Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Feb. 6th, 2023

[Ronald E. Ignace]

We are eager to get out and meet with indigenous people and get their perspective on what needs they have, so that we can properly promote and support indigenous people across this country.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marc Garneau]

Thank you, Mrs. Gill.

Ms. Idlout, you have two and a half minutes.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

[Member spoke in Inuktitut, interpreted as follows:]

Thank you.

I tried to ask earlier, and I'll try again. Regarding the commission that you are working in, I know it is a new organization. As a new organization, are there any barriers or challenges your office has experienced that we, as parliamentarians, can try to address to make doing your important work easier?

What can we do to assist you? We need to have a better understanding of the challenges that you may have run into or that you may be facing. If we know what they are, we can support you.

If you require supplementary funding or additional support, let us know—if you could—what your needs are at the moment to make your work easier.

[Ronald E. Ignace]

Thank you for that offer.

[Witness spoke in Secwepemctsin]

[English]

Thank you for the generous offer of supporting us to be able to do our work more importantly. When and if we need it, we will and have been reaching out to various members of Parliament and letting them know about the indigenous language legislation, the mandate of the commission and where we are in building up the commission.

They have all indicated, much like yourself, the willingness to support us. We know that the willingness is there, and we are very grateful for it. When we need it, we will come forward and seek that support, while protecting the independence of the commission and the integrity of that independence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marc Garneau]

Thank you, Ms. Idlout.

This brings our first panel to an end.

I would like to thank you, Commissioner Ignace, for coming today and providing us with opening remarks, as well as for answering our questions. As you can see, we are very interested in the work you are doing. We realize that you are setting up shop, but we are eager to see how things develop in the coming months and years.

Thank you for taking the time to come today.

[Ronald E. Ignace]

I'm very grateful for the work you are doing.

As I said, the witnesses have come forward and made statements here. We're going to be reviewing them. They will be very helpful in informing the commission on how to better do its work going forward. We are grateful for that.

Thank you all for your interest. Let us strengthen that interest going forward, with a whole-of-government approach and the engagement of all Canadians in this work. It's going to take a whole-of-Canada approach to be able to revitalize and strengthen indigenous languages that have been under attack for the last 500 years.

It's going to take long, hard work to accomplish that objective.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marc Garneau]

Thank you, Commissioner.

We will now suspend briefly as we await the Minister of Canadian Heritage for our next hour.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marc Garneau]

I call the meeting back to order.

Committee members, we will now resume.

On our second panel, we welcome the Honourable Pablo Rodriguez,

the Minister of Canadian Heritage, and Mr. Paul Pelletier, Director General, Indigenous Languages, at the Department of Canadian Heritage.

You may speak in the official language of your choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting in French, English and Inuktitut. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French audio.

Please select your language now. If you have interpretation problems, let us know and we'll interrupt momentarily to fix it.

Minister, the meeting will be conducted as usual. As you know, you have five minutes for your opening address. After that, we'll move on to the round of questions.

Welcome to this discussion on indigenous languages. You have the floor.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Minister of Canadian Heritage]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Members of the committee, dear colleagues, good afternoon. I am truly pleased to be here with you.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we are gathering today on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe nation.

It's truly an honour for me to be here to discuss this subject and to field your questions. It's not only important from a general standpoint but also personally. I'll explain why afterwards.

In Canada, over 70 languages are spoken by first nations, Inuit and Métis, but none of them are protected. In fact they are all threatened, in one way or another.

Our job is to continue to take concrete steps to maintain, revitalize and strengthen them. We want these languages to be strong, and we need them to be so.

It is our duty to listen and to take our indigenous partners' lead on their language priorities, because it's not about us. It's about them.

We cannot afford to lose the wealth of knowledge, wisdom and beauty that is held in each of the indigenous languages spoken in Canada. This is why we developed the Indigenous Languages Act, which I have had the honour of tabling during my time as Minister of Canadian Heritage. It is, sincerely, one of the things I'm most proud of. At this moment, as you know, we're working very closely with indigenous partners to implement that bill.

We have done much since June 2019, in spite of the problems caused by the pandemic. We established a joint implementation steering committee with representatives from the three national indigenous organizations. We have been working together on it. We have held 26 consultation sessions with indigenous peoples across Canada. We organized a symposium that had more than 800 participants.

We made the initial appointments to the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. You have had the opportunity to meet the people in question.

And of course there was our support to the international Decade of Indigenous Languages, through the development of a national action plan specific to Canada.

We have also worked toward advancing access to federal services in indigenous languages. In particular—I know how important this is—we're working with Inuit partners to identify pilot projects that can help us develop regulations for access to federal services in Inuktut. We have established a cross-government steering committee that will work toward this goal, as the act intends.

Since the adoption of the act, we have funded more community indigenous projects than ever before. Everything is moving ahead quickly. We went from only 180 projects in 2018‑2019, which is not insignificant, to over a thousand projects in 2022‑2023. The number is still growing.

By increasing funding, we were able to support all eligible Inuit and Métis language projects since 2020, through investments from the 2019 and 2021 budgets, totalling more than $840 million over a seven-year period, and $118 million per year afterwards.

That's a lot, although it will never be enough. The needs are huge, but if we compare current funding to the $5 million available for indigenous languages in 2016‑2017, it's a giant step forward.

Indigenous partners have consistently told us that funding for indigenous languages must be long term, stable and predictable, and we agree. They've said that the processes for receiving funding must be indigenous-led, accessible, responsive, timely and transparent. We totally agree once again.

