Madam Speaker, I want to thank all my colleagues for this important discussion today on the economic barriers that are leading to detrimental impacts on indigenous communities to better serve themselves, their community and all Canadians.
It is not too far in our own history that we looked to indigenous innovation for immense solutions to everyday problems. For example, the baby jumper is something that was invented by an indigenous woman right here in Canada. It is a significant contribution that most indigenous and non-Indigenous children would have access to. Indigenous entrepreneurs and indigenous economic motivators are critical to the success of Canada. However, that being said, there are immense barriers to these kinds of achievements by indigenous people, which is why it is so often the case that they find themselves in difficult circumstances to keep their businesses and operations afloat.
The indigenous and northern affairs committee was asked to study the barriers to indigenous economic development and highlighted a few key aspects of what that could mean within the report. However, I would like to focus today on what we find in the recommendations and speak to some of the challenges we are seeing here in Ottawa. For example, there is the infrastructure gap, and I will be touching on this important deficit, which is largely contributing to indigenous people having less access to our economy. Let me put it into perspective.
Within the immense supply chain in our country there are, for example, railroads, two bands of steel right across the country, but this kind of economic infrastructure in the supply chain is very difficult for indigenous people to participate in when they are so far from infrastructure inputs to get their product to market. Indigenous communities make up an immense part of the economies in northern Alberta, northern Saskatchewan, northern Manitoba and northern British Columbia, but they are still finding the lack of infrastructure a critical barrier. For example, the deficit for infrastructure is over $350 billion for first nations communities and $75 billion for Inuit.
There is a $2.5-billion deficit for infrastructure, and indigenous people have been simply left behind for generations. It is time we catch up. We need a government that is willing to invest in infrastructure to see these communities truly flourish.
Another topic I would like to address is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is true that although economic development in Canada has largely taken place without the consent of indigenous people, we are now on a path that would see indigenous people participate better in the economic development drivers of our country. However, there are still immense barriers to this.
We see, time and time again, that when a first nations, Métis or Inuit community says no, the government ignores it. Indigenous people have fought tooth and nail to see the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples truly adhered to. This gives indigenous people the great ability not just to say yes to projects that benefit them, but to also say no. This is the biggest contrast and challenge that indigenous people have, particularly with Conservative and Liberal governments. Time and time again, indigenous issues and indigenous people are only important when it is convenient to them.
This particular case is another one of those instances where indigenous people have now taken the floor of the House of Commons to speak to the very interesting and deep challenges related to economic development. However, it is against the backdrop of an important moment in our House of Commons where we are being stalemated, because of several instances of concurrence in this place to slow down government legislation, which I understand completely. However, I also understand, and want to point out, that this debate today is critical and should not be taking place on the backs of other critical pieces of work and legislation. This is an important topic, and we have a moment now to speak to it. I would hope that the government representatives are listening.
We have a serious issue with the final topic I will address today, which is indigenous procurement. To back up a bit, procurement for indigenous people is done through a federal program called PSIB, the indigenous business support program, which allows indigenous people to bid on procurement items. When the government is looking for talent acquisition, it would create an offer, have indigenous people bid, and then the successful indigenous company would administer that program. It sounds wonderful. It is a great thing for indigenous businesses, should they be allowed to fairly participate.
There is no framework today that would put the indigenous procurement strategy of the government to a higher standard, one that would not be forcing the Assembly of First Nations to call for real reform within procurement. It would not be that the victims of the lack of procurement are those indigenous businesses, which are the real victims here. It is the indigenous businesses that have done everything right, that played by the rules, that signed all the papers and that got the congratulations and a pat on the back for incorporating their company, only to be met by a system that is rigged by the government and that has benefited, in this particular case, someone named Randy.
This is an obvious instance that requires the government's immediate attention. We need to get directly to the bottom of what has been taking place in the indigenous procurement processes of the government. It is time for someone to be held accountable for the pretendianism that continues to propagate right across this country. Whether it is in social media, in traditional media, in businesses or right here in the House of Commons, there are people who are falsely claiming to be indigenous.
I had a conversation with my sister when the story came up, and she smiled at me and she said that if people want to be indigenous so badly, they should also suffer the consequences. What a thing to say. Today, the lack of access to indigenous business support is the consequence. Being disproportionately impacted by poverty is the condition indigenous people are in.
