Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise to speak on Bill C-30.
At the outset, the NDP will support the bill. We had a number of concerns with it and attempted to bring forward amendments that would have improved it, but the Conservatives were not interested. We will be putting on the record our concerns about the bill because it will go a few steps toward dealing with some of the specific issues in the area of specific claims, but it does not deal with some of the larger issues that we really need to deal with as a Parliament and a country.
The more I travel and the more people I meet, the more I understand that Canada's failure to address the need to deal with our historic legacy with first nations is probably the one element that keeps us from meeting our greatness as a nation. We need to come together. This is not a partisan issue. This is a fundamental failing that has been running through Canada since the beginning and we and our generation have to deal with this.
I had the great honour to represent my riding, and in a sense be the representative of the Government of Canada, during the Treaty No. 9 activities that happened across a vast section of northern Ontario. Treaty No. 9, as we are aware, covers probably two-thirds of the land mass of Ontario.
We began in northwestern Ontario, where the first treaty signers, who were actually representing the government of Ontario and the Government of Canada, met with the first communities. They travelled by canoe to every community up to the James Bay region. That was 100 years ago.
I was in certain communities when it was re-enacted with young canoeists. I had the opportunity to go to the community of Martin Falls. Martin Falls is the most isolated community in my riding, far along the Albany River, as far from any other community as one could imagine. We were invited to come up river to the actual spot at Martin Falls where the treaty was signed 100 years ago. It took us all afternoon to get up the river to that location. We were in the exact spot and probably what looked like the exact conditions when the first treaty signers can come across Martin Falls and met with the Ojibwe community.
During that afternoon, the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and representatives of the Government of Canada were there, and I was speaking. A man stood up and started to speak in Ojibwe. He asked if he could address us. He apologized and said that he had never learned to speak English. When he was four years old, government officials came and took his sister away. She was a year older. They never brought her back and nobody had ever told them what happened to her. He said the next year when they came, his family hid him in the bush and he never went to school.
There was such a profound sense of loss in that little community as we stood on the river and he spoke of that little girl, for whom nobody has ever accounted. We think of the years of tragedy, abuse and broken promises that happened in these communities, which profoundly affected people's ability to develop. They were profoundly affected emotionally in the wholesale surrenders and illegal transfers of lands and the stripping of resources that happened. It crippled them financially.
As I stood there 100 years later and spoke on behalf of the Government of Canada as the people's member of Parliament, I said there was not really much to celebrate. There is not much to celebrate in a legacy in which a treaty was signed by these people in good faith and that treaty was broken every step of the way.
Every community in my riding in the James Bay region and isolated regions are among the most impoverished in Canada. We can do better. This is why we need to speak about the issue of specific claims. No one government, no one party will be able to come forward with a panacea for dealing with the years of broken promises and the devastating impacts they have had on our communities across the country, but we need to take specific steps.
I will speak to the issue of specific claims. One of the great fortunes of my life was to work for the Algonquin Nation in Quebec. I worked on historic research and dealt with the outstanding issue of claims. The issue of specific claims falls into many varieties of economic and financial abuses that were done against these communities. It could have been the stripping of timber off the land. It could have been the abuse by federal officials of the trust fund accounts that were set up for these communities. It could be outrageous acts as just simply moving the boundary of a reserve because it was more convenient to sell it off.
We need to have a bit of historical perspective. Between 1898 and 1940 there was a phenomenal sell-off of first nation territory. In western Canada in the prairie provinces it was almost as though the role of the MP and the role of the government officials was to act as real estate speculators. Land was sold off at phenomenal fire sale prices.
In my region, in the Abitibi region with the Algonquin Nation so much land was sold off through a whole series of patchwork surrenders. Many of these surrenders were dubious at best. Any kind of intimidation was used. There were a few key players in each of them. Often it was a member of Parliament who played a role. He was seen as the guy who could get them the land. The others of course were the government officials who failed in their fiduciary responsibility. The third player was the Indian agent.
In the community of Timiskaming First Nation, from which I have learned so much, there was only one Indian agent who was ever fired, as far as we know. He was the only Indian agent who was ever on record as telling the community that he did not think that a particular land surrender was in their best interests and in fact they had better keep their land because they were going to get nothing out of it. He is the only Indian agent we ever heard of who was fired. All the rest were more than willing to sell the interests of these communities down the river.
Here we are, in some cases 100 years and in some cases 50 years after these surrenders took place where communities are still crippled. We need to address them. Unfortunately the attitude toward specific claims has been much the same as the attitude toward the other problems of the first nations. The attitude is one of, “Take us to court”. The attitude is, “Let us drag it out”. The attitude is, “We will get into negotiations and then we will start dragging our feet”. The second we are into negotiations, the community is basically in a borrowing situation. The community is having to borrow to meet with consultants and experts, so at the end of the day the community does not get what is needed. Many of these claims could be settled with a little good faith.
I have dealt with communities that have been very wary about signing on to any kind of treaty claim process because they have seen what has happened in other communities. A simple issue of trying to resolve a historical dispute over a boundary, over an illegal surrender becomes a hodge-podge of so many interests who are coming to the table and dragging out with lawyers. The community is on the hook in terms of having to pay until the point that whatever it gets at the end of the day simply does not address the community's needs.
On top of that the first nations are being asked to sign away any aboriginal title, to extinguish their claim as a people over the land that they have always lived on. I have known communities in desperate poverty who will never sign that because they believe the only thing they have to pass on to their grandchildren is the title, and the title has to be preserved.
