Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this important conversation. I hope you are all well.
My name is Doris Bill and I am chief of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. We are a self-governing first nation, an urban first nation. Our traditional territory is located in and around the city of Whitehorse, Yukon.
We settled our self-government and final agreements 16 years ago, in 2005. These modern treaties empower us to manage our settlement lands, to enact legislation and to make our own decisions in the best interests of our citizens—to be self-determining.
I am here today to share some information about our first nation and our journey to create a collaborative, community-driven approach to addressing safety, support and enforcement in our traditional territory.
Many indigenous people and indigenous communities in Canada have a complicated relationship with the RCMP. Our first nation is no different. History has made it difficult to trust. People sometimes need to be reminded that the police were involved in the trauma that came with residential schools, the sixties scoop and the forced relocation of our people. These events are still a part of our people's living memory, and that trauma continues to be passed down through generations.
We cannot change the past, but we can look forward to a brighter future, one in which we can work together for mutual benefit.
I do not support recent calls to defund policing services. Here at home I am sure our police department could use additional resources. In some cases, increased demands and inadequate resources have had a trickle-down effect, especially as this relates to prioritized calls and response times. At one point, citizens reported that at times it would take an hour or more for officers to show up, and there were occasions when no officers attended at all.
To provide some insight into where I am coming from, as a former journalist I am aware of the crime in our area. However, the reality of the situation truly hit home when there were two murders in our community shortly after I was elected in 2014. These tragedies struck at the very core of our people, and they were a catalyst for change.
The first step towards healing is to admit that there is a problem. In our case, we chose to listen, learn from one another and put what we heard into action. Through many discussions, we learned of numerous break-ins and other crimes in our area. We saw that most of the violent crimes were committed by people who didn't belong in our community. We heard from single moms who were sleeping with baseball bats beside their beds, from elders who didn't feel safe going out for a walk, from citizens concerned with bootlegging and drug houses and from parents wanting reassurance that their children would be safe playing outside in the neighbourhood.
Together, under the community's direction, we created a comprehensive community safety plan; established an inter-agency working group of partners, including the RCMP, bylaw services, SCAN, Public Safety and Investigations and the Correctional Service of Canada; and built an innovative community safety officer, or CSO, program, which launched in 2016. It is the CSO program that I wish to highlight today.
The program is centred on the concept that the safety, health and well-being of Kwanlin Dün citizens would be significantly enhanced through the intensive and consistent presence of safety officers who come from the community itself. Therefore, all of the four full-time and two on-call CSOs who work on our lands are citizens or have a strong connection to the community.
CSOs help mediate disputes, they provide safe rides to safe places, and they connect citizens to other services, such as the RCMP, family and child supports, and legal services when needed.
They patrol our streets. They are visible and they are known. They do not replace the RCMP or any other service in our community. We understand the value and need for policing and bylaw services and other government services from partner organizations, but the CSOs help to bridge the gap between our citizens and those necessary services, and they help our citizens to achieve better outcomes from their interactions with those services. In fact, it is the strength of our partnerships that make this program possible and successful. The support we receive from the Yukon government, Canada and the RCMP is essential, and we have seen that it is working. Kwanlin Dün is proud of this program and how citizens and elders report feeling safer with the CSOs on patrol. We see fewer calls to the RCMP; as a result, they can focus on dealing with the things they really should be dealing with.
We remain committed to the process of building community-driven, culturally relevant services for our citizens.
Another step forward came last summer when we signed a historic letter of expectation with the RCMP. It promotes positive and co-operative relationships and defines policing priorities, goals and strategies that are specific to the needs of Kwanlin Dün. I won't say it has been an easy process, but it has been extremely rewarding for our community as a whole. Ultimately, it is about choosing a path forward where strong partnerships allow us to create and steer the kind of policing we know we need in our community.
I think we can agree that together we can bring about change.
Shä`w níthän, gùnálchîsh, mähsi'cho and thank you. I welcome your questions.