Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I'll let go some of the comments that the previous presenter shared. In particular, I will unpack some of the issues around indigenous reconciliation, and I hope that my comments will help inform the committee.
My name is Alika Lafontaine. I am an Ojibwe anesthesiologist, alignment consultant, and current project chair for the Indigenous Health Alliance.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional territory of Treaty 8, from which I am teleconferencing, as well as the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin people on whose territory these hearings are being held.
The Indigenous Health Alliance is a project that arose in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action for health. It has a mission to eliminate the differences in quality of care between indigenous and non-indigenous patients. Most important, it is through a process led by indigenous peoples.
Our members and supporters include the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, the College of Family Physicians Canada, the Canadian Medical Association, the Assembly of First Nations, and the national Indian Residential School Survivor Society, as well as many other first nations and territorial organizations. We are building a strategy to eliminate health quality differences that is led by indigenous people. Additional information about the Indigenous Health Alliance has been forwarded to your committee.
You may be asking why I am talking to you today. I hope I can shed some light on that as we talk about the similarities that exist between indigenous health and resource development.
I would like to acknowledge the technical assistance of Indigemetrics consulting in preparing my remarks, and the direction and advice of indigenous community members and leadership. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Senator Ted Quewezance from the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. He has been very helpful in understanding the history of resource development in my own traditional territory of Treaty 4.
I would like to emphasize that my remarks should not be misinterpreted as speaking for indigenous peoples. Our indigenous communities have their own internal decision-making processes, priorities, and leadership, and I encourage the committee to reach out to those territorial and local first nations at a regional and community level.
The challenges and issues before you today—the future of Canada's oil and gas, mining, and nuclear sectors—have interesting similarities in health. I would like to unpack a couple of points briefly.
The first point is one raised repeatedly by Justice Murray Sinclair, who states that the intent of colonialism was to extinguish the rights of indigenous peoples to land and resources. When we speak of colonial systems in health, for example, we can recognize these systems based on their outcomes—to extinguish the rights of indigenous peoples to land and resources. Consider that, for indigenous patients living on reserve to access the full benefits of the Canadian medical system, all they need to do is leave their traditional territory and disengage from their treaty rights to health. Quite literally, by giving up their rights to land and resources, they become like every other Canadian.
There are many layers to the situation, but to put it simply, indigenous peoples are not engaged in defining the problems, the solutions, or the implementation strategies concerning their health problems, and this is done by design. Health problems, solutions, and implementation strategies are predetermined. The system, once again by design, excludes indigenous patients in communities from playing a meaningful role. This is contrary to the transformation occurring in the mainstream Canadian health care system, where communities, families, and patients form the centre of everything we do. We are actually redesigning our Canadian health care system to ensure this.
It is also important to note that while the mainstream Canadian health system continues to have better outcomes, indigenous health outcomes are moving in the opposite direction. There is obvious correlation between health system design and patient outcomes. The indigenous health approach is obviously not working, as disparities widen. Quite literally, the colonial health system encourages extinguishment of indigenous rights to land and resources.
Now let me connect this with resource development in the oil and gas, mining, and nuclear sectors. Framing engagement of indigenous peoples as a social licence is a misconception that has to be addressed in any future framework. In 2013, indigenous communities had already won more than 150 court cases across the Canadian resource sector, and this number has likely grown since then. As indigenous communities have asserted their treaty rights to land and resources, the duty to consult and accommodate impacts the outcome of resource development in a very real way. Indigenous peoples do not provide a social licence to resource projects; they provide a literal licence. That licence is protected by a legal framework that continues to evolve.
Indigenous peoples must be engaged at a level that respects and supports their treaty rights to land and resources. Corporations have a legal duty to engage indigenous peoples for resource development that occurs on their respective traditional territory. It is a legal duty that corporations have yet to fully embrace. There is still an ongoing effort to reframe these legal rights as social rights. Each has a very different trust obligation.
By comparing the indigenous health consultation process, and the consultation process for resource development in the oil, gas, mining, and nuclear sectors, I observed the same colonial system. For example, the National Energy Board process is designed to engage indigenous peoples after a plan has been made. That means identifying the problems, solutions, and implementation strategies for resource development have largely been predetermined.
The NEB process then becomes more of an exercise of selling the plan, instead of having indigenous peoples involved in creating the plan. Inevitably conflict emerges from this process with strong efforts to minimize or eliminate the treaty rights to land and resources held by indigenous peoples within the territory in an effort to ensure the resource development proceeds.
Consultation varies widely among resource development projects. In a project around the Swift Current area of Saskatchewan in Treaty 4 territory, the indigenous consultation involved picking up a single hitchhiker with whom the persons consulting discussed the project over coffee. This is not hyperbole. This literally happened. I am not suggesting this is the norm for consultation, but evaluating processes cannot ignore such obvious deficiencies.
How can Canada properly consult indigenous peoples in a way that acknowledges and respects their treaty rights to land and resources? The current process must embrace having communities involved in defining the problems, solutions, and implementation strategies of any resource development project at the earliest reasonable opportunity. Outcomes cannot be predetermined.
The process must also acknowledge that problems cannot be identified as a single issue; for example, how to get a pipeline from point A to point B.
Integrated with the issues of resource development are those of education, health, economic development, and environment, among others. If a consultation process does not acknowledge and address these issues in a clear manner, the solutions will not address the real problems. Implementation strategies will then be more likely to fail.
When stakeholders in the Indigenous Health Alliance identified that these issues would arise, we adopted a community-based process with a charting and prioritization tool kit. I will share some of our highest priorities issues, and you may recognize some overlap with ongoing issues within the oil, gas, mining, and nuclear sectors from previous presenters.
These priorities include recognizing that in order to achieve this outcome, we need to address the lack of a community-based model of decision-making, where communities decide the problem, decide the solution, and decide on the strategy for implementation.
First nations often have internally competing visions, and competing visions with non-community stakeholders and with other regional first nations. This leads to difficulties articulating how to own and control models to optimize outcomes through cross-jurisdictional collaboration and integration of federal and provincially funded processes as anticipated by self-government.
Often decisions about problems, solutions, and implementation strategies are already decided before the community is even engaged. “Engagement” becomes selling communities on a predetermined strategy, instead of truly engaging the community and proceeding with community-based priorities controlled by community decision-making processes.
Indigenous historical trauma leads to a community not trusting outsiders to facilitate this engagement, and the engagement must have leadership in the community that it has confidence in.
Communities are insistent on the involvement of elders through the process and the decision-making process. Elders must be recognized as a stakeholder group that needs to be part of the decision-making and not just as influencers on the decision-making process. They need to be directly involved in setting the agenda as they want to integrate project components and processes. This is often expressed in the activity as being holistic.
Government processes use a one-issue process. They don't want to address all the issues in a coordinated strategy. Without transparency and a good communication strategy the design of the process will fail.
Lack of trust of government is intensified in indigenous communities and is exacerbated with communities who do not understand how government structures work. The result is that both sides feel they are not being heard.
The current process adopted by government to move forward resource development projects does not engage communities because it is not designed to engage communities. It is a colonial process.
Indigenous peoples are pragmatic. Indigenous peoples are reasonable. Indigenous peoples have our own priorities and we are heterogeneous. If a process that truly addresses our community-based issues supports the building of a community-based decision-making structure and clearly identifies issues in a context beyond a one-sided consultation, indigenous peoples are pragmatic and reasonable about resource development.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today. I look forward to further discussion.
Meegwetch.