Evidence of meeting #71 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was métis.
A video is available from Parliament.
Lori Idlout NDP Nunavut, NU
[Member spoke in Inuktitut, interpreted as follows:]
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples needs to be recognized even more so in Canada. How could we use this declaration even more in regard to the restitution of lands? How can this instrument be used?
Treaty Commissioner, Office of the Treaty Commissioner
Thank you.
On the UN declaration and the implementation of the act, I believe the final report is being released. It's supposed to be this month. That's the UN declaration act. To implement the UN declaration fully, on the rights of indigenous peoples in Canada, all Canadian laws need to be completely compatible with that UN declaration. Canada's laws cannot override that base set of standards that the UN declaration sets out.
I remember when I first read the UN declaration. I was in law school in 2009. I remember looking at it and thinking why didn't we just have this all along, and there would be no issues. All our treaties would have been honoured. We would have a right to practice and to exercise all our rights inherently, and we would have the right to self-determination recognized.
Canada needs to ensure that its laws are changed to make them compatible with the UN declaration. That means a complete overhaul of laws, but we know that Canada is there for Canada. Canada is not here to protect all the rights of indigenous peoples. If that was the case, there would be no Canada because the indigenous peoples wouldn't have allowed it. They wouldn't have allowed such blatant: Yes, you can come here. You can have all our land. You can put us on reserves. You can put us in residential schools. You can put policy in place to starve us, commit genocide, and then we're all good.
Colonization is what created Canada, and created all the countries that have indigenous people and that now have outside governments running them. Those were made in the name of empire building and not “let's go out and protect indigenous people and lands”.
We have this Canadian law structure that's completely incompatible with the UN declaration. It needs to be made compatible. All these processes that Canada has put in place, and the provinces, those need to be eradicated, because none of these structures, processes and legislation are there to protect indigenous people and the lands. The purpose of exploration here was to get to the lands.
There is a lot of work to do. I do not believe there ever will be 100% reconciliation, because 100% reconciliation is implementation of treaty obligations, and it's allowing nations to have full self-determination over their lands and themselves. There is a lot of work to do, and I do not believe I will be able to see it in my lifetime. I sure wish that were different, but I don't believe that's so.
NDP
Lori Idlout NDP Nunavut, NU
[Member spoke in Inuktitut, interpreted as follows:]
Thank you.
Chief Gordon BlueSky.
Brokenhead Ojibway Nation, Treaty One Nation
I really appreciate it.
I also want to acknowledge your beautiful language and your native tongue. It's a wonderful thing to hear in 2023. I wish all our nations were afforded the same when speaking at these levels.
With that being said, for me, I think the first step is exactly that—recognizing our people. With the declaration itself, if you look at the Declaration of Human Rights when that happened, what happened, and what were the subsequent actions from there? There was the creation of the Human Rights Commission. Then there was the Human Rights Tribunal where you could actually go and make arguments on issues specific to human rights.
Indigenous rights aren't being treated the same. We are being left to fight these things out in these courts where the only real change that we can actually have is all the way up to the Supreme Court, yet human rights are being challenged and recognized, and decisions like what we're seeing today in regard to our children are happening today in real time.
I think there are steps that need to happen. There needs to be an indigenous rights commission that allows for us to have tribunals and to have decisions made that recognize the issues we have here. There are no courts that are supporting that right now. The courts that are being supported right now, or the system that we're involved with right now, we didn't have any involvement in creating it. If we had no involvement in creating that, how are we expecting our issues and our rights to be settled within a structure that was never meant to service our people?
For me, it's a big challenge that, where we are, we've all inherited this. Everyone sitting around this table and everybody online inherited the problem that was created over 200 years ago when it started to recognize the immigration of people into our territory and then the pushing us away and the annihilation of our people.
I think if Canada was to get serious, it would start to look at having opportunities for our people to sit down and to be able to discuss disputes, and to be able to discuss indigenous issues that aren't contrary to law but are focused on the indigenous rights that we have inherently from birth.
Conservative
The Vice-Chair Conservative Jamie Schmale
Thank you very much, Chief BlueSky, and all our witnesses today.
Unfortunately we don't have any more time to hear from more witnesses but, as I said in the first panel, if you have anything more to add please feel free to submit that in written form to our committee and we will definitely take that into consideration when we draft our final report.
Thank you to all our witnesses once again. Thank you to our panellists.
Our next meeting will be on Monday, June 19, when we will be discussing the Whitecap Dakota agreement.
Thank you very much, everyone. We'll see you in a few days.
The meeting is adjourned.