Mr. Speaker, first nation communities are willing partners; the government is not.
I include a quote from AFN Ontario Regional Chief Stan Beardy. He asked, “If there's no fire equipment on First Nations, if there's no reporting requirements for fire protection, if there's no fire inspections, how do you ensure you're meeting some standard to make sure there's safety?”
The answer is that one cannot ensure anything, and at best, one merely hopes all goes well, but statistics prove that things are not going well at all. There is a reason for that, and that is the current level of funding, which is handcuffing first nations who would like to beef up their firefighting capabilities but find that they simply do not have the money to do that. The problem is so bad that no first nation in Ontario has been able to purchase any equipment in three years. If that were happening in other communities across the country, people would be up in arms. The fact that so many of the communities we are discussing are remote only makes the problem more pressing.
First nation lives matter. Will the government do something about the crisis in firefighting capabilities on first nations so that we can put a dent in the number of preventable deaths that are the result of horrible house fires in those communities every winter?