Status of Women Committee on May 7th, 2013

[The Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

Welcome, everyone. This is the 75th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today, we are continuing the study of S-2, An Act respecting family homes situated on First Nation reserves and matrimonial interests or rights in or to structures and lands situated on those reserves.

Joining us today are Chief William K. Montour, Chief R. Donald Maracle and Chief Joel Abram from the Iroquois Caucus. Welcome.

You have 10 minutes that you can share for your opening statement. Then, by videoconference, we will hear from

the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, with Deputy Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, and Madam Jackie Fletcher, the women's council representative.

You will have 10 minutes for your opening remarks. Then we'll go to our rounds of questions with the MPs around this table.

Mr. Montour, I welcome you and invite you to start your opening remarks.

[Chief William K. Montour, Member, Iroquois Caucus]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

She:koh sewakwe:koh. I'm the elected chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River. I put a written submission in to the clerk back on April 25, so you have that in your package. In general, my remarks are going to be representing the Iroquois Caucus.

The Iroquois Caucus is an independent organization representing 70,000 Six Nations people in Canada. We have concerns that this legislation is an abuse of our people, and I might say a continued abuse of our people, because your Indian Act, back in 1867, took suffrage from our women. I think it's wrong that it be perpetuated today.

The Six Nations Council has enacted our own legislation, as I said, but on behalf of the caucus, we're concerned about the process. There is supposed to have been extensive consultation. We don't know who with, because as representatives of the communities of those 70,000 Six Nations people, we have never seen anyone consulting us.

I believe, as do my colleagues, that our relationship is embodied in the Guswenta, Tekeni Teiohate, or the Two Row Wampum Treaty. I'll reiterate what it says: We will not be like Father and Son, but like Brothers. [Our treaties] symbolize two paths or two vessels travelling down the same river together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian People, their laws, their customs and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white people, their laws, their customs and their ways. We shall...travel the river together, side by side, but [each] in our [own] boat. Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other. Neither of us will try to steer the other's vessel.

What we have here, committee, in my estimation, is someone trying to steer our canoe.

As I said, the remarks I'm making are on behalf of the caucus. We're concerned, as I said, with the consultation process with the AFN and the Native Women's Association. They don't represent the people that this is going to affect: the people in the communities.

With that, I'll ask my colleagues to make their presentations, because they haven't done their presentations yet. I'll be open for questions later on.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

Thank you.

[Chief R. Donald Maracle, Member, Iroquois Caucus]

Seken sewahkwekenh. Good morning, everyone. My name is Chief Don Maracle. I am the chief of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. I concur with what my colleague Chief Montour has said.

The Mohawk Nation is part of the Iroquois Confederacy. We're part of the Iroquois Caucus and part of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians. We live near Belleville, Ontario. Our current membership is 9,053 members. Our people live on just about every continent in the world.

Since the passage of the McIvor legislation, we have seen our membership increase by 819 members and there are other applications pending registration at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. We have 2,200 members who live in our community, and an estimated 1,200 non-native, non-status people who live in our community and are attached to families.

With the implementation of Bill C-31 and in the past two years, our membership has increased by 10%. Many of the funding formulas are for people who live on the territory. Some of the funding formulas are for the entire membership. The new registrations have placed additional financial burdens on our community and on the council, with no additional funding to offset the increase in membership. These provide pressure on housing and education.

We have the third largest membership of aboriginal communities in Ontario and the ninth largest in Canada.

Our ancestors were military allies of Great Britain and participated in most of the wars in the last 300 years. After the American Revolutionary War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, our ancestors were required to choose a homeland on the north shore of Lake Ontario and the traditional hunting territory of the Iroquois Confederacy.

We are very disappointed that this legislation has once again surfaced in the House without prior consultation. The views of Wendy Grant-John, who was commissioned by Canada to travel across the country to gather the views of first nations people, have largely been ignored in the bill.

The government has a duty to consult and to also honour its own laws, and to date the government has not followed its own jurisprudence with respect to decisions passed on by the Supreme Court regarding the duty to consult. The duty to consult, accommodate, and obtain consent was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court when the government is considering action that could affect aboriginal and treaty rights.

This bill does impact on Treaty 3 1/2, which created the land base for the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. It's published by the Crown as Treaty 3 1/2, dated April 1, 1793.

