Science and Research Committee on June 11th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 92 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Before I begin, I'd like to ask all members and other in-person participants to consult the cards on the table for guidelines to prevent audio feedback incidents. Please take note of the following preventative measures in place to protect the health and safety of all participants, including our interpreters.

Use only the black, approved earpiece. Keep your earpiece away from the microphones at all times. When you're not using your earpiece, please place it face down on the sticker placed on the table for this purpose.

Thank you all for your co-operation.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. I'd like to make a few comments for the benefit of members. For the members in the room, please raise your hand if you wish to speak. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can, and we appreciate your understanding in this regard. All comments should be addressed through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(a)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Tuesday, January 31, 2023, the committee is resuming its study of science and research in Canada's Arctic in relation to climate change. This is our sixth and final meeting on this topic, and I know that we have all found it to be very fascinating.

It's now my pleasure to welcome from Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Natan Obed, president, and Carrie Grable, director, Inuit Qaujisarvingat.

You will have up to five minutes for your opening remarks after which we'll proceed with rounds of questions.

President Obed, I invite you to make an opening statement for up to five minutes.

[Natan Obed, President, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami]

Nakurmiik.

Good morning, and thank you so much for having me here to discuss such an important topic to Inuit.

As introduced, my name is Natan Obed.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami represents the 70,000 Inuit in Canada. Our homeland is called Inuit Nunangat, and there are four geopolitical regions in our jurisdiction: Nunatsiavut in northern Labrador, Nunavik in northern Quebec, Nunavut as a whole—the public government was created by the land claim, but there is an Inuit treaty organization called Nunavut Tunngavik that represents the rights of Inuit within Nunavut—and the Inuvialuit region, which is represented by the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation.

At ITK, one of our biggest priorities is combatting climate change, as well as ongoing adaptation and mitigation efforts regarding a changing Arctic. We created a national Inuit climate change strategy, which was released in 2019. Also, in the research and science field, we created the national Inuit strategy on research, which was launched in 2018. We've tried to use these tools to interact with all of our partners—government included—regarding our research priorities and climate change priorities.

As I'm sure you've heard, the Arctic is warming at a rate of up to four times faster than the global average. Inuit living within Inuit Nunangat have a wide range of socio-economic challenges that are further exacerbated by climate change, especially things like food security and health and safety.

The ability to travel within our homeland the way we always have, and to use our knowledge to navigate within our homeland, is jeopardized by a changing Arctic. We've lost over 40% of our sea ice cover in the last two decades. That is a massive challenge for us when it comes to general travel, considering that sea ice is our highway, especially from—usually—November until June. There is a significant part of the year now when we don't have access to hunting and fishing as we did before or are able to travel among communities. There are only two communities that have road access between southern Canada and the Arctic, and there are very few, if any, road networks among Inuit communities. Therefore, the sea ice—and winter in general, in a terrestrial sense—creates opportunities for us to travel and connect in ways that are now jeopardized.

If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at this rate, we could see a temperature increase in our Inuit Nunangat area of well over 10°C from the 1951 to 1990 averages, which would have catastrophic effects on our biodiversity and communities. We've tried to work in partnership with the Government of Canada and, as best we can, with the research community, but significant barriers remain, and I look forward to chatting with you about these today.

At the very heart of this is the challenge that the Government of Canada and provinces and territories have in recognizing Inuit as a specific level of government with specific rights and specific partnership opportunities beyond the traditional ones the Government of Canada understands, whether they be nation-state to nation-state or the federal government versus provinces and territories. That extends to the way Parliament does its business, the way legislation is crafted and the way orders in council are adjudicated or administered. This ends up leading to the exclusion of Inuit or the individualization of Inuit, instead of working with Inuit as collectives.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to this conversation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you so much for your opening statement.

I will now open the floor to questions. Please be sure to indicate to whom your questions are directed.

I have MP Rempel Garner on the list.

Are we going to switch? Is it Mr. Lobb going first and Michelle in the next round?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Yes. Just like we planned it, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Okay. That's fine.

The floor is yours.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for attending.

We've had many different groups and people appear before this committee. There's one takeaway for me. Maybe I'm wrong or right; I don't know. It seems like there are a lot of organizations—up to 40, at least—whether they be in university research or different groups that focus on studying the climate and other things in the Arctic, but many don't live where they are doing the research. I'm not faulting them for that, but that's a statement of fact. They rely a lot on the people who actually live there.

Do you think it would be beneficial to the universities and research organizations to put more of a focus on being able to live, work and research in the communities they're supposed to be studying?

[Natan Obed]

Thanks for the question.

We've struggled, as Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and/or Inuit treaty organizations, to fight for a space for the research priority setting and the research funding, whether it be with the federal government, within academia or within the tri-council. We've made some inroads, but largely not.

