Kwe. I would first like to thank the various aboriginal nations for allowing us to meet today on their ancestral land.
I represent Quebec Native Women Inc. as a coordinator for the environment and sustainable development.
Quebec Native Women Inc. represents Quebec's first nations women, including those living in urban areas. Our members come from Quebec's 11 aboriginal nations and various aboriginal groups from the rest of Canada who are living in Quebec's urban communities. We are members of the Native Women's Association of Canada. We also sit on the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, the First Nations Human Resources Development Commission of Quebec, as well as a number of other aboriginal and non-aboriginal commissions and committees.
In pursuit of its mission to defend the rights of aboriginal women, Quebec Native Women Inc. has been engaged for a number of years in issues related to the protection of the environment and resources. Our organization outlines aboriginal women's specific concerns and perspectives with regard to their access to land and its resources, as well as the protection of their traditional knowledge.
In collaboration with the Hutchins Legal law firm, in March 2017, Quebec Native Women Inc. submitted to the National Energy Board Modernization Expert Panel a brief whose goal was to raise the expert panel's awareness of the realities experienced by aboriginal women as an “intersectional” group. The idea was specifically to raise their awareness of the implications and specific risks all major projects regulated by the board may have for those women.
I am here today to remind the expert panel that aboriginal women are suffering specific and disproportionate consequences of major energy development projects. Those projects are affecting their land and resources permanently and contributing to climate change, to which aboriginal women and communities are more vulnerable than the rest of the population. The fact that aboriginal women are the ones who benefit the least from the economic impact of those projects within their communities makes this reality even more worrisome.
Currently, the National Energy Board's regulations, policies and guidance notes contain no requirement in terms of the assessment and consideration of aboriginal women's concerns or the specific and disproportionate impact those projects have on them.
Although, since 2011, at the request of the Native Women's Association of Canada and Pauktuutit, the Inuit women's association of Canada, the option to carry out a gender-based analysis in consultation with aboriginal communities has been included in the guidelines for federal officials to fulfill the duty to consult, neither the National Energy Board Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act or their implementation policies make that an obligation.
In 2014 and 2015, Quebec Native Women Inc. also participated in a series of conferences held in Ottawa and Vancouver as part of an international symposium entitled “Gendered Impacts: Indigenous Women and Resource Extraction”. At that event, people pointed out a worrisome lack of specific data on the particular impact of land and resource development on aboriginal women. However, those projects' specific and disproportionate repercussions on aboriginal people and women and the resulting climate change are increasingly recognized in Canada and around the world.
The consultation policies currently applied by Canada in regulatory and environmental processes, including those carried out by the National Energy Board, leave no room for the voice of aboriginal women and do not require a fair representation of their interests. This situation is related to a double under-representation of aboriginal women and a virtual lack of consideration for their concerns, the risks they are exposed to and their specific interests within aboriginal governmental structures at the community, regional and national levels. The situation is the same in the consultation processes carried out by the federal government or its delegated officers. As a result, inequalities and discrimination against women are created and perpetuated.
That double under-representation is reflected in the environmental and socioeconomic impact studies, environmental assessments and the required follow-up measures for regulatory processes, especially in preliminary negotiations and the text of agreements signed with promoters and governments. No special attention is paid to aboriginal women in those documents, or to their concerns, rights or interests.
We argue that the modernization of regulatory and environmental processes requires the full participation of women in the decisions related to land and its resources and that their interests should be taken into account properly. As a result, the voice of aboriginal women must come through clearly in the national data on energy.
Regardless of the process used and the entity in charge of reviewing the assessments of environmental or socioeconomic impacts on aboriginal communities, appropriate mechanisms must be implemented to ensure the assessment and the taking into consideration of the specific repercussions of development projects on aboriginal women.
For example, Canada must, in collaboration with aboriginal women, adapt the current gender-based analysis model to aboriginal realities in order to be able to use it as an analysis tool to assess the impact of major development projects regulated by the National Energy Board. In order to ensure that aboriginal women's perspectives are really taken into account, that tool must make the active participation of aboriginal women or organizations that represent their interests mandatory in the assessment of projects' environmental and socioeconomic repercussions.
To that effect, the federal government must provide aboriginal women and organizations that represent them with the resources and capacities they need to carry out appropriate studies on environmental impacts and fully participate in the environmental assessment process.
In addition, environmental assessments must take into account the unique perspective of aboriginal women that stems from their special relationship with the land, their traditional knowledge and their role in the transfer of that knowledge to future generations. The exclusion of aboriginal women from the public arena, such as courts or studies on traditional land use, has rendered their traditional knowledge invisible. Therefore, concrete and specific measures must be implemented to encourage their participation in the environmental assessments of large-scale development projects, in order to address the lack of national data on energy.
Those are the main recommendations of the brief presented to the expert panel related to issues we are discussing today.
The government must implement, in collaboration with organizations representing aboriginal women, such as Quebec Native Women Inc., specific mechanisms to ensure the full participation of aboriginal women throughout the consultation process of aboriginal communities on projects regulated by the National Energy Board, especially regarding the management, design, planning, execution, assessment and monitoring of projects.
The government must provide organizations representing aboriginal women with adequate and realistic resources and funding to address the concerns and specific interests of aboriginal women in the processes currently undertaken by the National Energy Board.
The government must support and fund organizations representing aboriginal women as they carry out in-depth studies to document and analyze specific repercussions of projects regulated by the National Energy Board on aboriginal women, so as to address the lack of analytical and statistical data in that area.
We recommend that the government require the integration of a gender-based analysis adapted to aboriginal realities in the assessments of environmental and socioeconomic impacts undertaken with regard to projects regulated by the National Energy Board. To that effect, the gender-based analysis method already used by the federal government could be adapted and used as a tool for assessing the specific repercussions of those projects on aboriginal women.
In light of the concerns and recommendations Quebec Native Women Inc. is outlining in this brief, we can say that access to national data on energy provides many benefits for community, provincial and national aboriginal organizations, as it makes it easier for us to gather documentation and get informed when decisions that concern us are being made.
However, as it has been shown, there is a major lack of data on energy concerning specifically the country's aboriginal women. It is worrisome that decisions are being made based on current data on energy, when we know that aboriginal women are the ones who benefit the least from the economic impact of those projects and that they will face the most direct negative impacts.
By addressing that lack of data on energy, the government would enable organizations representing aboriginal women such as Quebec Native Women Inc., aboriginal communities, researchers and officials to make more informed and fair decisions, so that the rights and interests of aboriginal women would finally be taken into account better.
Kchi wliwni. Thank you.