Welcome, Madam Chair, and welcome, committee members.
[Witness spoke in Oneida]
My name is Randall Phillips, and I am currently the elected chief at the Oneida Nation of the Thames. It is an Oneida community. It is located about 25 kilometres southwest of London, Ontario. It's a unique community in itself in that we established our community around 1830. We were at a forced relocation from our homelands in the United States, and we ended up in what we called our traditional beaver hunting grounds. With respect to the Algonquins of this territory, we also have a shared interest in this land.
First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to this. Unfortunately, I am the recipient of this invitation because of certain tragedies that happened in our communities and to our people.
I want to let you know that, as of December last year.... I know that even that was announced by the Prime Minister on the news in terms of the disaster that took the lives of one of our men and four of our children, but that was not the only fire disaster that has happened in our community within the last 10 years.
We have had other losses, too. One young lady who was very instrumental within our community in terms of gathering herbs and passing that message on—very much what we might call a healer—perished in a fire. She couldn't get out. She had a wheelchair ramp, so there were mobility issues. We had another fire in approximately 2011, and the same thing happened. We are not immune in terms of this disaster, that's for sure.
We are the fifth-largest community in Ontario in terms of population, not in size, but in population. Our community currently has over 500 houses, and approximately 35% of those houses are in need of repair. Approximately 10% of those houses are in need of destruction. We have approximately 40 houses like that, so 8%, that should be demolished right now. They're uninhabitable, but we have an overcrowding issue at our community, just like a lot of communities.
We tend to, as Iroquoian people and Haudenosaunee people, stick together, and we also share our same houses. We have that problem. We can see a disaster with respect to the Antone family, in terms of how that happened. We were lucky that three other young people plus the mother were gone, so that could have been even worse.
That's the sort of situation we find ourselves in. There are social and economic conditions that add to this, and we can't just simply look at a fire management program or a fire suppression program and try to address this. I understand the need for incrementalism, and I also understand the need to move on issues where we can move on them.
For our community, and certainly for myself as the leader and chief, I've had some issues with our fire protection for a long time, not from the people who provide the service, not from our volunteers, but in terms of our capacity, in terms of trying to do what we can do. Again, as a larger community, we have access to equipment that other communities don't have. We have access to the nearby city of London, which also provided some training to us as well. Other communities don't have that either.
The one thing they have that we don't have is a base in terms of our firefighters and our professionals who do this work. They're volunteers. If any of you have been on the road in terms of this kind of volunteer work, you will know very quickly that your first disaster, the first limb that you see severed, or your first horrific sight is going to change your perspective on whether you think that's a profession for you or not. Unfortunately, our first responders in our communities have to see that. Not only do they have to see that, they have to see that knowing they know who that person is.
We look at that. I look at our own current staff and the struggles that they go through, and I'm sure my colleagues to the left of me will tell you the same thing with regard to their staffing.
In terms of aftercare, I don't know what the word is in the fire profession, but certainly we need to take care of our staff. If we're going to have them perform at their their peak whenever we need them, then we need to take care of them. I don't see any systems that allow us to do that properly.
When it comes to our staffing, it's the old adage of “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. We have one full-time fire staff on duty, and that is the fire chief. That's a nine-to-five job, an administrative job. We're looking at that. We certainly all need access to this whole notion of staff capacity, complement of equipment, and constant training. Certainly we need more resources from our community to do that.
Again, our community is one of the largest ones, as is my sister community to the left of me. The current funding formula from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs stops at a population threshold of 1,200 people. We have 6,000 so we have to find other monies for all these public services, and we try. We have the equipment, but we don't have the men.
That's just one side, so you might have questions on that. I'm trying to speed up, Madam Chair.
The other issue I wanted to talk to you about as well is our capacity in terms of that equipment. Right now, our community is serviced through our own aquifer. However, there is limited access to that water. Four-inch-diameter pipes were installed throughout our community. Anybody in the profession can confirm that's not adequate pressure. This was one of the problems in the last fire: we didn't have enough pressure. We need infrastructure development and investment to change the rest of those four-inch pipes to six-inch pipes. We need more hydrants in our community. Again, we're one of the biggest ones.
We have an awful lot of roads to maintain, and we're going to continue to grow. If I can take one step back with regard to our firefighters, we've been working on a program with an outside agency to get them trained to deal with roof-mounted solar panel fires. We know they're dangerous and need to be dealt with in a special way, so we're providing that training to our firefighters. We're one of the first first nations communities to provide that training, because we have those facilities in our community. They will be gone once the city of London and the other municipalities around us find out they have that training; then we're back to square one.
Those are two of the things we need. One of the keys here is there needs to be a look at our housing programs. Again, this can't be done in isolation. The tragedies that occurred in our community were preventable, but the structures were old and very susceptible to fire. We really didn't have a chance. When we put in housing standards they have to be appropriate. The housing standards for a first nations national housing program will not meet the needs of southern Ontario. They will be different from northern Ontario so we have to look at that. The fire standards of how many officers, how many this and how many that, might be nice for some kind of budgeting process, but they need to meet the reality of what's going on in the community.
We try our best to support everybody we can, but we certainly need your help. Our firefighters and our emergency services can't do it alone. Oneida is the fifth-largest community in Ontario, and we have all these services. Other people in other communities rely on us as well, because that's what we're supposed to do with our brothers and sisters. We're supposed to help them.
It's very difficult to try to provide that help when we just simply don't have the capacity.
I wanted to say thank you very much for listening to that story, and I appreciate the invite. Yaw?’ko