Thank you, Chief.
Thank you for the invitation here, members of the committee.
My name is Drew Lafond. I'm a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation. I've had the good privilege of having the opportunity to represent as a legal counsel the Assembly of First Nations, but also, in one of those rare circumstances, my home community the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation.
The Muskeg Lake Cree Nation chief spoke very well and very candidly about the challenges we're facing as a community back home with respect to the second-generation cut-off rule.
To go back to your question there, Chief, or former chief.... Well, in our culture, it's once a chief always a chief, so Chief Morin, thank you for the question.
When we're talking about reconciliation, to peel back some of the layers and all of the rhetoric, in my former capacity as the president of the Indigenous Bar Association, I was working on the file of Indian status, whether it's discrimination or whether it's the self-determination of indigenous peoples to determine their own citizens since at least 2016. We're going on 10 years now since the Descheneaux decision was handed down by the courts. Back then the standing Senate committee was considering, with the guidance of the late Murray Sinclair, this very question about what it means to be a status Indian and what it means to be self-determining.
I thought optimistically back then that we were going to have an opportunity to clean up once and for all the discrimination within section 6 of the Indian Act. We aren't there because of what you just said, Chief, about the incremental approach that was adopted at that time.
I'll remind members of the committee here that, if you look back at the records, there was a popular phrase that was circulating back then in 2016, “6(1)(a) all the way”, which essentially would have allowed any descendant of a status Indian to be eligible to obtain status. It was a one-parent rule and it was something that was being advocated for by a number of people who made their way before the Senate at that time.
Of course, we didn't make it that far. We made it to a formula that was a lot more driven by caution and not as justified and not as in touch with the concerns of indigenous peoples. That caution was about money, candidly. There was a lot of fearmongering at that time—which wasn't data driven—about how many more status Indians would be introduced under the Indian Register if we went with a “6(1)(a) all the way” approach. I think there were figures ranging between the hundreds of thousands to the millions without any information, facts or data to support that. Those were the numbers that were being circulated to parliamentarians at that time to evoke some sort of, I guess you can call it, sentiment that we needed to be worried about the budgetary concerns and to be worried about the impact on our bottom line that this was going to have. Unfortunately, it was that motivation that drove section 6 of the Indian Act that was drafted back in 2017 and ultimately adopted. We're stuck with that.
Now here I am 10 years later and we're having the same conversation about the same subject matter. It's because of that reluctance to take that real step, to have a conversation with indigenous nations, specifically the first nations impacted by section 6 and what they thought a solution or an interim solution to this problem of discrimination would be.