Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise virtually during Adjournment Proceedings to address a question I asked on October 19, not that long ago, in relation to the ongoing conflicts between the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia and non-indigenous fishermen, and more specifically in the context of systemic racism.
We know that the name Donald Marshall, Jr., as I said on October 19, will always be remembered in Canada as synonymous with injustice and systemic racism. He was jailed for 11 years for a crime he did not commit, and when he was finally out of jail, he continued to play a significant role in indigenous rights for the Mi'kmaq people. Two different court cases bear his name.
The Marshall case stands for the proposition that, of course, the treaties of peace and friendship of 1760-61 established that Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy rights to land and resources were never surrendered. Donald Marshall took the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada because the simple act of fishing eels was considered out of season, even though it was completely within Mi'kmaq fishing rights.
The systemic racism that I want to address is deeper than the RCMP's actions in failing to protect the Mi'kmaq lobster catch or the lobster pound in West Pubnico, where the Mi'kmaq catch was being stored. As we know, it was burned to the ground while the RCMP stood by. In my question on October 19, I asked why there is never any shortage of well-equipped RCMP officers to move in to arrest non-violent indigenous protesters protecting their land and resources anywhere across Canada, but particularly in my home province of British Columbia, yet there is somehow a failure of the RCMP to protect indigenous property. It is much deeper than these several episodes.
Let us look at the statistics of how injunctions are granted. It is injunction law that allows RCMP officers to be converted from public security and public safety officers into essentially the private police of corporations operating on indigenous lands. The Yellowhead Institute, in a study from October 2019, noted that when corporations go to court and seek injunctions to prevent indigenous people from interrupting their commercial enterprises, corporations succeed before the courts in gaining injunctions 76% of the time. In contrast, when indigenous people go to court to seek injunctions to protect their land from corporate operations, they are rejected 81% of the time. Thus, the system in which we operate is, again, systemically racist in that the RCMP are far more likely to show up for corporations.
In the case of the Elsipogtog, there were indigenous actions against fracking back in 2013 in New Brunswick. Mi'kmaq residents, in full possession of their rights, in a non-violent protest against fracking, had the police show up with attack dogs. They showed up well armed and arrested people. They arrested them forcefully. This is quite an outrage when we look at the history of how the RCMP operate to enforce injunctions to protect resource-extracting companies. Their rights to extract resources come right up against indigenous rights recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada, yet over and over again, it is indigenous people who are not protected by the RCMP while corporations are.
When we look at what has happened in British Columbia, certainly injunctive relief was available—