Mr. Speaker, I rise today on a question that I raised in the House in March about the process that was being used around the so-called consultation for water on first nations reserves. Now that the results are in, in terms of how effective that consultation was, the Femmes Autochtones du Québec has been quite vocal in its criticism and has commented on this so-called engagement process.
It is important to note here that engagement sessions were only initiated at the end of February and terminated in early April with a government deadline of mid-April for bands to submit an impact study. This kind of activity undertaken by INAC fails to adequately meet the standards and duty to consult indigenous peoples in accordance with Supreme Court judgements. Indeed, during these sessions, the government had already defined legislation as the only option for bands to choose.
We also have the Safe Drinking Water Foundation's advanced aboriginal water treatment team being highly critical of this process. It has indicated a number of problems, including the fact that invitations were problematic because first nations communities did not receive adequate notice to attend and the timing of the sessions overlapped with critical annual budgeting events which prevented many leaders from attending.
The facilitators provided misleading or incomplete information to participants and government voices tended to dominate their conversations advocating for a particular goal. Having water quality on reserves be subject to variations of less strict provincial guidelines instead of the guidelines for Canadian drinking water quality, thereby abdicating its fiduciary responsibility and liability for first nations drinking water quality.
Later in its report, it talked about the fact that the SDWF's AAWTT feels that the INAC's engagement sessions and attempts to deal with first nations drinking water quality were utterly inadequate, did not offer opportunity for meaningful consultation, diminished first nations' treaty rights and attempted to absolve INAC of its fiduciary responsibility. The SDWF's position in this respect was further explained and it went on to outline a number of problems with the process.
It said participation expectations were not met and the fact that those who were able to attend the engagement sessions expected that they would contribute to the development of the federal action plan on safe drinking water and that they would receive accurate and complete information in order to make well-founded decisions.
It went on to talk about the fact that in these conversations, at times there were more bureaucrats in the room than there were first nations. In some cases the bands received the information package at noon the day before and had to drive three hours in order to even get to a session. As was already pointed out, there were conflicting demands, the timeframe was far too short, and it just generally ignored all the principles of what should be deemed consultation.
I wonder what it was that the minister was trying to avoid by short-circuiting a consultation process that could have had some meaningful impact on the quality of drinking water in first nations communities.