Evidence of meeting #30 for National Defence in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was important.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk of the Committee Mr. Paul Cardegna
Honourable members of the committee, I see a quorum.
So we can proceed with the election of the chair.
I am ready to receive motions to that effect.
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk
I have a nomination for Mr. Maxime Bernier. Are there any other nominations?
(Motion agreed to)
I declare the motion carried and Maxime Bernier duly elected chair of the committee.
9:05 a.m.
Some hon. members
Hear, hear!
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk
Before inviting Mr. Bernier to take the chair, if the committee wishes we'll now proceed to the election of the vice-chairs.
I'm prepared to take nominations for the position of first vice-chair.
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk
Mr. Bryon Wilfert is nominated.
Are there other nominations?
(Motion agreed to)
I declare the motion adopted and Mr. Bryon Wilfert duly elected first vice-chair of the committee.
9:05 a.m.
Some hon. members
Hear, hear!
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk
I will now proceed with the election of second vice-chair of the committee.
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk
Claude Bachand has been nominated for the position of second vice-chair of the committee.
Are there any other nominations?
(Motion agreed to.)
9:05 a.m.
The Clerk
I declare the motion carried and Claude Bachand duly elected second vice-chair of the committee.
I now invite the chair to take the chair.
9:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Maxime Bernier
First of all, I want to thank you for electing me chair, and I would like to congratulate the two vice-chairs, Mr. Wilfert and Mr. Bachand, on their election.
I will do my best in chairing this committee, as I did in the past.
I will do my best to ensure that our proceedings run as efficiently as possible and that I remain as neutral and non-partisan as possible.
Thank you very much for the confidence that you have placed in me. It is an honour to serve as chair of this committee, assisted by my two vice-chairs.
Now I will ask if we have unanimous consent to go ahead and do our study on Arctic sovereignty. If we have consent, we have some witnesses who are ready to appear before us.
Do we have unanimous consent?
9:05 a.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
9:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Maxime Bernier
Thank you very much. I will ask our witnesses to come in.
The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami will be our first witnesses for our study on Arctic sovereignty.
We have with us Mary Simon, who is the president, and also John Merritt, le conseiller principal en politiques.
Welcome to our committee. You will have five to seven minutes to do your presentation. After that, the members will ask you questions. Thank you very much. You have the floor.
9:10 a.m.
Mary Simon President, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami
Thank you very much, and good morning. Congratulations on your election as chair.
I would like to first of all thank the standing committee for the invitation to appear today to speak to the topic of Arctic sovereignty.
You've mentioned that I have about five to seven minutes. With your indulgence, I might take a couple of extra minutes, if that's okay with the committee. It won't be much more than that.
As you said, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami—we call it ITK for short—is the national organization for the Inuit of Canada. ITK represents the Inuit who live in the four regions that make up Inuit Nunangat: the Inuvialuit region in the Beaufort Sea region, Nunavut, Nunavik in Arctic Quebec, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador.
All of the four Inuit regions that comprise Inuit Nunangat have entered into land claims agreements, modern treaties with the crown. In this context the crown represents the Canadian state and the people of Canada as a whole. These land claims agreements are protected under section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982. Land claims agreements provide much of the contemporary institutional structure to our contemporary relations with the crown, but it is important to remember that our special relationship with the crown goes back much further in history.
From the time of Martin Frobisher and continuing through centuries of voyages and activities involving naval ships, whalers, traders, missionaries, police, and public servants, Inuit have been working within a specific political and legal relationship with the crown. That relationship has been an evolving one, and the pace of that evolution has increased in recent years.
In the period leading up to the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship between the crown and Inuit was a grossly one-sided one, with Inuit suffering a steady loss of control over our ability to make decisions both for ourselves and for the lands and waters that have sustained us for thousands of years. Perhaps the bottom point of this one-sided relationship was experienced in the period when Inuit households were coaxed into relocating thousands of miles in order to serve agendas developed elsewhere, and when Inuit children were taken away to residential schools. A society's loss of control cannot be illustrated more pointedly or more painfully than through the rupturing of bonds between parents and children.
