Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being here today.
Being from Miramichi—Grand Lake in New Brunswick, living within the Mi'kmaq ancestral region, I would prefer the questions be answered by Chief Mitchell or Chief Peters, but I'm also open to having anybody else answer the same point.
It's unfortunate the subject matter today is how Indigenous Services Canada and the CMHC have poorly managed housing conditions in first nations communities.
As a former minister of aboriginal affairs in New Brunswick, as you can imagine, I saw this up close and personal for about a two-year period when I was minister.
I'll repeat what I said to the Auditor General when she first presented her reports on “Housing in First Nations Communities”, and I'll comment on the work of Canada's first female auditor general, Sheila Fraser.
In her farewell speech, Madam Fraser criticized as “truly shocking” the lack of improvements on first nations reserves. She also said, “I actually think it's quite tragic when you see that there is a population in this country that does not have the sort of basic services that Canadians take for granted.”
The recent Office of the Auditor General report, “Housing in First Nations Communities”, shows lots of similarities to former auditor Fraser's comments. It's very unfortunate to see a complete lack of progress over the past nine years.
According to the Office of the Auditor General, Indigenous Services Canada and CMHC do not have a strategy to support first nations in closing the housing gap by 2030. Even worse, according to the office, the housing gap will keep growing.
I'm thinking of something here today, and I'm going to mention it, because I think it's important. With everything that's just been said, we talk a lot about housing and home ownership and how in the future young people in Canada, in general, will have a very difficult time owning their first home. Although we're not here to debate the Indian Act, and there could be positives and negatives seen both ways on that act, I want to say this. Sometimes we forget that first nations and indigenous people are essentially robbed of a sense of pride and accomplishment that actually comes with home ownership, because of some of the sections of that act. Although it may not apply to every single indigenous person today, it's still a fair number of them, as I can understand from earlier deliberations.
I would like to ask your opinion here. I can imagine how we got here. We're always talking about building capacity. I remember a situation in a Mi'kmaq community in New Brunswick where the chief asked me to visit, and I went down and visited the community. I found this house, and it was full of mould, and there were 16 or 17 people living there. There should never have been that many people living there, number one. The house had poor ventilation. It was black mould. I'm an asthmatic, so as soon as I walked in, I knew, because I could hardly breathe.
The chief of the community and the band at the time couldn't afford to fix that mould problem. As I understood it, there were far more problems than just the unit that I witnessed up close and personal, if you will. The family that was living in the unit also didn't have the ability or the resources to fix the problem. There was a wooden basement under this house, as someone said earlier. It was a house that was probably only 30 years old, but it was literally falling apart.