Veterans Affairs Committee on Sept. 20th, 2018

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

You made some reference to how the Métis were falling between the definitions of first nations and all others. Is there still that problem, that Métis vets are feeling like they're stuck in the middle, between systems or between identities, when they're trying to access their services and support as veterans?

[David Chartrand]

We've changed that a lot in this country. There's no doubt in the prairies that you're either Métis or you're first nation. There is no such thing as non-status. I hear that phrase all the time, and I don't know what that is. In the west, the prairies, you're either part of the Métis nation or you're part of a first nation.

There's a clear, distinct position now that has evolved throughout time in bureaucracies of government. No matter which party has been in, the same position has been taken on the Métis, which is that we're not part of any fiduciary legal relationship with Canada. We were locked out of any relationship with INAC, Indian Affairs, even Health Canada—all of them. However, since Daniels, all that has changed. There's a shift of a circle coming and indigenous governments are being given the respect that's been owing to them.

I can say openly anywhere that I'm very, very proud today in this country. The Métis nation is finally finding its place in Confederation. It's taken us a long damn time to get here, and I can't wait to make sure that it's resolved during my time. I've been elected in seven elections. I serve for four years and three months. We have a province-wide election by ballot. I've been serving now for 22 years as president.

My background is that I come from the Department of Justice. I have a doctorate and was given an honorary doctorate from.... I have tons of awards from everywhere for all my years of service and work.

However, there's nothing more important to me. That's why I wanted to come here for this file too. I have an assembly happening right now; it starts tomorrow morning. I have 3,000 delegates coming from across Manitoba, and we have one of the biggest gatherings in western Canada. The Métis nation of MMF is a very powerful government in the west.

I wanted to come here personally for this, to send as powerful a message as I can to you that you do not give this up. I don't want a study taking three years, five years, or 10 years and you guys deciding that now we think we should do right when there's not a veteran alive. You can keep your study. You can keep your promise. You can keep anything you want, because you've already missed the opportunity to say “I'm sorry.” That's what I can't see go through here and missing a chance like this. There are so few left alive, and if we don't fix this problem, this wrong, then we all deserve to live with that shame.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Go ahead, Mr. MacGregor, for six minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, NDP]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome, Mr. Chartrand. I'm here on behalf of my friend and colleague Gord Johns, who serves as our Veterans Affairs critic. On his behalf, I would like to extend a warm welcome and thank you for your statements.

[David Chartrand]

Thank you.

[Alistair MacGregor]

I know it's a pretty sordid history when you spell it out like that. It's something that we definitely need to hear. I just want to let you know that I was personally struck by your going through that.

Ultimately in this committee, we want to produce that report, and we don't want it to just be filed away, so we want to get down to some specifics.

Given the unique demographic and geographic nature of the Métis nation, can you maybe elaborate for us a bit on whether the Métis veterans have any unique service requirements. I'm thinking in terms of language or different programs that we could be recommending.

[David Chartrand]

Some of the key things include the fact that we're a multilingual nation. As you've seen in the 1995 report, there's some talk about how they didn't get newspapers or television, and at the same time they spoke a different language. Sometimes we forget that if....

Even when I speak, I assure you I can turn from speaking at a university level to speaking at a grade 9 level just like this, because that's who my audience is. A lot of the time when I speak in my own province, I speak at a grade 9 level to my people. The schooling of a lot of these veterans— these seniors and elders—has been very limited, so we try to address matters at a level they can understand. Even when Ottawa was trying to send documents at the time, trying to resolve these things or help them, they didn't understand them. Nobody spoke to them.

Think of the hypocrisy of it. We're a multilingual nation. We have a very large French-speaking population in part of our nation, and we don't get one cent in French language translation, yet, by law, we're supposed to translate. That's why I apologized earlier. I was supposed to bring two documents, one in English and one in French.

If services are to come, I think the best way to approach it is to recognize that this is the reason we have a government. Our Métis government knows exactly where people live. We know exactly what their issues are and we know exactly how to address them. You can go to functions anywhere you want in Manitoba, but you may not get a real taste of what is happening if you don't know who you should speak to and how you should speak to those people. That's the function of our Métis government. We do it better than anybody else. We have, as I said, the most powerful government. You'll see 3,000 people attending my assembly.