In more recent years, the relationship between the crown and Inuit has regained some, if still not a complete, balance. Courts have recognized common law responsibilities of the crown in relation to such things as aboriginal title, aboriginal rights, the honour of the crown, a fiduciary relationship, and the duty to consult and accommodate.
Since 1982, aboriginal treaty rights have constitutional status and constitutional protection. Accompanying this effort to rebalance the political and legal relationship between the crown and Inuit within Canada has been a changing international understanding of how the rights and roles of states interact with the rights and roles of peoples of the world, including indigenous peoples. The rights and roles of states must now be situated alongside established and emerging concepts of fundamental human rights, both collective and individual. This new reality has figured prominently in Inuit thinking about sovereignty in the Arctic, and not just the Canadian Arctic but also the larger circumpolar Arctic.
Inuit are an aboriginal people of Canada, but Inuit are also an indigenous people of Greenland and Alaska and the far eastern tip of Russia. In April of this year, Inuit from across the circumpolar world adopted a key document entitled “A Circumpolar Inuit Declaration on Sovereignty in the Arctic”. I have brought extra copies of that document with me today, if you would care to have one. Maybe you already have it.
Section 2 of that declaration is entitled “The Evolving Nature of Sovereignty in the Arctic”, and it puts forward six key propositions in that regard. Given the topic before the committee, section 2.1 is worth quoting in its entirety:
“Sovereignty" is a term that has often been used to refer to the absolute and independent authority of a community or nation both internally and externally. Sovereignty is a contested concept, however, and does not have a fixed meeting. Old ideas of sovereignty are breaking down as different governance models, such as the European Union, evolve. Sovereignties overlap and are frequently divided within federations in creative ways to recognize the rights of peoples.
For Inuit living within the states of Russia, Canada, the USA and Denmark/Greenland, issues of sovereignty and sovereign rights must be examined and assessed in the context of our long history of struggle to gain recognition and respect as an Arctic indigenous people having the right to exercise self-determination over our lives, territories, cultures and languages.
How should the Government of Canada's domestic and international policy-making for the Arctic build on the new and evolving realities identified in the Circumpolar Inuit Declaration? I would suggest there are six key things that the Parliament and Government of Canada should do.
Recommendation one is that in all its key assertions as to sovereignty and sovereign rights in relation to Arctic lands and waters, the Government of Canada should acknowledge the central importance of Inuit use and occupation of the lands and waters of Inuit Nunangat since time immemorial. The history of Inuit use has been acknowledged at various times and at various places in the past. For example, the 1930 understandings with Norway as to the Sverdrup Islands recognized the critical importance of Inuit hunting activity, and the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement expressly recognized the contributions of Nunavut Inuit to Canada's sovereignty arguments.
Consistency in acknowledging Inuit use and occupation isn't just a matter of effective advocacy before an international audience; it is also a matter of fundamental respect owed to Inuit.
Recommendation two is that coherent Government of Canada policy-making for the Arctic must be built around the idea of a core partnership relationship with Inuit. The Circumpolar Inuit Declaration put this in the following way in section 3.3 of the declaration:
The inextricable linkages between issues of sovereignty and sovereign rights in the Arctic and Inuit self-determination and other rights require states to accept the presence and role of Inuit as partners in the conduct of international relations in the Arctic.
The idea of partnership with Inuit is even more compelling in the domestic policy context. To be credible and constructive, partnership must be more than tokenism or lip service. Any Arctic strategy worth pursuing must put working with Inuit at its heart, not at the periphery. The current federal Arctic strategy should have been more of a collaborative writing project within an expedited timetable, on a partnership basis with Inuit.
Recommendation three is this. Partnerships that are not built on trust will always fail, and trust requires, at its most basic level, confidence that promises made are promises kept. Unfortunately, some baseline promises made to Inuit are still unfulfilled.
The most compelling example of this is found in the billion-dollar lawsuit that Nunavut Inuit had to initiate in the fall of 2006 because the Government of Canada would not act on a conciliation report on how to fairly implement the promises made in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. That's simply not good enough.