Can members imagine how much of a slap in the face it is when there is a member of the cabinet claiming to be indigenous for the purposes of accessing an indigenous procurement strategy? That is the issue pertaining to indigenous procurement today. It requires the immediate attention of the government. The AFN, indigenous leaders and, as someone made mention, Métis people are also calling for justice. How can anyone have faith in a system that allows for non-indigenous people's applications to even be heard, let alone eventually accepted and part of the government's procurement process? It is very serious indeed.
I want to speak to the important and critical aspects of the report as it pertains to indigenous self-determination. Indigenous people in Canada have always been subject to a unique relationship. Ever since the onset of colonization in North America, it has always been one of economic coercion. Economic coercion is the story and history of Canada.
We do not even have to look all that far. In my own lifetime, I have heard stories from elders who remember the days of the crooked and greedy Hudson's Bay Company. It was a monopoly here in North America that took such great advantage of indigenous people that there are horrific stories, whether of the delivery of small pox blankets or whether of the fact that indigenous people had to trap so many furs, up to the height of a rifle. That was the cost of it. There was extreme greed by the companies.
What is a shame to hear today is the fact that companies continue in that tradition, whether they are huge, immense, giant natural resource companies that say they would rather sue the nation than work with it, like we have seen in northern Alberta, or whether it is governments getting in the direct way of indigenous people trying to get access to real economic benefit, like what is taking place in Alberta.
In southwest Calgary, Canada's largest first nation development, the Tsuut'ina Nation, is building a master-planned community on 1,200 acres of its land. The $10-billion, mixed-use project will feature 17 million square feet of real estate, including more than 6,500 residential units. However, there are issues related to the ability to permit it by the provincial government.
Now the nation is waiting. It has been waiting and waiting for the government to give it the green light, when it is the nation of those lands. Original stewards have always built homes on their lands since time immemorial, and today a province is saying no. That is limiting economic business and economic opportunity for indigenous people, just as much as pretending to be indigenous for the purpose of trying to access capital. Over and over again we see instances of indigenous entrepreneurs being sidelined, whether in the case of provincial governments, as I just mentioned; in this case, with a federal government program that was meant to help indigenous entrepreneurs in procurement; or in the case of upholding indigenous people's rights.
We often talk about economic reconciliation, a buzzword from my Conservative colleagues, who most particularly want to talk about access to natural resources. I understand this very well, coming from a natural resource community myself, an area that I worked in for quite a long time. I know how these debates go with companies. When companies come in, they are hoping to get a $3,000 barbecue so we do not have to talk about beneficial ownership. I know exactly what it means when a company comes in and says it is going to use our roads and not pay for any operations or maintenance. I know exactly what it means when a company says it is going to give us a sweetheart deal today and walk out 10 years later, leaving the community with a mess to clean up costing billions of dollars.
These are the real economic barriers facing indigenous people, and these are issues we do not talk about. We do not talk about them because of the deep desire to see a partisan benefit. Anytime we talk about indigenous issues in this place, with the Liberals and the Conservatives, it is always about how they can score one on indigenous people. We have to end this. We have to be critical of these issues. Hopefully, we can unite as a House toward a process that deals with indigenous people as the rightful and beneficial owners of their lands and come to a real conclusion, a united conclusion, in the House saying that Canada must respect fundamental rights.
I would like to speak now for a moment about the importance of treaties. Canada undertook, in the 1870s and 1880s, until the late 1920s, a process of historic treaty-making. For the better knowledge of my colleagues, there are several eras of treaties we can delineate. For the topic of this discussion, we are talking about the numbered treaties. For the numbered treaties, one of which I am from, Treaty No. 6, benefits were allocated throughout treaty negotiations and for the treaties themselves. However, the government, as soon as it signed these treaties, walked away and said, no, it knows better and that since it had the land, it is going to legislate these people, put down the Indian Act and never hear of the treaties again.
Today, we are in the courts. The Liberal government and the federal Conservatives have had a whole lifetime of lawsuits against indigenous people based on this decision. There is the clean water legislation, for example. Having clean drinking water would fundamentally increase indigenous people's access to the economy. A federal piece of legislation on that was struck down by the courts when the Conservatives tried to defend it. A Conservative piece of legislation that was struck down for being unconstitutional is now being replaced with another piece of legislation by the Liberals that is barely an improvement.
