moved:
That Bill C-10 be amended by deleting the short title.
Mr. Speaker, before I get to my comments, I would like to draw members' attention to Cancer Awareness Month in honour of my younger sister, my mother and all those fighting this horrible disease; and the support teams who help out those who are trying to fight cancer.
We are talking today about the government trying to create a new position of treaty commissioner. The rationale is that somehow this would give accountability to the government's implementing and honouring the modern-day treaties that have been signed, mainly in B.C. They were negotiated in B.C. for the last 30 or 40 years. I have the honour of having one treaty in my riding, the Nisg̱a'a Treaty. The treaty is 20 years old and yet the people still cannot get the federal government to co-operate as a treaty partner as outlined in the treaty itself.
I also have in my riding two first nations that are up for ratification, the Kitselas First Nation and Kitsumkalum. They are going through the ratification stage right now in B.C. However, they are going to face the same problems that Nisg̱a'a, Tsawwassen, Maa-nulth and other first nations are experiencing right now with modern-day treaties, in that they cannot get Canada to participate in a modern-day treaty in partnership with Canada.
The current Liberal government wants the world to think that if it creates a treaty commissioner there will be accountability and Canada would then get to the table and co-operate with these first nations that have signed modern-day treaties. However, what government members will forget to tell them is that this issue is 20 years old. It comes back annually. There have been endless reports, even to the point where the Government of Canada created a document called the “Cabinet Directive on the Federal Approach to Modern Treaty Implementation”. It has headings: “Roles and Responsibilities...Deputy Ministers' Oversight Committee...Modern Treaty Implementation Office [and] Evaluation of the Directive”.
On top of that is the expected rhetoric that the government will “ensure that they are aware of, understand, and fulfill their departments' obligations pursuant to all modern treaties in effect.” It sounds good, except it does not do it. The treaty itself is supposed to be a document that says Canada, B.C. and a first nation shall work together in key areas. A first nation gives up its asserted rights and title and comes into a constitutionally protected document agreement in good faith, in the spirit that the first nation that signs the treaty will walk beside Canada and B.C. and help build Canada together.
The first nations are there. They want to implement and they want to build, not just for their own first nation but for Canada overall, but Canada is missing. In fact, the document, “Cabinet Directive on the Federal Approach to Modern Treaty Implementation”, came from another document, “Canada's Collaborative Modern Treaty Implementation Policy”. This has more headings than the first document I named. It goes on at length ad nauseam in terms of how Canada this year will commit to implementing the treaties that it signed with first nations. It has the regular rhetoric: “Message from the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations...Purpose...Context...Interpretation and application of this policy...Principles guiding the timely, effective and full implementation of modern treaties...Advancing objectives of modern treaties...[and] Direction to public servants”.
That means that every single ministry under the federal government that is tasked with working with its counterparts in treaty first nations has been directed to do a job.
There are headings on legislative, policy and program design considerations; monitoring, evaluation and review; and commitments to further work on essential components of the policy. Then there are the annexes. One is intergovernmental relationships, with the intergovernmental leaders' forum and the intergovernmental policy circle. The next is accountability and oversight.
All these documents and all these announcements that have come up year after year over the past 30 years are simply to state one thing: Canada is not living up to the obligations that it signed on to with the modern day treaties. Is it any wonder that the first nations will take anything that shows accountability to the first nations that have already signed them?
There are already mechanisms in the House that speak to the accountability. There are already entities outside the House that speak to the accountability that should be there but is not. There is the Auditor General's report on whether or not the government is living up to its commitments and obligations under the treaty. In B.C., we have the BC Treaty Commission, “the keeper of the process”, as it is referred to.
There is also every single department under the federal government that is supposed to be held accountable and should be sending reports to the government and to cabinet on why they are or are not living up to these commitments. We have logged, cut down, a massive amount of forest to produce all the paperwork simply to say we want to work with first nations that have signed a treaty, that have given up their aboriginal rights and title.
The biggest example that comes to mind is the Nisg̱a'a, in my territory. They wanted to be respected as a treaty partner. They take pride in their treaty. Not only is it a form of independence they are still working on, but they also thought they would be walking side by side with the federal and provincial governments. That is not so, according to the Nisg̱a'a.
On Bill C-48, the tanker ban, the Nisg̱a'a urged the government that the moratorium, the tanker ban, must not be introduced before the implications for their nation and their treaty were well understood. More important, they said that the moratorium should not cover Nisg̱a'a treaty territory. The Nisg̱a'a, to be clear, were not supporting a tanker ban. They were not for it. They were not against it. They just felt that they were owed the duty of a higher level of consultation when Canada was proposing it. They did not get it.
This brings me back to the days of the B.C. legislature. I warned the B.C. legislature not to play games with aboriginal issues, whether we were talking about case law or UNDRIP, and now B.C. is chaos. I give the same warning to the House. We should not play games with aboriginal issues, or else the chaos and the confusion are going to get built on, in terms of what we are seeing in B.C. right now.