Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for York South—Weston.
I am very proud to speak to the motion about the need for the House of Commons to finally get serious and understand its obligation to address the longstanding moral, economic, social and historic deficit that has left so much of our country in absolutely abominable condition, which must change.
We have always told ourselves that Canada is the greatest country in the world. The international index of human indicators of health and social well-being always placed Canada right at the very top until it started to factor in the fact there are two worlds in Canada. There is the non-native world and then there is the fourth world that the aboriginal communities are living in. When that was factored in, Canada started to drop year-by-year. We are now down to eighth place, that is, taken as a whole. In terms of first nation communities, we are down in 63rd place among communities in the world.
We are seeing talk from the government. Conservatives have their message box. They have press releases and they expect the young generation marching out there in the streets to be patient. We have seen from the Idle No More campaign an unprecedented response across this country, a virtual uprising of people who have come to feel they are hostages in their own country, that somehow they are a colonized people in their own land. They are saying they are not putting up with it any more.
There is a sense of urgency, an urgency that needs us to move beyond party lines, because this problem did not start with the present Conservative government. This is well over a century in the making. Now is the time to pay up and start fixing some of these fundamental problems. We have 39% of first nation communities at high risk from poor water quality and 34% at medium risk. That amounts to some 83% of first nation communities in this country not having safe drinking water. How can a country this rich say that is okay?
How can we tell young people to be patient when they have substandard systems of education, set up in a manner that is a form of systemic discrimination? Every child in this country walks into a school with an inalienable set of rights unless they live on a first nation, and then they get whatever the government gives them. Those kids are being told to be patient.
They were told to be patient in Attawapiskat when, under the federal government's watch, diesel fumes from a contaminant leak were coming up in classrooms and the kids were passing out in the grade 1 classroom and coming home stinking of diesel fuel from their daily exposure to benzines and xylenes, cancer-causing agents. The families were told to be patient, that it would be fixed. Well it was never fixed. It went on year after year.
That is why people are marching in the streets, because they are not going to be patient any longer. This generation has seen that the time has now come to pay up. It is never convenient to do the right thing. It is never an opportune time to do the right thing. We do the right thing because at a certain point in our juncture or history, it becomes clear that we are not the nation we were meant to be unless we meet that fundamental debt, unless we pay that debt. That is what we are called to do.
We need to deal with the education deficit. I speak about this issue because I saw it through a child's eyes. That is probably the thing I most learned in this job, seeing what it was like through the eyes of a child in Attawapiskat, Shannen Koostachin, who saw her life passing before her because she had gone to school in crappy portables. She knew she had a substandard education. She knew that if she did not get that one chance to get a better education, it would be too late for her and her generation. I saw that look in her eyes. I saw that look in the eyes of those children and I realized that all the talk that goes on in the House is not enough. We need to start seeing action.
There are a number of steps we need to take in terms of economic development and meeting basic treaty commitments. I would like to talk about treaties, because there is an idea out there that we won, they lost, and why do they not just shut up? What is their problem? That is not what the treaties were about.
When Treaty 9 was signed, representing a large region of the Nishnawbe Aski territory I represent, they went from community to community and asked the people to sign an agreement to share the land. Some people may think this happened in ancient times, but it did not. I know people whose families signed the treaty. Grand Chief Stan Louttit's grandfather signed that treaty. Theresa Spence's grandfather signed the treaty. Government representatives came to Fort Hope saying that this would be a great agreement, gave everyone eight bucks, and told the first nation people: “You go off and do your thing and we'll do ours”.
However, Chief Elijah Moonias—and we have another version of Chief Elijah Moonias alive today in Marten Falls dealing with the Ring of Fire—stood up and said to the people: “Wait a minute. What's going on here? The white guys have come up and offered us eight bucks and they're telling us that we don't have to give anything in return”. That is in the records. Chief Elijah Moonias warned the people about signing the treaty because they did not know what they were signing on to.
The records also show when first nations were signing Treaty 9 that one of the reasons they felt they needed to sign was that they were worried about the future. They were willing to share the land, but in exchange they wanted education. It was actually in the Treaty 9 documents that they saw that the future for their kids was an education. So the white commissioners signed that. However, they gave them the residential schools. They took their children away from them and tried to destroy them as a people. That is what they got in return for signing Treaty 9.
If we look at the history of Treaty 9, before the community leaders signed it, they asked two clear questions. These people communicated orally, they did not write it down, but they asked for clarification at the treaty signings. One question was: “What will happen to our hunting and fishing rights and our ability to use our lands?” The government answered: “Those will not be impacted in any way”. Well, they were lied to there.
The second question they asked was: “Will we be forced to live on these reserves that you're setting up?” The government answered: “No, you'll be free to live wherever you want”. This was also a promise that was broken because they are stuck on the reserves. For example, in Attawapiskat, the community cannot even be expanded to put in proper houses. All that land either belongs to the federal government or the province and they are stuck on these postage stamp-size reserves, but right beside them is one of the largest diamond mines in the world, and just down the road there will be gold mines. However, when the treaty was signed, the government said that they would not be impacted in any way in their ability to use the land in traditional ways.
Now the current Conservative government might not recognize those treaties, but they have been recognized by the Constitution of this country under section 35. They have been recognized in court decision after court decision. There is no ambivalence about the need to consult because the first nation people never gave up the right to use the land, which brings us to Bill C-45.
Bill C-45 is the government's omnibus legislation where it decided to strip protection of waters and basic environmental protections from all the northern lakes and rivers, but it did not have the guts to do it publicly. The government was not going to go and tell the first nation communities that it was open season on their waterways, the Albany River, Moose River and Attawapiskat River. No, the Conservatives stuck that into a budget bill and tried to ram it through without people noticing, and they figured they would get away with it.
However, now people are saying: “Wait a minute, you didn't consult. You didn't do your legal duty to consult”. That is what the courts have shown and that is what is in our Constitution.
The time has come to start addressing these issues. We are in this relationship together. Although it has been a very dysfunctional relationship, it is the primary relationship in this country. It is the first relationship. We must recognize that we are all treaty people, that we all share this land, and that we will all make the country what it should be when we make sure that our young first nation children have the same opportunities as everyone else. Until we do that, we will never be the country we are supposed to be. This is the moment for all parliamentarians to start making it happen. Let us tell this generation that they are not going to be betrayed the way the last generation was and the generation before them.