What do we do to make this a reality, to make it happen? We already have been working with communities to take the lead in decision-making and to increase flexibility in their funding. We're also working in developing new distinction-based funding models, being implemented this year, that would better meet the respective needs and goals of the communities, no matter where they live across the country.

This will allow for long-term funding agreements with indigenous governments, organizations and communities. It will also put funding decisions in the hands of indigenous people and ensure that they can make decisions based on their specific and unique priorities. So far, we have also been able to support six innovative agreements through sections 8 and 9, and we're working on more.

In spite of the rather negative picture I painted at the beginning when I said that all of the indigenous languages were threatened, there are some positive factors too. Indeed, the 2021 Census gives us some hope. Since 2016, for example, the number of indigenous people whose mother tongue was not an indigenous language and who can now speak one of these languages, grew by 7%.

There are therefore 7% more indigenous people whose mother tongue is not an indigenous language who have now learned one of these languages. More and more indigenous people are therefore speaking an indigenous language as a second language.

We've made much progress together, but there's definitely a lot of work to do. It takes years to properly implement a law like this one, and we're definitely—definitely—committed to this journey in true partnership with our colleagues and friends from across the country.

I'm ready to take your questions, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marc Garneau]

Thank you, Minister.

We'll start with Mr. Vidal for six minutes.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister, for being here today and for having this conversation with us. This is an important discussion.

I want to drill into a couple of numbers that I've been digging through in the last few days and see what you can offer as an explanation for some of them. Although the act wasn't passed until 2019, there is some history in the program for funding. If I go back over the program from 2018-19 all the way through 2021-22, there's a significant amount of money each year, and that number grows every year in what are called “transfers”. It's transfer payments. For example, in 2021-22, out of a total of $113 million in this program, $105 million of that was transfer payments.

Do you know where all those transfers went? I did some digging today, and I can't find where they went. My question is really around this: Is that getting to these programs on the ground, or is it for stuff happening in Ottawa? Is that money actually getting...? We've heard from a number of witnesses who are saying that they're struggling to have access to enough dollars to do the work they want to do. Personally, I would love to see this money getting to those people who are working on the ground, so to speak.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

I totally agree with you, and it is the case, as I've mentioned before. Now we're up to about a thousand projects, community projects, that are financed by Heritage, but in collaboration with our indigenous partners. They are part of the process in approving the projects. It's not us saying, “We know what is good for you and what is not.” They're part of the decision, and the money is definitely going to them.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Would you be able to provide a breakdown of that money for us?

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Sure, absolutely.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Could the department provide that to us going back a couple of years, even if you went back to 2019-20, say, and broke down those transfers for us?

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Sure. On the implementation of the bill, we voted royal assent in June, and then it went into effect in August, I think. Sure, with pleasure.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

If you could do that, that would be great for us as we do our report, just to see where that money is being spent. Then we can account for some of the comments made by other people in the program.

You talked about the bill being passed in June 2019. We just heard from the commissioner of indigenous languages here, in the hour prior. He hopes to be fully up and running this summer. I believe that was his target. Back when we looked at Bill C-29, one of the patterns or one of the things that we were challenged with was the time frame on getting the work done.

This was approved in June 2019. We are now in February 2023, and he's still.... I think that in his words he called it “setting up shop”. He's still working at setting up shop. I guess my question for you is, do you feel that's an appropriate time frame? If we're going to place importance on reconciliation and if we're going to place importance on languages, that seems like a long time to get the aspects of the bill that seem very important up and running.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

We would love to see things go faster. I fully trust the commissioner. I think we're lucky, and I think it's a privilege to have Ronald Ignace as a commissioner and a director.

I had the chance to go to the United Nations with Mr. Ignace, and I spoke in front of the United Nations on indigenous languages. He was there. We had many meetings. He has devoted all of his life to this.

I'm sure, Mr. Vidal, you understand that we're starting from scratch. There was no commissioner's office. Even just getting an office, a physical office, and getting toilet paper and getting everything started—there was a pandemic that we had to deal with. I fully trust him to move ahead with that.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

In fairness, though, Minister, we're coming up on four years here. By the time we get to June 2023, we're going to be at a full four years. I get that, but I still struggle with the pace, I guess.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

If I may, though, Mr. Vidal, this doesn't change the fact that we've increased the number of projects. We're not funding the projects through the commissioner. His role is different, isn't it?

We went from having 180 projects before to about 1,000 projects that we're financing now, working with our indigenous partners. As we do, they are putting the office in place, which will give reports of where we are, the status of the languages and all of that.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

I appreciate that.

When you provide that information on where some of that money is going, we'll get a better sense of—

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Sure.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

—how much is getting to people on the ground.

I have one final question. You're very quick with your answers. I appreciate it. I'm getting through my whole list here in one slot, so that's perfect.

When I look at your departmental results reports, specifically around this program, there's a target in there, which is that 83% of participants in the program should report improvement in their ability to use their indigenous language—and I'm paraphrasing here—in their everyday lives. That target has been there for four years. It had a measurement date of March 2021, and now, again, we're a couple of years past that and no results with respect to that target have ever been reported in any of the departmental results.

People on this committee know that I'm always pushing for outcomes and results from the work we do. That target doesn't seem to be getting measured, or there's nothing reported on the outcomes. I'm just curious as to whether you have a comment on whether you can provide that information, and if you don't have it today, maybe you could provide that for us along with the other information I asked for.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

That's a very good question.

Part of that information will also be gathered by the commissioner, because he has to report where we are, the needs and the status of different languages. Statistics Canada will report on this after five years.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

The target was supposed to be reported on in March 2021, though. For your departmental results, that was the target date. We're almost two years past that, and we still have no outcomes.