Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Oct. 6th, 2022

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you very much.

Minister, thank you for joining us.

I really appreciate some of the comments I've heard about how we need to move forward on indigenous rights and on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action. I can't help but think about how much further or more quickly we would have gotten to this legislation if Romeo Saganash's private member's bill on UNDRIP hadn't been blocked by Conservative senators in 2018 and 2019, and then dragging their feet on Bill C-15. I think we could have gotten to this legislation a lot quicker.

Since we're talking about reconciliation, within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was mentioned seven times.

Minister, can you talk a little about what you've heard from the leadership on the priority of moving forward on UNDRIP during the years that you were a minister in Indigenous Services and now as Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations?

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

I often get this question as well, as it ties into the calls to action. I think as we looked at the very painful moment of the rediscoveries in Kamloops and other locations, the focus moved quite rightly to the calls to action 72 through 76, which are now being extensively financed for people to do searches on their own time. It brought back lots of painful memories and the importance of putting the truth before reconciliation so that we can speak quite clearly about what is going right and what is going wrong, and about our relationship. It is the one impediment, and the justified mistrust toward the Canadian government, that prevents us from doing things like implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That work is ongoing with the Minister of Justice, which we are assisting with.

I think, as Wilton Littlechild said, the declaration itself is a bunch of principles that set indigenous peoples at the starting line. The finish line is yet to come, and I don't know what that finish line looks like. It definitely isn't up to me to decide, but it's something that we have to keep working on with indigenous communities as we review our laws, which are extensive in nature, and regulations, and put together an action plan that reflects the contribution of indigenous communities to what that would look like.

Luckily, thanks to B.C. we have a path. It is not one that we would completely copy, but it's something that I think shows us where the pitfalls are, where the positive elements are and where we can move as a country, as a leader in implementing it, especially in our jurisdiction. Also, it's encouraging provinces, then, to adopt UNDRIP as their own set of principles as they implement and reform their laws to make them consonant with the basic inherent rights of indigenous peoples.

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Minister.

Within some of the work that this committee will be doing, paragraph 7(c) says that they'll be conducting “research on promising practices that advance efforts for reconciliation in all sectors of Canadian society, by all governments in Canada and at the international level”. I'm wondering if you could speak to some of the promising practices that we're seeing on reconciliation, which you've been able to witness in your journeys around Canada, especially in terms of education and creating awareness of what happened during the residential schools.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

I'd preface my response to that by saying there still is a lot of ignorance as to the reality of residential schools. I think if you see any sort of polling out there, there is a large ignorance as to what residential schools were and the legacy of that.

I think it's unfortunate that indigenous peoples have to take it again on their shoulders, while they're in a period of trauma, to educate people who should already know better. I take a lot of pride in seeing my own children being educated in a way that I wasn't—and I see that across the country. It's not anecdotal. It's a real groundswell. That's nice to see.

When you come to the education reform and some of the discussions that I've had with elders, particularly those who have attended residential schools, there's a lot of hope in that. It's to their credit, because they have no reason to trust the Canadian government, but they see hope in our not reproducing the model that created residential schools in the first place. They see it in investments in education and education reforms, schools on reserve and schools that are culturally appropriate.

The path is long. I'm not going to say it's going to be fixed overnight, but I think there's a lot of hope out there and hope that we won't fail. It isn't blind to the realities of what is ongoing, but it's something I think we can all be quite proud of as parliamentarians for having pushed that hard. It's really because indigenous peoples pushed us.

Regardless of the form of government of the day, this is a joint project for everyone in Canada and something that we have to keep moving forward on and make irreversible. This commission is part of the process. It's very difficult to reverse a law and an organization that is fully funded to hold people to account and hold people's feet to the fire. We'll be the first government to be subject to it, but this is more than just keeping the current government's feet to the fire but also that of any subsequent government that would report to govern Canada.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marc Garneau]

Thank you, Mr. Battiste.

This ends our second round of questions.

I'd like to thank the minister for being with us and answering our questions on Bill C‑29.

I'd also like to thank Ms. Ledgerwood, Mr. Garrow and Ms. Sunga for being here today and for answering some of our questions as we continue, in committee stage, to look at Bill C-29.

With that, I remind the committee that our next meeting is on Monday the 17th—we won't be here next week—when we'll continue our study on Bill C-29.

Thank you very much, everyone.

With that, the meeting is adjourned.