I'll move on to recommendation number four. The Government of Canada cannot expect the world to give full respect to arguments built on Inuit use and occupation of Arctic lands and waters when Inuit continue to lag so far behind other Canadians in relation to such things as minimum education, health, and housing standards.
9:20 a.m.
President, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami
Okay.
The world will increasingly tie assertions of sovereignty to questions involving other expectations of the international community, including expectations as to the treatment of aboriginal minorities and regard for key environmental considerations.
Inuit are a patient and practical people. We know that the economic and social problems that we face did not come about overnight and will not be remedied overnight. We know that most of these problems are problems of history and circumstances, not prejudice or bad intentions. But we also know that sovereignty will not be enhanced if it ignores or understates the basic material needs of the permanent residents of the Arctic or if it fails to understand that the alienation of the young is the surest way to undermine respect for the law and tolerance for others. In that very real sense, sovereignty must begin at home.
I will move on to my last recommendation, which is number five.
Partnership with Inuit in the Arctic cannot be divorced from the Government of Canada's willingness or unwillingness to stand up for aboriginal rights everywhere. It is time for the Government of Canada to act in concert with the resolution adopted by the House of Commons and express its support, along with almost the entirety of the global community, for the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Government of Canada's broader reputation and capacity in relation to arctic issues would also be enhanced by the reappointment of an arctic ambassador.
Thank you very much for allowing me to give you this presentation.
9:20 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Maxime Bernier
Thank you very much.
Now I will ask Mr. Wilfert to start the discussion.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Bryon Wilfert Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll be splitting my time with Mr. Bélanger.
Congratulations on your hard-fought election.
Thank you, Ms. Simon and Mr. Merritt, for coming before the committee today.
Section 4.2 talks about the need for interfacing with indigenous peoples in terms of the development of institutions in the Arctic, a multi-governance approach. You outlined a number of key points here in terms of what you see as important to enhancing the issue of sovereignty in the north. How would you describe the process to date in terms of that interface with government? And what approaches do you think should be taken to implement the type of strategies that you've put forward in order to make those key points--particularly in terms of a partnership--a reality?
9:25 a.m.
President, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami
Thank you very much for your question.
One of the key elements of this partnership-building that we're talking about between governments and Inuit is premised on the fact that we have settled all our land claims agreements. These land claims agreements are very comprehensive in nature and they were signed between all parties. I think there was a certain trust and expectation when these signatures were put on the legal documents.
So we have the tools already in place to be able to build that partnership, and it's very important to make sure that these agreements are being implemented in a way that allows us as Inuit to be partners with different organizations. It's not just the federal government, it's the territorial government and provincial governments. The co-management regimes and the authority that's bestowed upon us through these agreements are very important in terms of building that relationship.
The other point I want to make is that we work with the Government of Canada. Inuit have never really been against military presence in the Arctic. That's not a real issue for us, except that our agenda as Inuit is more focused on the human dimension of sovereignty, which means that alongside the infrastructure that is being built for the presence of our military and to make sure that our borders are secure, we need to build sustainable communities. As I said earlier in my presentation, Inuit have occupied the Arctic for millennia, and in many ways, as Canadians, as aboriginal people living in Canada, we were used as flag posts in the High Arctic to show that we had presence.
The Inuit won't be leaving there any time soon. We are permanent residents of the Arctic. So I think it's very important to build an agenda with the government that will help develop the capacity of our communities, where we take on the jobs that are there, where you don't always have to transport individuals into the Arctic to do all the jobs that are necessary. It means having a better education and health system, comparable to Canada. We're talking about trying to close the gap in living conditions between Inuit and other Canadians. Those go hand in hand, and I think that's a very important element of what we're talking about.
9:25 a.m.
Liberal
Bryon Wilfert Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Do you think the measurements are in place to evaluate progress in these areas that you've outlined?
9:25 a.m.
President, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami
No, there is no report card per se that is presented on an annual basis. We have asked the Government of Canada to establish a report card type of process. We raised this also with the premiers through the premiers' meeting, the confederation meeting. We've also raised it with different ministers within the Government of Canada. We feel that if we can gauge the progress that is being made, it will be easier to see how we can address the gaps.