It's good to express it. I thank you for your question. I encourage you if you want to do that, if you want to work with our Métis governments. We're out there. We have offices right across the province. We have institutions of locals, which constitute the voice of the community. We can trace and bring those people to a meeting that you really want, and we can, if necessary, translate for you. Some people still are very fluent. I speak very fluent Saulteaux—Ojibwe, which is the same common language with just a bit of a different accent. It's the same thing, Ojibwe and Saulteaux. Our people are Michif speakers and Cree speakers, depending on what part of the province you're going into.

You just said something about your study. This is a 1995 study. That's a long time ago, you guys. There was already evidence of injustice happening again. This is 2018, and 2019 is coming around the corner. As I said, you only have a handful of veterans still alive in the Métis nation. If you're going to do a study and the recommendations are going to be similar to this again, this study did help the first nations. They came to a conclusion, to a resolution of their matters, and a settlement occurred.

I'm encouraging this country and I've been working with Minister O'Regan to try to get this thing resolved once and for all. I came close three times in this country, even with Strahl. Strahl and I are still good friends to this day and always will be friends. He understood, but he still couldn't get the support to get to the next level, to get towards a settlement and to dealing an apology to these Métis veterans. They kept not allowing.... Indigenous to them was good enough.

First nations are not us. We're completely different people, and so are the Inuit, so just because you've dealt with one indigenous people doesn't mean you've dealt with all of us. I think it's important for you to realize that.

The Métis nation has never been dealt with properly in this country. They fought for you. They fought for your families. They fought for your children and for those they didn't even know. Imagine that. Thirty years after you attacked us in Batoche and killed us in Batoche and did a lot of damage to our future and hanged our leader, we still came to fight for you. Nobody has ever said “Thank you”. Nobody has ever come out to express, “How can we help you? How can we fix the wrongs?”

If you can fix that, I think you'll do justice for yourselves and for your families.

[Alistair MacGregor]

Is there anything you can add to that with respect to Métis veterans who are living in remote communities? Is there anything you want to say about the services that exist or how we should change them for remote communities?

[David Chartrand]

With today's technology, why are we still struggling to find headstones for some who don't have them? That is the stupidest thing that we can.... With the big government with all the intellect and genius we have, we still can't resolve a process to ensure that every veteran promised a headstone will get one. My dad is one of them. He doesn't have a headstone. You start looking at that. I purposely didn't give him a headstone. I buy headstones for all my family, but I didn't put one for him because I think he deserves that headstone. There are so many out there who don't have headstones and yet, to this day in 2018, we still can't find a way to solve it.

It's the same thing when we go through these processes of trying to establish recognition and honour. I didn't waste my time trying to apply for money, because I knew it would take me too long to go through the bureaucracy. It would take me too long to get a “yes” from somebody, so I just went on my own. They're costing us good money. I'm telling you that elders and veterans are fundraising themselves. They're having little barbecues and little bingo nights. It makes me so proud, and I give them back their money and I pay for it all. They still want to put something in there because it honours them that they're doing justice for their brothers and sisters, which is what they call themselves. Again, why is there so much red tape to fix a simple problem? If you answer that, you solve the problem. Then we have no problem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Mr. Bratina, you have six minutes.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thanks for coming in. It's always better than the screen. It's good to have the screen, but I admire you for wanting to meet with us to look us in the eye and talk about these issues.

Cathay and I, and other members, had the opportunity to go to Beauval. I put a picture on my Facebook page of 98-year-old Louis Roy, and I got the biggest response I've ever had on Facebook. He was a Second World War veteran who walked 110 miles to enlist. He lost his best friend in Italy. A lot of those guys had enlisted. His story was really touching, because he came back and walked 110 miles back to Beauval and went back into the bush to his trapline. He didn't know any of the benefits.

I have a couple of questions. Do you have an accurate number of Métis veterans?

[David Chartrand]

Throughout probably the last two decades, we've been working to formulate the issues and concerns of our veterans. In several books that have been developed, we've catalogued all the veterans we possibly can know of. As I said in my earlier comments, we have 5,000 veterans' names on the Batoche monument. It's a big monument, and I think Canada did help with it. A lot of it was about getting fundraising. MMF itself put $35,000 as a government. From there we can definitely extract all the World War II veterans' names.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Is there much dialogue between Métis and first nations with regard to indigenous veterans' issues? Are you talking at any level?

