Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
It's good to see you in the chair for our final committee. It means a lot to have representation by women, particularly you, in this committee. I know how important your judgment is to our good work here.
Madam Chair, I'd now like to table a motion, which I provided to the clerk's office this morning, in relation to the study we are undergoing right now:
That, in relation to the Follow-up Study on Report 3, Access to Safe Drinking Water in First Nations Communities—Indigenous Services Canada, of the 2021 Reports 1 to 5 of the Auditor General of Canada, the committee calls on the Minister of Indigenous Services and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations to appear at the Public Accounts Committee in light of the seriousness and urgency of the issues raised by this study.
Madam Chair, it means a lot, I think to this committee in particular, that we voted unanimously to ensure that this work was done in the past. It's extremely disappointing to me that the ministers have declined to appear in this committee on something so serious.
We're talking about clean water, Madam Chair, something that is a fundamental right to life in this country, and what we're witnessing is ministers choosing to actively ignore the reality and the work of Parliament to ensure that we actually have a comprehensive study that tries to get to the bottom of this. We've heard from countless numbers of Auditors General—three Auditors General—who have said that this is simply unacceptable, and they have each called for accountability.
We have now asked twice for the deputy minister to come to present to this committee on this issue to clarify who's accountable. We've been unable to actually ascertain who is responsible for this.
We can't continue to see first nations and indigenous communities go without. I think it's imperative—and actually an emergency—that we take this crisis seriously. There will be a day—today—when children will be unable to get clean water as we speak. The fact that this has been going on for a decade—decades and decades—is simply unacceptable, and I think this is something that is very much shared by most of my colleagues.
I implore all my colleagues to see the importance and relevance of ensuring that the ministers understand this issue, are present to the committee and are also accountable to Canadians, and in particular to indigenous people, who continue to have no clean water for their children. They're feeling helpless.
At this point in time, I'd like to reassert my thoughts from the previous meeting about how devastated I am about this fact that we continue to not see this, and my understanding is that the government's approach to this is that things are better than what we think. That's something that we simply can't demonstrate to be true if we don't actually have the ministers here to account for it. I implore the committee to take this motion seriously.
I apologize to the clerk, and to you, Madam Chair, for not providing translation.
Thank you.