Science and Research Committee on June 11th, 2024

[Natan Obed]

Thanks for the question.

I think I'll talk about barriers here, and perhaps pass it to Carrie as well.

We work as closely as we can with the tri-council. The tri-council's inability to accept Inuit governance in the way that it creates its strategies and its terms and conditions for its particular programs within the agencies is a huge barrier.

Our institutional eligibility has almost always been denied. We are making strides in that case. I think CIHR is the first that has actually allowed Inuit institutional eligibility when applying for research grants, without the traditional principal investigator academic lens being put on the work. Also, just with the Government of Canada in general and the way in which this country partners with other countries to do research projects in Inuit Nunangat across the Canadian Arctic, we have almost never been involved in any of those deliberations, even though the projects—the funds—are going to end up supporting or flowing through our homelands. It's a completely out-of-date way of doing business.

The research community is often a generation or perhaps even two generations behind the reconciliation efforts of governments, which is surprising considering that academics often feel as though they are enlightened and do things with no sense of prejudice and are completely objective in the way they deliberate.

The same goes for things like order in council processes, which I've touched on before. You'll understand the dilemma of Polar Knowledge Canada putting out a call for members for their board of directors and asking ITK to put names forward. If we democratically put forward Inuit to serve on the Polar Knowledge Canada board, those names would go through the order in council process, and the Government of Canada would decide whether or not those Inuit were fit to serve on the Polar Knowledge Canada board.

The fundamental problem that we still face in this country is that we haven't broken down the colonial structures of exclusion for Inuit to participate in these processes and recognized Inuit governance in the way we all do work together. We have a shared understanding now of wanting to partner and to respect one another, but we still have a long way to go to amend the structures that are in place to allow for that to happen.

It isn't as though Inuit are coming to the table saying that we demand something that is unnatural to governance. We just demand to apply our governance to a multilateral table, at which we've been invited to sit but not invited to share in the decision-making processes.

Carrie, do you want to say something?

[Carrie Grable, Director, Inuit Qaujisarvingat, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami]

Thank you, President Obed.

Thank you for the question.

I would like to say, in addition, that in the last budget there was an announcement of $10 million over three years for Inuit research governance. This is welcome. I think it's a first step. I think the number of research programs, calls for proposals and initiatives that Inuit governance structures are already involved in is massive. I'm thinking here of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, ITK, board of directors governance structure. In every subcommittee under that in relation to research and science, we mirror that governance structure. We interact with the research fields of at least 10 different federal departments and agencies. The number of requests for engagement without appropriate remuneration is inequitable from the get-go.

For the next three years, we are looking to develop a governance framework that could assist in future opportunities to work in tandem and in partnership. There are opportunities that come along on which we think we could be doing so much more.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you. I'm afraid that's our time.

We'll now start our second round, with MP Rempel Garner for five minutes.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

President Obed, we're at the point in the committee deliberations where we need to be developing recommendations for a report. We've heard from many witnesses with different backgrounds and viewpoints that one of the things that hampers their work and their scope—as broad as that is—is the lack of a coordinating federal research strategy when it comes to Arctic research.

I hear everything you're saying. I understand that if we were to recommend that, there would need to be work with your community to ensure that it functions properly in the context of everything you've said. Is the development of a specific research strategy something you would notionally support, understanding that there would have to be a lot of work done on scope, function, etc.?

I'll start with that.

[Natan Obed]

In principle, absolutely. It would be great to further clarify Canada's priority areas for Arctic research and also the way in which Canada wishes to conduct Arctic research and the collaboration that's necessary within that.

The Canadian government spends tens of millions of dollars on Arctic research every year, but often it is hard to understand the broader purpose and the reason why certain monies are spent on, say, POLAR and 50 bureaucrats in Ottawa, plus however many in Cambridge Bay, and for what purpose. It would be great to have a strategy that ties that all together.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

As to how that would function, taking some of the comments you've made already, obviously there would need to be a formal collaboration with your people in setting priorities. Is that something you would recommend?

[Natan Obed]

Absolutely. However you define “Arctic”—you can be more inclusive or less inclusive—for us our homelands are about 40% of Canada's landmass, about 4 million square kilometres. We are the dominant public policy interest when it comes to the creation of a strategy. Leave the politics out of it. If you just look at the space and who lives there, we are the dominant player. We do hope that in the creation of something like this there would be a partnership approach with Inuit in it.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you.

Some of the other testimony that struck me—which I think you've sort of slightly touched on this in your comments today—that the government's strategy on funding "Arctic research" has been focused on important research like climate change, but there's a much broader scope of research that funding should be directed to: economic development, governance, food security, mental health strategy, infrastructure or whatever. There's such a broad breadth.

Would you recommend—again, in the context of formal collaboration in the truest sense of the word—that the priorities for an Arctic research strategy be broadened to encapsulate the larger set of needs of Arctic peoples?

[Natan Obed]

Yes, absolutely.

