Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, members of the committee, fellow witnesses and officials. Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today regarding Bill C-10.
My name is David Wright. I'm a law professor with the University of Calgary's faculty of law. I appear before you as an individual, although I understand my name was put forward by the Land Claims Agreements Coalition as someone who has worked, researched and written in this area extensively.
Prior to my academic appointment, I held several roles, including legal counsel for the Gwich'in Tribal Council—for whom I still act from time to time—and lawyer and auditor for the federal commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, housed in the Office of the Auditor General, for five years. This latter role, in particular, informs my perspectives today.
My opening comments complement those of the esteemed witnesses you have heard from already, including indigenous leaders in modern treaty contexts across Canada. In these opening comments, I offer three interrelated perspectives to assist this committee in situating Bill C-10 in the broader law policy and institutional landscape for modern treaty implementation.
The first of these is follow-through. Bill C-10 can be seen as the federal government's simply following through on an existing commitment to create such an institution. Indigenous modern treaty partners have called for the creation of this institution since 2003, including tabling the formal proposal by the Land Claims Agreements Coalition in 2017. In recent years, the federal government has been a constructive partner in pursuing this agenda, articulating this in several documents, including the 2023 modern treaty implementation policy and the 2023-28 UNDRIP action plan, chapter 5. The commitment has also been reiterated by a prime minister and several ministers in the years since 2023. In light of these clearly articulated commitments and intentions of the federal government, Bill C-10 represents a rare and important opportunity to simply follow through on this important shared Crown-indigenous objective.
The second perspective is a whole-of-government approach. The commissioner is a key missing piece in the federal government's stated intention to take a whole-of-government approach to modern treaty implementation. For more than a decade, beginning with the 2015 cabinet directive put in place by the Harper administration, led by former minister Valcourt, the federal government has committed to taking a whole-of-government approach to modern treaty implementation. The commitment has been repeated, of course, many times—for example, in the 2015 statement of principles on modern treaty implementation, numerous departmental reports and the aforementioned collaborative modern treaty implementation policy.
The whole-of-government approach—as you've heard—is required because treaties cumulatively include thousands of obligations the Crown must fulfill. Those Crown modern treaty obligations reside not with any single government department but with the Crown as a whole. Because no single department can meaningfully ensure that this whole-of-government approach is fulfilled, implementation challenges are systemic and stubborn. As such, this commissioner would fill an important institutional gap by ensuring that sustained independent oversight focuses on implementation and getting better information, in order to guide the Crown-indigenous modern treaty relationships. The powers and authorities set out in Bill C-10 offer a very important bird's-eye view with sightlines that don't exist elsewhere in the government.
The third and final perspective is deference to the existing text version of Bill C-10. Bill C-10 really does represent an exemplary approach to collaborative Crown-indigenous codevelopment of legislation, leading to—as you've heard from numerous witnesses—broad support across indigenous modern treaty parties, meaning that the text of the present version deserves strong deference. I think most would agree that the process was one of the very finest examples of legislative codevelopment with the federal government. I commend all the officials involved in the exercise. Bill C-10 is the outcome of this collaborative process. Modern treaty parties put their trust in the process, engaged in good faith and endorsed the tabled version without amendment.
It is important to acknowledge that amendments at this stage would essentially amount to unilateral change by the Crown. Such unilateral acts are precisely part of the problem in this historically fraught Crown-indigenous relationship. To amend at this late stage would be contrary to nation-to-nation dealings, the shared objective of reconciliation, and the spirit and intent of the aforementioned policies and modern treaties themselves.
As a final closing comment, let me step back for a second and say that, from my perspective, the commissioner would help everybody do their jobs better. In my experience with the federal environment commissioner, most audits are quite collaborative with departments and officials, including very senior officials. They quickly realize that there's a shared interest in continual improvement. The mere existence of the commissioner's office would likely help all departments and officials up their game. From there, the reports and recommendations would provide a robust, substantiated body of information and findings to guide and inform forward progress in pursuit of fulfilling treaty objectives and the shared goal of reconciliation.
Thanks very much.