We are also of the view that this committee is not the appropriate committee to be studying this matter. This issue is not really just about aboriginal women's rights. There are men in our communities who fall under the same situation, who have suffered abuse, and sometimes it's not always the man that's the abusing partner. We feel that the bill should protect the family as a unit, to have a more holistic view, and not be gender-based.

There's a great deal of focus on family violence with this bill. There are many reasons that contribute to the breakdown of a family. To focus on family violence is leading the public to believe that all first nation marriages break down as a result of family violence. That is not the case. It also brings to the public the view that all first nation men are violent to their partners. That is not the case.

This submission does not constitute consultation. Bill S-2 is paternalistic. It does not recognize that the jurisdiction over who can live on our land belongs to the first nation and not to the Government of Canada. The government purports only to understand that family law is a right of a first nation's jurisdiction, but in fact, all the government is doing is not recognizing their right, they're delegating authority to manage it to the first nation. The Royal Proclamation of Canada was a document the government spent millions of dollars on and that document recognized that family law is a matter of first nations' jurisdiction.

There is a requirement to hold a referendum to pass a law. There is no government anywhere in Canada that has to hold a referendum to pass a law. There is a lot of difficulty meeting the 25% threshold because many of our people, who have been added to the list through Bill C-31 in 1985 and the McIvor legislation, live in various parts of the world. They may not always participate in community decisions and a lot of them believe it's not appropriate for them to do so.

There's no clamour from our membership to participate in these kinds of decisions. To get to the threshold to even vote could be problematic in some of the communities. Also, there's a high cost to that manner of consultation, which the government does not fund, so it adds another financial burden on first nation communities to go through this type of process.

Our land is very integral to our people. There's a strong connection that our people have to the land. Our identity flows from that relationship to the land, and it holds a cultural and spiritual importance to our people.

[The Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

You have one minute left, Chief Maracle.

[Chief R. Donald Maracle]

The problem is largely the lack of housing and the chronic underfunding for infrastructure to build homes. People don't have a lot of choices. You can't just go and rent another house somewhere else in the community, because there are over 100 people on a waiting list for housing. This bill will create pressure to build more rent-geared-to-income housing. If a person has to give up a house, they have to live somewhere or else we'll have homeless people in our community, which will become another social problem.

When separations occur, some people simply have nowhere else to live, so people quarrel over who can live in the house. The previous Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, recognized that there was chronic underfunding. The chronic underfunding contributes to the violence because there's no alternative housing in the community—

[The Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

I'm sorry, Chief Maracle, I need to stop you because the 10 minutes have expired. We'll come back later with questions from members. Thank you very much.

I'm now turning to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation. I'll let you start. You have 10 minutes to share your opening remarks.

[Deputy Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler, Deputy Grand Chief, Nishnawbe Aski Nation]

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.

[Jackie Fletcher, Women's Council Representative, Nishnawbe Aski Nation]

Hi. My name is Jackie Fletcher. I'm a member of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation Women's Council.

I'm pleased to say there are nine members on the Nishnawbe Aski Nation Women's Council. We don't have a hierarchy. We don't deal with a president, vice-president, all those kinds of things, and it works really well. We are all equal at that table. That's a very important facet of how we used to be as aboriginal people before contact.

What I want to talk about on MRP has been said already by the three gentlemen—and I'm very pleased to see gentlemen here at this table. I'm not sure who all are on the standing committee, but I understand there are 12 females, which is not very good representation, because this is not just a women's issue, this belongs to the community. As well as not being gender-based, we have same-sex marriages, we have men and women. We can't just have a cookie-cutter approach to this issue.

I also want to talk a little bit about the checkerboard effect. For example, if a non-native woman marries a native man and they separate, under this legislation the house goes to the female, who is non-native. You could end up with all non-native people on a reserve, so it doesn't make sense. I'm very concerned about that as well.

We appreciate the effort that is being put forward to address this issue. It is a very extreme issue in our communities, but we need the resources, as Deputy Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler talked about. We need the legal people there. I can't even understand a lot of this information that has come forward. We need to educate our people in the communities, and every community is different. We can't just say we'll put in this blanket solution for all the communities. I know some communities are using their housing policy now to address MRP. So it's up to the individuals.

I would also invite you to come to sit with us so we can come up with the solution. We are tired of being talked down to.