There are elements in this claims process, and I commend the former Indian affairs minister who made it an issue that we have to start dealing with the backlog; yes, we have to deal with the backlog. I am concerned about the whole role of the tribunal and the issue of how litigious it will be. The minister will be the one who sets the terms for negotiation. He has the ability to reject claims. In three years if no one gets back to the community, it is considered rejected. I think it will be difficult for some communities to feel they can trust to go forward into that claim. I am not sure at the end of the day we will be any further ahead.
This gets to the most fundamental issue of dealing with specific claims. We really need to start a process where we actually stop breaking faith with our communities in terms of any agreements that are signed. With the abuses that were done 100 years ago, we can talk about the abuses that are being done today in terms of the government walking away on commitments.
I worked in the community of Barriere Lake in Quebec, a little community that has been beaten mercilessly, and that is the only way I can describe it, in terms of trying to break the traditional structure. That community is so impoverished. It is sitting on a territory that creates $50 million or $60 million a year in resources. People in that community did not want to stop the logging. They just wanted to find a way to balance the logging so they could continue their way of life and there could be some sense of resource revenue sharing to get out of the horrific poverty. They are only 300 kilometres up the road. There are 21 people living in two bedroom houses. A diesel generator is keeping the community going when it is beside some of the largest hydro dams in North America.
In 1997 the federal government intervened and took out the traditional band council. We had a year's standoff where there was no school. There was no heat in the community. No money was going into that community for a year. This was all happening just in the shadow of Ottawa, until it actually became an international story.
Clifford Lincoln was involved. Former representatives of the Quebec government sat down with the federal government and the community of Barriere Lake and tried to sign an agreement. How do we rebuild this community? That was called the memorandum of global understanding, to make a plan to get this community, over the long term, out of its dire poverty. That agreement was signed and nothing ever happened after that. It was just one more broken promise.
We are seeing the sense of hopelessness and bitterness among so many of the young first nations. They are looking for where the results are. When we are looking at terms of how to deal with the backlog of claims, and it is important to deal with those claims, we need to be saying that we have to go beyond a litigious process, beyond simply take it or leave it. We have to start asking how to deal with our backlog of problems so that we move further ahead.
I know communities that have lost phenomenal amounts of land. They know they will never get that land back. They are under no illusions. What they want is a process so that they can give their young people opportunities. In many of these communities it is possible, but it is only going to be possible with good faith.
We certainly are willing to support this bill going forward, but we do not believe it is going to address the fundamental problem that we are facing, which is the need for government to enter into good faith negotiations with communities, to enter into consultations with the leadership in various regions to find a format to move forward to address the backlog of specific claims.
We need to start dealing with the issue of specific claims and find a way that we can actually move forward so that we can begin to address the absolute failure of government to live up to any of its basic fiduciary obligations in terms of housing, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of resource revenue sharing.
In the province of Ontario right now we, through the provincial New Democrats, have been pushing for the notion of resource revenue sharing for many years. If a mine is going to develop, a municipality is allowed to receive some of the tax revenue, and yet we think it is perfectly all right to go into an isolated first nation region, set up a mine and the community has no say, no benefit, nothing.
The provincial Liberal government continually has cancelled our attempts to get resource revenue sharing. Now we have a situation with the KI community where the province threw the leadership in jail. The message is, “We will consult with you as long as you allow complete and open access on our terms. Otherwise we will take you to court. We will allow the companies to throw massive lawsuits against you and we will put you in jail”.
I do not know if non-native Canada understands the implications of what is happening with KI, but it has poisoned the developing relations that we are seeing and what we are trying to see in terms of first nations development.
Consultation cannot be done with a gun to the head and throwing the leadership in jail. The situation with KI, which I think is so astounding, is that the courts have proven again and again the obligation to consult. We have certainly seen it in British Columbia, where most of the big test cases have come from the obligation to consult, but the kicker is, they actually need the money to hire the lawyers to get into court to prove their case. KI faced a $10 billion lawsuit because they kicked a mercenary hired by Platinex off their territory and they simply did not have that money. Since they did not have the money to prove their claim for consultation, they were liable for charges, and in the end they were thrown in jail.
That has certainly thrown a pall over one of the other elements that up to now has been one of the few positives. That positive is the actual move by first nations to sign, we call them treaties on the ground, with resource companies because they can actually get better deals sometimes from the companies than they could ever get from the federal government.
When I was working in the Abitibi region, we were looking to meet with Tembec. We were looking to meet with diamond exploration companies. We were trying to find a way to use the aboriginal title of the territory and our aboriginal rights to actually negotiate agreements where we could start to see economic benefits. If we involved the federal government in it, all those agreements would have been stopped immediately and nothing would have ever been done.
When we look at the development of northern Canada where we have some of our most impoverished communities, resource revenue sharing agreements, agreements with mining companies that work in good faith, not companies that work in bad faith, but companies that work in good faith, can actually start to bring us a model for moving ahead in the 21st century the way we need to.
In conclusion, we support the notion of needing to deal with specific claims. There are a number of elements in the bill that we believe are not addressed. We do not believe that at the end of the day a specific claim should end up with the signing away of aboriginal title to territory. We believe that the cap will prove to be unnecessarily low and deliberately so. We do not accept the take it or leave it stance of the tribunal because we believe that one, it is in a conflict of interest, and two, we would be doubtful that some first nations would submit to a process.
We have to move forward. We have to start dealing with this. This is one of the reasons the New Democrats will be supporting the bill at this point, but we say, and this has to be seen, the greatness of Canada is being judged by our refusal to deal with first nations as honest partners, as equal partners. We need to start moving toward that.
