Clearly there's a different distinction in how it's treated. Canada continues to avoid that the Métis or Red River Métis are section 35 rights holders in this country and have rights. Canada still tries to avoid its responsibilities, so it treats us differently. It does not want to have a direct collaboration of recognition of responsibility.
We're then pushed back to the provinces and the provinces push us back to Canada. Both of them take our taxes, but they still push us back and forth. Who is supposed to be working with us?
When you start looking, I think, in the overall context of.... In just my personal experience, I worked for the Department of Justice in Manitoba for 10 years. I was a probation officer for four years and I was director of the courts for six years. When we looked at the opportunity for change, I'm talking now 28 years that I've been the president; I left the Department of Justice in 1996. Even then, change was being talked about—change of the future—distinctively for the Métis, Inuit and first nations.
At that time, I developed a court model along with some other judges. We wrote a court model that would make it more community-based, where decisions would be made in the community because that's how our laws worked. That's how we maintain peace in our communities. It's because our families were in control. Our oldest is always the boss in our Métis culture. The grandparents are the boss. When they pass on, the parents are the boss. When they pass on, the oldest is the boss. That keeps the family responsibility intact. When you affect another family, the two family heads would talk to try to find peace.
What happens in the colonial system is the Crown becomes the victim and acts on behalf of the victim. The victim is never there, so the Crown then represents the victim. What the Crown in the colonial system forgets is that those two people who interacted in the justice system are going to go back to the same village. Those two family clans are going to still scrap when they get back home to get their own justice. Now you solved nothing. You just maybe gave somebody probation or gave somebody some offence or punishment in some form, but you didn't solve the problem.
From our perspective, our laws and our way of managing our affairs worked so well. One time years ago, I had a justice conference and I asked my elder how they had so much peace. We never locked up anything. Our bikes were outside or we left stuff outside overnight and never had to lock up nothing. Today, you have to lock up everything. You can't even go to the store unless you lock your house. In our villages, that was never the way.
This exterior of policies and driven processes that are coming to our community on how we run ourselves has really broken our system. We have to figure out how we bring it back to our ways.
Right now, we have no methodology for any distinct-based approach by the provincial governments, by the RCMP or the municipal policing, nor do we have anything from Canada. There is no distinct-based approach for how we're going to tackle this issue together.