44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 23, 2023
- 04:51:22 p.m.
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Thank you.
Good afternoon, members of the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs.
My name is Joel Abram. I'm the grand chief of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians, whose seven member nations include Batchewana First Nation, Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit or Delaware Nation, Caldwell First Nation, Wahta Mohawks, Oneida Nation of the Thames, Hiawatha First Nation and Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. All together, we advocate for approximately 20,000 first nations citizens.
I am here today to speak of our strong concerns that this bill will irreparably destabilize the foundation of Canada's relations with our member nations. Our member nations affirm their sovereignty, founded in the responsibilities provided to their respective nations by the Creator. The member nations have their own constitutionalism and self-determination, including pre-existing laws that govern over treaty relationships, and they are steadfast that they cannot surrender their sovereignty, territory or way of life.
We stand united in our opposition to Bill C-53, and I am here to ask you to kill the bill. We cannot be idle when this Métis nation claims sovereign rights in our territories in southern, central and northeastern Ontario. Bill C-53 is another example of the Canadian government's attempt to assimilate and subjugate our peoples. It ignores our inherent, aboriginal and treaty rights, and prioritizes Métis rights in lands they have no indigenous claim to.
In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau introduced a 1969 “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy”, more commonly known as the “white paper”. It proposed eradicating the special legal status of Indians in this country. The result was a first nations uprising and uproar that put an end to that policy. This was the beginning of AIAI: a shared commitment to our sovereignty as indigenous peoples.
We are actively participating in a similar response to Bill C-53 hoping to achieve the same result, because it seems Bill C-53 has the same endgame: eradicating the meaning of the special status we are recognized as having in your Constitution. We are widely known as a first nation organization that takes to the streets to organize demonstrations when Canada goes too far.
Subsection 35(2) is not a colonial equalizer of rights, and our member nations are still called “Indian” alongside Métis and Inuit, but this does not erase the Haudenosaunee, Lenape or Anishinabe nations' very unique and special relationship with Canada.
Co-equal first nation, Inuit and Métis policy continues the harm and damage of the Indian Act. We have communities and nations to heal and revitalize, and the Métis run up the middle with equity-seeking funding they do not deserve in municipalities that have clean drinking water, well-funded schools and first world infrastructure. More specifically, in Bill C-53, recognizing section 35 rights of groups that do not actually have that unique constitutional status waters down the significance of that recognition. This is assimilation all over again through a slightly different angle.
Our nations have treaty relationships that existed before Confederation. At no time did we recognize or have kinship relations with these distinct and separate Métis communities, let alone nations, in our territories. It is that simple. They did not exist at the requisite time they would need to in order to have an inherent right to self-government in territories near or adjacent to our nations. However, our nations must deal with these organizations, the Métis Nation of Ontario and their collectivities within municipalities in southern, central and northern Ontario, and this legislation will make their questionable and illegitimate claims real, while our inherent and treaty rights become subservient.
We were your military allies before Confederation, and we were key treaty partners who shared our territories for the settlement of southern, central and northeastern Ontario. Canada's history could have been a much different one without these important treaty relationships in the 18th and 19th centuries. Bill C-53 grants rights to a Métis collectivity not because it meets the criteria in a Métis right to self-government analysis, but because its name is added to column 2 in a schedule. We are going so far beyond Powley with this legislation.
Our lawyers inform us that differential treatment has always been part of the honour of the Crown and the Crown policy of aboriginal rights, and ignoring these doctrines is to undermine the significance of section 35 for nations that hold inherent aboriginal and treaty rights based on sacred relationships to our homelands and adherence to the law. This is assimilation all over again.
Not only does Bill C-53 promote assimilation by ignoring section 35 analysis, but it also subjugates our member nations and their jurisdiction to that of this modern treaty contemplated in this legislation.
Clause 7 of Bill C-53 states that a Métis treaty would take precedence over any inconsistent provisions of the bill or of any piece of federal legislation. This includes existing first nation treaty implementation legislation and means that the implementation of legitimate first nation treaties would take a back seat to the implementation of the Métis Nation of Ontario’s treaty in event of any conflict.
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- 05:19:12 p.m.
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I don't really have an issue overall with Métis people, but our real issue is in Ontario and specifically with the Métis Nation of Ontario, where they're having real claims to consultation rights and harvesting rights within our homelands. We know their objectives are about land, and this legislation is tied to that.
I'm not a lawyer, but we did speak with several about this issue. I understand that the Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that the foundation of section 35 rights in Canadian law is about our presence in our homelands before Europeans came here. In other words, it's our pre-existing relationship with land over which the Crown now exerts jurisdiction that is the very foundation of section 35 rights in Canadian law. We can't speak about section 35 rights without speaking about land, because without that relationship with land there would be no section 35 rights.
Even in the Supreme Court's 1996 decision in Van der Peet, these were the words of Chief Justice Lamer:
...the doctrine of aboriginal rights exists, and is recognized and affirmed by s. 35(1), because of one simple fact: when Europeans arrived in North America, aboriginal peoples were already here, living in communities on the land, and participating in distinctive cultures, as they had done for centuries. It is this fact, and this fact above all others, which separates aboriginal peoples from all other minority groups in Canadian society and which mandates their special legal, and now constitutional, status.
More specifically, what s. 35(1) does is provide the constitutional framework through which the fact that aboriginals lived on the land in distinctive societies, with their own practices, traditions and cultures, is acknowledged and reconciled with the sovereignty of the Crown.
Recognizing that section 35 right to self-government is necessarily about land because there cannot be section 35 rights without that pre-existing relationship with specific homelands.
The Supreme Court, in Powley, did say that there were Métis nations in Ontario that had section 35 rights. We're not asking Parliament to ignore that, but no court in Canada, including its top court, has ever recognized Métis rights to self-government anywhere in Ontario, let alone across the entire province. When it comes to Métis in general, we don't have an issue, but we know that, specifically in Ontario, the Métis Nation of Ontario is vastly overreaching in terms of what kind of recognition they're going to be getting. That's our major concern.
If Canada had consulted with us, then it would have known that. In fact, [Technical difficulty—Editor] Canada has run fast in the other direction without discussion or answers. It's been acting as though we do not already have well-established treaty relationships with it. It has turned its back on a covenant chain and the process agreed to through it to resolve disputes by meeting in council and discussing issues and concerns among the treaty nations. Not only has Canada not consulted, but it's breaching fundamental treaty obligations by refusing to sit down with us [Technical difficulty—Editor] to hear our concerns and engage in reasoned dialogue. The only thing that we have is this process here, today.
There's a recent decision from the Supreme Court in Quebec that talks about the covenant [Technical difficulty—Editor] chain and the dispute resolution process. That case involved two individuals from the Mohawks of Kahnawake, where the discussion of the covenant chain applies equally to our first nations in Ontario.
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- 05:23:22 p.m.
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If you're going to legislate something—
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- 05:23:26 p.m.
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How about now? I'll slow it down a little bit.
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