I have four sons right now, and they're all living on their own. When they move into their own houses, I don't go and say, “Okay, you have to live like this. You have to make your bed like this. You have to do this.” They're living their own lives, yet they'll allow me to come in and give them some suggestions. That's what I would like to see this government do, come to hear what we have to say. Come to the communities and see what it's all about. It's very easy to sit in an office in Ottawa and make rules when you don't know what's going on in the communities.

As I said, I appreciate that this issue is being addressed. I would like to have more resources. There are three languages: Oji-Cree, Ojibwe, and Cree. We need to have the translation done. We need to go into the communities and consult with the communities.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe]

Thank you, Madam Fletcher.

We're now starting our first round of questions.

Madam Truppe, you have seven minutes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you.

I'd like to thank everyone for being here and sharing your comments and thoughts on Bill S-2.

Can I just ask each of you, starting with Jackie, have you read Bill S-2? Have you read the bill and do you understand the bill?

[Jackie Fletcher]

I don't understand it totally, but I have read it.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

You've read it. Okay.

To Deputy Grand Chief Fiddler, I ask the same question.

[Deputy Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler]

I haven't read the whole bill. I've read a good chunk of it.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

The Chiefs who are here in person...?

[Chief William K. Montour]

I have.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

You've read it, yes.

[Chief R. Donald Maracle]

I've read it and I've been briefed on it.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you.

[Chief Joel Abram, Member, Iroquois Caucus]

I have as well.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Jackie, I just want to clarify something. You mentioned something to the effect that a non-aboriginal would be able to take possession of a house on the reserve, and then there'd be all non-aboriginals living on the reserve. But that's not what this bill is about. The bill would give temporary access to the home—they wouldn't be able to keep it. For example, in the event of a death, if there was a non-aboriginal married to an aboriginal person, that non-aboriginal would have up to 180 days, let's say, to get their affairs and things in order, and then they would have to leave. I just wanted to clarify that.

I'm sure you're familiar with the Frontier Centre. Joseph Quesnel is a policy analyst for Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He said:

The continuance of federal jurisdiction and paternalism for a temporary period for the sake of providing...justice and protection for women seems like an honourable compromise, especially from the perspective of women denied equal rights.

They did a study—I think it was in 2010—and they asked three questions to male and female respondents in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. First, they asked if they were in favour of an equal division of marital assets in the event of marital breakdown. Some 77% responded “definitely” or “perhaps”.

Second, they asked the same number of respondents whether they thought the band government was doing enough to protect on-reserve women from violence, usually from domestic partners. A troubling 42% of respondents across the province said “not really” or “never”.

Do you find this troubling?

I will ask the chiefs, starting with Grand Chief Fiddler?

[Deputy Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler]

It's difficult for me to speak to what's happening in other parts of the country, whether it's Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Alberta. I think what we're speaking about today, for myself and Jackie, is what's happening here in the NAN territory.

What we've said is that if we're going to do this, we need to do it right. We need to make sure that there is enough time and enough resources for us, and for you as well. That's why we're inviting you to visit our communities. We want you to speak with the leadership and the women directly to ensure that the work we will do is done right, to ensure that it's fair to all the individuals, and to ensure that it protects the women and it protects the rights of our children. I think they are the most vulnerable population in our communities. I find it difficult to speak about what's happening in other parts of the country. What we're hearing and what we're conveying to you today is what's happening in our communities in the NAN territory.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chief.

Chief Maracle?

[Chief R. Donald Maracle]

First of all, when there's family violence on the reserve, usually it's the police who are called, and they decide whether or not there's a level of violence that warrants the laying of charges. Those charges are not heard by the chief and council; they're heard by a court. If a court finds that a person is guilty, they'll put certain orders in place, usually non-communication orders. Often, whichever parent is going to look after the children will stay in the house and the other party has to stay away.

The chief and council get involved when it's a mixed marriage where one's a status Indian and the other's non-status, and the status Indian may want to borrow money from the band to pay the wife off so she can get a settlement and they can get on with their lives. We don't have the financial resources to accommodate those arrangements. That's how most marital breakdowns are handled—one party's paid off and they settle their differences through financial means. Alternatively, they may want another place for the husband to live so the wife and children can live in the house. Sometimes it's the father who has the children and the wife who has to leave.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Right.

Thank you.