If we think of our climate change strategy, it is unnatural for, say, somebody reading it at a climate change conference, because it isn't focused exclusively on the environment. It's actually the inverse. It's more focused on the ability of our communities to be sustainable within a changing Arctic. That means research in relation to infrastructure and how to build more resilient infrastructure. How do we mitigate against the worst impacts of climate change? How do we understand extreme weather events more completely to ensure that we can be more resilient?

Just to give an example, our understanding of weather shifts over time and is a huge indicator for us of whether to go somewhere or not to go somewhere on any given day. Then, once we are in a scenario where we are in a storm, it's how we act and how we react to it. If we can understand more about our changing Arctic and the climate within it, then we can stay safer on the land.

I want to give an example of SmartICE, which is a partnership between—

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Do so very quickly. We're having other witnesses come in and we're over time.

[Natan Obed]

It's just a partnership between Inuit and researchers to ensure that we have real-time data on sea ice so that people can be safer when they travel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much.

Now, for five minutes, we'll turn to MP Diab.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Welcome back to our committee, President Obed and Director Grable.

You were asked a question and were commenting on research. I don't think you had an opportunity to finish. If you did, I have a bit of a supplementary question on research.

President, you just spoke about research in relation to infrastructure and how to understand it better in relation to events. Do you have some more comments? I think you were trying to talk about SmartICE and the lack of consultation, or good consultation, with communities where research is taking place. How would you recommend researchers design better research to focus more on local priorities and do research with the local community? How would you classify a good partnership approach?

[Natan Obed]

There are such wide, diverse topics of research. I'll give you the example of tuberculosis and tuberculosis elimination.

From the public health side, we're still trying to understand how to talk about tuberculosis and how to identify active tuberculosis among our populations. We've done research projects. I was a part of one in Nunavut called Taima TB, where we paired public health nurses with Nunavut TB champions and went door to door in communities based on demographic information we had. They talked to people about tuberculosis and asked them if they wanted to get tested. It was done in Inuktitut and with a community sense.

That was highly effective. It was upstream public health work. The research portion of that allowed us to understand how effective it was. If we were going to spend money on TB elimination, would this be one of the ways to apply a community-based public health approach to lowering the rate over time? There's invaluable information that we gained from that. If we had just said, “Let's hire public health nurses from the south to come up and do this door to door”, we wouldn't have had the same result.

The willingness of a principal investigator to partner with Inuit—in this case, the organization I worked for at the time was Nunavut Tunngavik—and their ability to work with us on every single aspect of the project, including doing a community feast and returning results to the community in a specific way, can create a positive interaction between the community and the research project.

We have to recognize that we've had very negative interactions with research over time. Part of the construction of each one of our partnership approaches to research is destigmatizing research, being careful in the way we conduct it, having a community- and an individual-focused approach, and returning results so somebody who participated doesn't read about something that impacts them in a Globe and Mail article or hear about it at a research conference in the south.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Is that what contributes to what you described as being a negative with research?

[Natan Obed]

Yes. We are one of the most researched peoples in the world. Often, it has been a very one-sided relationship. Also, some of the research aspects had human rights abuses, such as grafting the skin of one person onto another to see how it's affected. There are many different examples of horrific—we would say in 2024—research that was applied to Inuit over the last 75 to 80 years.

We have memories of research happening for purposes that had nothing to do with us. It had more to do with the intellectual curiosity of certain southern researchers. That's what we're trying to push back on.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's our time. Thank you.

We will turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Obed, in 2019, you released a report containing a number of recommendations for the federal government. Under that year's budget, you received a million dollars in federal funding to support those efforts.

Where do things stand in relation to those recommendations? Has there been any improvement?

Did the government give your recommendations any consideration?

[Natan Obed]

Yes. Our 2019 national Inuit climate change strategy is still a work-in-progress. We released it in Inuvik. The federal government did indeed provide funding on day one for the implementation of the strategy, but I mean, a million dollars for climate change—it's more for the work that we can do in our regions to mobilize for climate change rather than to actually do the adaptation and mitigation work itself.

Our priority areas, such as advancing Inuit capacity and knowledge for climate decision-making, that we are standing on with the knowledge that we provide to you from the work that we've been able to do over the last four to five years with government funding, are to mobilize together and to create more specifically our climate priorities. We also have linked to some of the work we've done in our communities on housing or on other infrastructure projects in ensuring there's climate resilience within the work we do and research that focuses on ensuring that we are building the best possible structures. With food security and with poverty reduction, we've been able to work on those areas as well.

The work is ongoing, but we are grateful for the funds we have received.

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

Mr. Obed, one of the recommendations in your 2019 report focused on the infrastructure deficit identified in northern communities.

At this point, do you think the federal government has done enough to address the deficit and turn the situation around?

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Give a short answer, please.

[Natan Obed]

There have been a number of bold proclamations—getting our communities off diesel by 2030, and ending deficits in indigenous infrastructure also by 2030—and we've worked through the Inuit-Crown partnership committee to identify $75 billion in infrastructure projects that would help alleviate this deficit. We've received most recently approximately $450 million for infrastructure. I would say there's a big gap there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, President Obed and Director Grable, for—

[A voice]

Mr. Cannings was next.