The vast amount of funding that is targeted for Arctic science flows through systems that are in the south, and it benefits academic institutions, governments or relationships that are all south to south. People build their careers and live comfortably in the south, while being experts about us and about our environment, or about climate change in Inuit Nunangat. Therefore, priority setting for Inuit and for Inuit communities is a transformative change that we would like to see.

We see the Government of Canada investing in infrastructure, especially in Polar Knowledge Canada in Cambridge Bay. I think that is a very positive development, although the governance of POLAR is still of great concern to Inuit in the way in which the Government of Canada has only used its systems to populate the governance of that institution and the priority setting for it.

We hope that in the future, there will be more partnership-based approaches to Arctic research, but also that Inuit research priorities and Arctic community research priorities will be held in as high esteem as the research priority setting that happens in the south.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

What are the priorities? If somebody said to you, “Give me your top three,” would you have a top three?

[Natan Obed]

A lot of our priorities are based on adaptation and mitigation for the ongoing climate change effects in our communities and the ability for our people to adapt to them, or for our communities to even survive. We've faced existential threats of, say, erosion caused by either extreme weather events on the coast or permafrost thaw in the terrestrial regions. We have the collapse of species like caribou. We need to understand more about that and how to ensure that our wildlife can be as healthy as possible, even within a changing Arctic.

We have a number of different imperative research questions to meet the threats that are now caused by climate change. On the other side, on the academic side, we have a lot of other research questions that are important to institutions or to different fields of science. We're not here to criticize any of those; we're just here to say that some of them don't appear to be as urgent to answer as the ones that affect our communities and our people every day.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

When all the researchers come up—I'm guessing it's from around now until the fall—where do they all stay? I'm just curious about that. When they're up in your area, where do they stay?

[Natan Obed]

Well, some of our communities don't even have a hotel. If people are coming through, often people stay in other people's homes and, then, if people are doing field research on the land, they have remote camps. Inuit either will partner with researchers or be administrative support for researchers through guides and through helping out with people who are doing work by having base camps or providing guiding support for people.

On the bigger challenges we have, especially when we're doing work on, say, infrastructure development, if there's a big housing build in a community, a lot of those hotel rooms are gone six months out. All of our construction happens in the same window as the research. I think the capacity to house researchers in the Arctic definitely is a limiting factor when it comes to what can happen, but to answer in just one word, it's very difficult.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you. That's our time. That was perfect timing.

Now we will turn to MP Jaczek for six minutes.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Obed and Ms. Grable, for coming again to our committee. We didn't have the benefit of your wisdom at your previous attendance here.

I do want to reference something, Mr. Obed. It was eight years ago, but your words to the Ontario legislature back in June 2016 have remained with me through this time. You spoke particularly about the resilience of Inuit people, and surely that's being tested now with climate change. Obviously, it is a very real threat, and the resilience is so impressive in the face of that.

You have talked about priorities and, as I understand from the national Inuit strategy on research, you've identified the priority areas. Of course, we have heard a lot about physical infrastructure and so on, but would you be able to elaborate a bit on the pressing health challenges facing Inuit communities today and how research can address these particular challenges?

[Natan Obed]

We're quite fortunate to be in the midst of Qanuippitaa, a national Inuit health strategy. We're doing fieldwork now across our four regions. Fieldwork has already been completed in the Inuvialuit and the Nunatsiavut regions. This is building off of the international polar year Inuit health surveys that were point-in-time captures of Inuit health and wellness across Inuit Nunangat.

We are now doing a health survey that will be stable and sustainable. We hope to do it every four to five years. We're in the midst of creating that first cohort, that first summary data, that will allow us to be very clear about Inuit health status in 2023 or 2024. We relied on the aboriginal peoples survey and other related health surveys in the last 20 to 30 years. This is a definite step up.

Regarding our health status, we have huge challenges in regard to food insecurity and poverty. Our food insecurity rates are upwards of 70% for moderate and severe food insecurity. Our overcrowding rates are around 55%. Our tuberculosis rates are over 300 times the national average of those born in Canada. We also have a life expectancy that is over 10 years less than the Canadian life expectancy.

We have essential challenges when it comes to health. Some of that comes from lack of access. Our morbidity rate for cancer treatment is much higher than the Canadian average. The challenge that we face is health access. Most of our health care comes through referral structures. We have health centres in communities, but they consist of nurses who provide care and refer all patients who have any significant health challenge to regional centres. Often those regional centres are then referral centres to the south.

Much of the acute care that happens for Inuit across Canada happens in St. John's, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Yellowknife. That system has saved lives, but in its construction is a barrier to upstream care and to ensuring that those who have significant illnesses can be diagnosed and treated quickly.

We also have challenges in the climate sense. We have less access to hunting, fishing and traditional foods. That has then caused challenges for our diet and also for the social fabric of our community and the way in which we share with one another, the way in which we pass down knowledge and information, and then the overall health of our people.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

I'll just follow up a little bit on the food security piece. You've talked about adaptation and mitigation.

