Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to appear before this committee on this very important issue.
My name's Alvin Fiddler. I'm one of the deputy grand chiefs from Nishnawbe Aski Nation. With me is Jackie Fletcher. Jackie is a member of the NAN Women's Council.
Just briefly, to familiarize the committee with who we are, Nishnawbe Aski Nation represents 49 first nation communities situated right across northern Ontario, northwestern and northeastern Ontario. It covers roughly two-thirds of the province of Ontario, and those are the communities that signed Treaty No. 9 back in 1905-06, and the adhesions, which were signed in 1929 and 1930.
I just want to start off by saying that we recognize that we have a shared interest to protect families, to protect women and children in the event of a family breakup, in the event of a divorce in our communities. We need to ensure that every individual is treated with respect and that their interests are protected in that situation.
I also want to echo what my colleagues, Chief Montour and Chief Maracle, have brought forward to the committee. We've always had concerns about the process, how this bill was brought about, and how it's going through the process now.
One of the concerns we have is that, even though there were pockets of money to do consultations across NAN, we just feel that not nearly enough was done to properly consult with our members or to do them justice. I think that's one of the points we want to make today. There have to be adequate resources given—perhaps to NAN's Women's Council that will drive this—and adequate time to make sure we do it right.
One of the things that I want this committee to recognize and to acknowledge is that if you go ahead and impose this bill, impose these rules on our communities, the infrastructure isn't there to follow through with these rules. Right now we're involved in two processes just dealing with the justice system alone: the Iacobucci report, and also the fly-in court system. There's such a backlog. There's so much work that needs to be done to try to improve how justice is delivered and administered, especially in the remote north. Of the 49 communities, 32 of our communities are considered fly-in and remote communities.
The other piece of that is enforcement. I don't know what this committee's planning to do in terms of enforcing these rules. Some of you may be aware that policing is a real issue in our communities. In fact, we're struggling with our NAPS, our Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service. We're so under-resourced, we're so underfunded that we're having a hard time. We cannot guarantee public safety for our communities, as well as for our officers.
I'm telling you this because I'm not sure how familiar you are with the north. One thing we want to do is to invite members of this committee to come visit us, to come meet with our leadership, to come meet with the NAN Women's Council. If we're going to do this, I think we need to do it together. We need to work together to ensure that this is done right.
We're tired of having bills and rules imposed on us because they never work. They don't work for our communities. I think the message we want to convey to you today is for you to come up here.
That's why we're here. We just didn't feel it was worth our while to spend a couple of thousand dollars to come down there for 10 minutes to present to this committee. I think you need to also invest your time and your resources to work with us.