These are the issues we are talking about. This incremental justice results in massive injustices for indigenous people while we wait and wait and children go by without anything. That is why it is so critical that we speak to the real challenges facing economic development for indigenous communities.
Part of the real issue is capital. The Indian Act, for example, delineates very small, postage stamp pieces of land. For indigenous people to truly be stewards of an economy that is for their own people, their land must grow. The fact that we have reserved them to small, postage stamp pieces of property is an abomination. We must end the apartheid that exists in Canada. We must end the racial legislation that exists under the Indian Act. We must empower indigenous people toward their own destiny.
For thousands of years, indigenous people have traded up and down the St. Lawrence, up and down North America, all the way from Mexico to Tuktoyaktuk, bringing goods and services to people right across this great place. However, the ugly horrors of racism and discrimination clamped down on Canada as the boats of Europe arrived.
Europeans limited indigenous peoples' dignity by saying that they were savage. Today, we reject this term in the hope that we can see indigenous people like me, and like those right across this country, as the true stewards of this place. They are the ones who understand this land and who will hopefully save it from a climate crisis that continues to ravage the world and, most importantly, indigenous people, who are on the front lines of much of this.
There is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a meaningful framework, first ushered in by one of the greatest advocates in Canada, an Alberta first nations chief by the name of Dr. Wilton Littlechild, who is a fantastic and remarkable living giant from Alberta. The nations he serves are largely nations that are in the resource-rich provinces, including my home province.
We have never, at any point in time, have had to delineate between the unfortunate dichotomy that now exists between resource development and resource non-development. These kinds of questions presuppose indigenous peoples' interests. Perhaps indigenous peoples' interests are for their land mass to grow, for example. How do we get to the point of having conversations with indigenous people about their desires? Instead, we have a government that continually wants access to indigenous peoples' resources and lands, and it is finding every single way to do it, even though the courts and the international community have been clear that indigenous people have a fundamental right to their lands and a say in its use. That includes the right to say no.
These are fundamental rights that would ensure clarity for industrial partners. That is what I have been hearing from resource development companies, in particular. They just want clarity. If they can find a way to get clarity on who has those consultative rights, then perhaps those companies, including those of indigenous people, would not have to settle these disputes in court. This would require a government that would be willing to understand and implement treaties in a number of treaty areas. It would also require the government to act in earnest in areas where there is no treaty, fully recognizing that they are indigenous lands.
When we do not recognize this, there is a cost and a consequence. As a matter of fact, we saw this cost and consequence manifest during the last Parliament, when we saw one of the most historic instances of indigenous people saying no. That was in the Wet’suwet’en uprising in British Columbia. They had simply said no to a project, and it resulted in what we are again seeing today: immense violence, such as police officers with chainsaws ripping down doors. There is no reason for this violence in our country. The days of burning indigenous people off their lands are over.
It is time now to respect indigenous people for our perspectives, our knowledge and our ways of being, not simply for having to play defence for the Liberals or the Conservatives any time they bring up an issue concerning indigenous people for their own partisan benefit. That is the only time we debate these issues in the House.
I am asking my colleagues to rise to the occasion, to rise to the true dignity that Murray Sinclair called us to, and there are those who have already invoked his name. He called us to reconciliation because, without it, we will have resistance. Those words live on in my head and in the minds and hearts of indigenous people right across this country. They demand better. They demand reform and demand that these issues be taken more seriously and be given more credence.
I want to make a final comment in the last point I will make today, which is on indigenous procurement. I understand that there have been numerous discussions related to who is indigenous and who is not indigenous. This is a serious issue that has touched the hearts and minds of Canadians and those across North America. It is in the media, in academia and in this place. There has never been a time more important than today to work with indigenous people, to understand indigenous people and put indigenous people in the leadership role in developing a framework that would see indigenous identity truly respected and taken care of. I call on the government to immediately audit the existing list of businesses, strike down any that are ineligible and create a framework with indigenous people that gets to the bottom of this and ends Britannianism in procurement across Canada.