[David Chartrand]

When we talk about veterans, there is no discrepancy on bloodline. Let's put it that way. Whether non-indigenous or indigenous, to them they're all brothers. They have a very good working relationship and dialogue, but again, it hurts when one is being treated differently, when one gets a settlement and the other one gets nothing. Still it doesn't stop their friendships. They're still friends and brothers, and they do support each other when it comes to helping on matters such as the monuments and fundraising or helping when a veteran passes on. We raise money to make sure the person is given the greatest honour during a funeral service.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Are there any Métis veterans beyond the Canadian borders? Are there any in the United States? Did many of them enlist in the United States?

[David Chartrand]

Some of them actually tried to cross because they wanted to enlist so badly. For some reason, they wouldn't take them here, so they went to the American side to enlist. I've already heard many a time about their walking such great distances.

Some of them were lying in their application. They were only 16 and they tried to say they were 18 so they could go with their friends. I don't know if they knew about the horror and terror they were heading into, but they were willing to put their names forward as teenagers. Some of them got caught and were disallowed, but some of them did get in. I think Mr. Godon tried at 16 and got in at 17. He lied in his application about his age.

If you look at our people, you see some of them went to the United States. Just so you get a better grip on it, if you look at last names in the United States in Belcourt, North Dakota, and other places, you see they're our names. They're the last names of Métis people in Manitoba and the prairies. They're called the Chippewa tribe in the United States because they don't know of Métis recognition in the United States. If you go to their band offices, all you'll see is Métis artifacts everywhere. In fact, the first Michif dictionary, which is the language created by our people, comes from Belcourt, North Dakota. Some of us are actually Métis citizens but American civilians because we joined from that side, but they're our people.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I had concerns about your comments with regard to monuments and headstones. I looked up the numbers, and in our budget we provide $24.4 million over five years to clean, repair and replace grave markers and so on. Headstones are available through the Last Post Fund, which is out of Veterans Affairs.

Do you have an accurate flow of information available to Métis veterans about the benefits available to them?

[David Chartrand]

No, we definitely don't have that type of situation in our office. We don't have staff who work directly with our veterans, for example, but I think most of that resource is spent on military graveyards. You talk about Beauval. You talk about different places. Further north, you're going to Pinehouse or stuff like that, and the graveyards in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. If you go even further north, they're going to be burying them in their community, not in a military graveyard.

Yes, the military graveyards are impeccable: I give Canada credit for that. The most beautiful graveyards I've ever seen are in Europe, and they cherish our Canadian soldiers. I'm very proud of that as a Canadian, but for us, we fend for ourselves. We don't have any way of helping, so we even raise our own money when people pass on. We've been getting lucky. If it's closer to Winnipeg, the Legions have come out to do a service, to give honour to the military style of burial; but if they're too far away, it's just us and our cultural ways. If they're closer to a city or a Legion, then at least some kind of military burial will take place, but it's not that we have any connection with anybody. We're on our own.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Mr. Samson is next.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your presentation.

As others have indicated, throughout our trip to visit many of the communities, what we've heard here from the witnesses over the last several months of our study it's been eye-opening. There's no question about it. It's hard to understand how it all transpired and the mistakes that were made.

What would be the barriers in services received from VAC vis-à-vis Métis and other indigenous groups? Is there something that's different today that you know of in the services? Is it pretty well a level playing field today?

[David Chartrand]

I still don't think it's a level playing field. I'm not dealing with any science behind me, evidence-wise, on that, but I think without a doubt—and I don't want to use this word too openly—clearly racism was an issue when they returned. They were just not treated the same. Why, I don't know. We'll never know why.

At that time, the bureaucracy in our society was in a different state of mind. As I said, even to the question asked of me earlier today, if you ask a non-indigenous veteran and a Métis veteran and first nations veteran if they're brothers, without hesitation they'll tell you they're brothers, and yet they were not treated equally when they got home. It took how long for first nations to get justice? They did get it. They got their settlement and they have a trust now in place for their veterans.

We promote—I promote, as the president, for sure—without doubt that our people still join the military. We still have to have a strong military to protect our country and we have to be ready no matter what to defend our nation. As for whether they are treated better today, they probably are, but I'm talking now of a generation that's lost so much. There's no catch-up to it. For those from 1946 on, and even going back to1945, you'll ask yourself, "It's 2018. Are they finally going to be treated nicely now when they only have maybe a year left in their lives?” It's not a good place to find yourself.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Yes. It's shocking when you speak of asking to join the team 30 years after the fact.

Can I conclude that Métis did not get an apology?

[David Chartrand]

Never, guaranteed.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

First nations did.

[David Chartrand]

Yes.