inclusion by the other jurisdictions that are involved: Cariboo Regional District, the City of Williams Lake. Williams Lake Band does have an emergency evacuation plan which obviously we determined was not up fully where it should have been, but we are developing a community safety plan. However, since the fire, Williams Lake Band is now looking and negotiating with 150 Mile House Fire Department to put a second fire hall within our area. We also have plans to do a community forum with the city and CRD and Williams Lake Indian Band to continue the planning work.

However, that must occur across the entire province and not in individual communities, because what we determined during this crisis was that the different levels in the provincial government—forestry, firefighting—were all from different pockets, so different people were doing different things. One of the largest things that came out for us was that we were never consulted when they were bringing in the firefighters from out of province. When those firefighters hit the ground out here, they did not know the landscape. But we have people in our communities who are trained firefighters, who could have easily taken the lead and shown them how to eliminate the stuff that Chief Day spoke about, which was the back-burning that went so wrong.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you.

I'd like to ask each of you to answer in turn. I don't know how much time I have left, probably about two minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, MaryAnn Mihychuk]

You have two minutes.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Perhaps you could answer in about a minute each.

What kind of fire education programs or services do you offer on reserve? What information is provided to your community to be more aware of the dangers of fires in community? This is less about forest fire circumstances and a bit more about the average, everyday fire concern.

[Chief Ryan Day]

Little, that's the quickest answer there is. We really haven't done much. We do our regular fire alarm stuff, and that's about the extent of it.

[Chief Ann Louie]

Williams Lake Band has a fire truck, fire hall, and we're integrated with the 150 Mile House Fire Department, so some of our community members have been trained to work with the fire department. We make presentations at our community meetings, but as I said earlier, there's a lot more work to be done.