Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to present to you and have this discussion with this important committee.
I am the Arctic Athabaskan Council's international chair. We also are members of the Arctic Council as permanent participants. We represent approximately 50,000 people in Alaska, the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Generally in Canada we're called Dene, but in the books you'll find that the people in Alaska are called Athabaskans, so we have the name Arctic Athabaskan Council.
I want to focus on the existing agreements we already have that need to be put into practice and confirmed. Especially in Canada, we have, as you know, section 35 in the Canadian Constitution Act, 1982, which solidifies and makes clear that the rights we have are constitutional rights and are separate from the other rights that Canadian people have. Based on section 35, then, they are separate from the Constitution's section 91 powers that the federal government has or the section 92 powers that the provinces have.
The country is based on those three main areas. As such, when we're looking at developing a particular resource, whether it's in Canada or the United States, we have to look at the international instruments we have.
I'm originally from Yellowknife. I'm a member of Treaty No. 8. In the early 1970s, we took the treaties to the Canadian courts. Canada's position was that we may have had rights at one time, but because of the treaties and legislation, our rights were extinguished. The court case proved, in what is commonly called the Paulette case, that indeed we have rights, that they continue to exist. Our treaties were peace and friendship instruments between the Dene and the Crown—Great Britain—and not between Canada and the Dene, because Canada didn't have the authority to enter into treaties at that time.
The judgment also went so far as to say that the rights we have need to be protected by Canada and that we still retain title to our lands, so aboriginal title or Dene title exists. That was in 1973. Those agreements need to be put into practice by you as a government, and we include the opposition parties as part of the government when we talk about government.
With that, the relationship we have is based on trust. It's based on those early agreements. There are other agreements that you need to understand and look at.
There is the Jay treaty of 1794, which was more in the southern part of Canada but included all the tribes of North America and Great Britain and the United States. What it did was it encouraged continued trade, barter and sales across the Canada-U.S. border. Unfortunately, Canada no longer supports the agreement, although the United States does. That's primarily because of the War of 1812, when the U.S. tried to annex Canada, as you know. The whole thinking behind that treaty was to stabilize the economy, and that's what you're thinking about, so I think you have to understand that treaty and look at what the doctrine talks about.
There are other treaties that you need to be aware of. There's a recent court decision from December 2018 dealing with the Robinson-Huron treaty between the Anishinabe and Great Britain. They took the treaty to court, and the judgment came down a couple of months ago, a very important one. It talks about the annuities that the people receive through that agreement, which is an annual payment.
The agreement said that the fee would increase over time. It has only increased once since 1874, and it increased from two dollars to four dollars. They took that to court. The judgment came down, saying that the intent was never for that amount to be a stale amount, that it was to be increased. The court agreed to raise the four dollar annuity. To quote an article, “The judge ruled the annuities are to now be unlimited in their scope as they are intended as a mechanism to share the wealth generated by the resources within the treaty territory.” In other words, there is no ceiling on the amount that people ought to get. What's happening now is that these first nations are negotiating with the Crown as to what the increases should look like.
The important aspect here is that these treaties were meant to afford some of the wealth from the land within their territory. It includes the Province of Ontario and the federal government. That whole arrangement now has to get sorted out.
I think you need to look at some of these court cases because it opens up some of the things you're thinking of. I can't provide you all of those answers, but I'll give you some other examples.
The Tla-o-qui-aht land claims and self-government agreement, which came into effect in 2004 after many decades of negotiating, and also the Déline self-government agreement in the Northwest Territories, which was put together in 2016, provides them with opportunities, whole chapters on economics. On international matters the Tla-o-qui-aht agreement provides a whole chapter on how Canada has to engage with them, so it's already spelled out within these constitutionally entrenched agreements. The Nisga'a self-government agreement in the province of B.C. is very similar. The Inuit also have that in the territories. The provincial settings, which are different, set up those arrangements.
There is great concern with the foreign investment promotion and protection agreement, commonly called FIPA, between Canada and China. This agreement gives sweeping authority to companies outside Canada and because of the mechanisms in place to settle disputes, that doesn't give us in Canada the authority we normally would have because of the structure of decision-making. This concerns a lot of our people.
The saving grace—and this is what I think you need to study—is that these original treaties were designed to not only protect indigenous peoples, but to protect everyone in the country. For example, Treaty 11, the last numbered treaty, which was in 1921, goes all the way up to the Arctic coast and beyond into international waters, which essentially settles the question of who owns the Northwest Passage.
Use those agreements to your advantage. That's what they are there for, and I am obviously encouraging you to do that with our people.
It's a given that you're looking at this whole economic question with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, UNDRIP. It says that coming into our territories, you need the free, prior and informed consent of our people. I don't think we need to comment much on that.
As for some other thoughts, first, we know that some of our first nations, as Ms. Mack said earlier, really don't have the capacity to do the kind of work they want to do. They're slowly getting to the point where impact benefit agreements now are becoming common, but they're not really dealing with the question of wealth or the ownership of the resource. It's a short means to help the communities. It gives priorities to jobs and so on.
I think what we need to do is assist communities so that they can develop industrial development protocols. If an industry wants to come into a particular territory, the protocol defines who they ought to deal with. Is it the chief and council? Is it the elders council? Is it the tribal council and so on? Then there's a framework that everyone can work within.
I know I'm getting short on time, Mr. Chair, so I'll leave that for now. I can add comments as questions come forward.
Thank you.