Is there any research that has shown any cause for optimism for growing foods perhaps farther north than was ever able to be done previously so that there's less reliance on shipping foods in to your communities? Is there anything there that looks more positive?

[Natan Obed]

Growing up in Nunatsiavut, we had Moravian missionaries from the 1700s until now, so I grew up with rhubarb being a part of my diet or seeing people trying to get very tiny potatoes out of a garden. That's about the extent of it.

We've experimented with greenhouses, but the challenge is that greenhouses are tied to infrastructure costs and to energy costs.

We need to get our communities off diesel. We need to be able to have more established infrastructure to allow for goods to transit across Inuit Nunangat and to the south and back to the north to be able to build local food options.

Right now, our food-producing capacity is often feeding people in other parts of the world as well, and that's a systemic challenge.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you.

[Natan Obed]

All of the fish that are caught off 0A and 0B in the Davis Strait often go to China. A lot of the caribou that are hunted and the char that are caught in inshore fisheries end up being served in restaurants in southern Canada or other places.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

I'm sorry. That's our time. We might have other people who want to follow up on that. Thank you.

MP Blanchette-Joncas, you have six minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Welcome to the witnesses who are with us today.

Mr. Obed, the committee heard from researchers and experts who conduct northern research, including people from the Centre for Northern Studies, based at Université Laval, in Quebec City.

They carry out projects with Inuit and other communities, through co-development. They told us how challenging co-development can be, given that resources are quite limited. In their view, co-developing research projects with Inuit communities is the only way to carry out research that not only is relevant, but also truly addresses your needs.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

[Natan Obed]

Yes, there are very specific challenges in partnering with southern-based research institutions to do meaningful work in Inuit Nunangat. I'd like to talk about a couple of partnerships we've had that have actually worked, but have only worked because there has been a true partnership approach from start to finish, and a very difficult time in doing it.

ArcticNet is one of these networks. It's housed at Université Laval and has received federal funding, most recently from the strategic science fund. Inuit are now partners with ArcticNet, along with the Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada, to chart the course of the next five years for this particular network. It brings together academics, industry, governments, Inuit and other indigenous peoples into a common research program. There's a partnership-based approach to this work.

I think there is a natural misunderstanding that many of us have with one another, whether it be the roles and responsibilities of the federal government or the particular makeup and rules around academia, and then the individuals who then come to us for partnerships, mostly principal investigators, professors with research chairs and their particular views on the world and thoughts about partnership. Then there's our governance, which is often not understood very well—without making that into a negative statement.

The ability for us to come together and work together does take time. It is, by its very nature, challenging. The terms and conditions that are put on all of us in all of our roles make the windows that we have to collaborate much smaller. But we have a common interest. As long as we can accept and celebrate all of the different priorities that we have together, I think that is the path forward.

The other example is the research partnership we've recently had with the United Kingdom, Polar Knowledge Canada and Inuit. We have done over 20 projects in relation to climate change adaptation. They have partnered with U.K. academics, Canadian academics and Inuit partners as well.

So there are examples of good work that's happening.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Obed, you talked about one of your big challenges: having your specific level of government recognized. As you know, the people of Quebec understand the importance of self-determination and nation-to-nation dialogue.

What do you expect from the federal government today?

Truth and reconciliation are mentioned a lot, but there's something no one wants to talk about, the elephant in the room, as they say. I'm talking about the Indian Act, which is the source of all these conflicts.

First, do you think the Indian Act should be abolished? Right now, discussions are focused on amending it.

Second, what do we need to do on a practical level to recognize indigenous communities and nations, so they can have their own form of government and be self-governing?

[Natan Obed]

Inuit don't fall under the Indian Act, and that has allowed for Inuit to chart a very different path with the Government of Canada, in a relationship sense. We have modern treaties, and we have co-management structures that have been created by each one of those treaties, including the two that are in Nunavik: the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement and the Nunavik agreement. This is, I think, a more self-determining way of relating between first nations, Inuit and Métis and the Government of Canada than, perhaps, legislation or other structures that were created over 100 years ago.

I think it remains one of our biggest challenges. The complexity of our relationship, which was mostly created by the federal government through legislation, policy and constitutional status, is often too complex for the federal government itself to understand and to apply to its relationship with first nations, Inuit and Métis. We, on the other hand, struggle to understand this complexity fully, especially on the political side, as we make honest attempts to work with you but are confused by the responses that we often get.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's right on time.

We now turn to MP Cannings for six minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

Mr. Obed, you talked about how, in Canada, research planning and funding flows largely from the south, within the south. In your research strategy, I think you have five priorities on things that need to be addressed, and the number one issue there is governance. I'm wondering how governance relates to the whole system we have for funding and planning research. You mentioned some collaborations and partnerships with researchers from the U.K. and southern Canada. What's the ITK's vision for governance as it applies to research?