- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
- Dec/12/23 1:41:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Nunavut for her important and wonderful voice here in this Parliament, constantly reminding us about the rights of indigenous people. It gives more than just words and thoughts to their rights, and actually puts those rights into action in our agreements and our laws.
Yes, I am very happy that we have a chapter here on indigenous rights in this agreement. It speaks to the Tatar people of Ukraine, as well as the indigenous people here in Canada, and that these types of chapters will be in further agreements.
We had the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which we have recognized here in Canada. British Columbia has laws. We have to make sure that, every day, we think of what those rights mean and how we make our laws and decisions here to uphold those rights.
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Madam Speaker, as I said, this bill would not infringe on anything involving the indigenous rights under section 35. I discussed this with my colleagues here in this place: the member for Nunavut and the member for Winnipeg Centre, who are well versed in these matters.
Again, this is the fifth time this bill has been tabled in this place. Those matters have been discussed in committee and discussed at length in other venues, so I am confident we are actually making this country a clean and healthy place for all. Indigenous people are really the best stewards we have had, and I am sure they would appreciate any legislation that would keep us all protected from anything that would limit the ability for us to live in a healthy environment.
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Mr. Speaker, I will follow up on the comments we heard just now. In terms of the funding that needs to be available for the upkeep of these sites, a lot of sites commemorating the indigenous history of our country really do not have a built environment. I think it is important to create the interpretive centres that would tell us, finally, about the indigenous history of Canada and to provide funding for that necessary part of our national historic sites.
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Madam Speaker, in 2018, the Auditor General pointed out that the Liberal government was not assigning enough funding to national historic sites to keep them from falling apart. We are adding more, and with this bill, hopefully we will add more indigenous-led historic sites. I am wondering what the government's plan is to properly fund the preservation of these sites.
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Madam Speaker, the last time I heard my colleague speak to this subject, he exclaimed how interested he was in history, and that really came through here.
There are historic sites in my riding. There is the Rossland Miners' Hall; the Rossland Court House; the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre in New Denver, which talks about the Japanese internment during the Second World War; and the Doukhobor Suspension Bridge, a remarkable bridge built over a hundred years ago over the Kootenay River near Castlegar. However, as we know, none of these speak to that first nations indigenous history of Canada, which is so important. The good thing about the bill before us is that it would more than encourage that. It would make it possible.
I am just wondering if the member could comment further on letting first nations and indigenous peoples take the reins.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Nunavut.
I am happy to rise today to speak to Bill C-23, the historic places of Canada act, which will modernize the Historic Sites and Monuments Act. In short, this new act will update the protection and conservation framework for historic places and give indigenous people a role in determining those places.
Canadians value our heritage places and the role they play in our collective history and culture, but for most of Canadian history, the history of indigenous peoples has almost been entirely absent from our historic sites and monuments. This bill takes a first step to include indigenous peoples in the designation and development of those sites.
While the member for Nunavut will expand more fully on this issue, I would like to bring up two examples of important indigenous sites from my riding that illustrate this.
There are two provincial parks in the South Okanagan that are popular camping spots but also happen to be important cultural sites for the Syilx people.
Unlike most non-indigenous historic sites, these sites do not have a building to mark them but have been important gathering places for millennia.
One is sẁiẁs Provincial Park. It is a beautiful narrow peninsula that almost cuts the Osoyoos Lake in two. The nsyilxcən name means a shallow place where one can cross the lake on foot or by horse.
The name sẁiẁs was altered by the first settler justice of the peace, Judge Haynes, to Osoyoos, and that has become the name of the local town and of the lake.
Legend has it that Judge Haynes added the “o” in front of the name because of his Irish heritage.
Ironically, the long peninsula took on the name Haynes Point and then became Haynes Point Provincial Park. In 2015, the name of the park was changed to sẁiẁs Provincial Park, and the park is now managed and operated by the Osoyoos Indian Band.
A similar situation is found a little further north, at Okanagan Falls. This site, at a rocky rapids where the Okanagan River flows out of Skaha Lake, has been a sacred gathering site for the Syilx people for thousands of years, as it was a place where sockeye and chinook salmon were caught as they swam upstream to spawn.
Like sẁiẁs Park, which I mentioned previously, this became a provincial park, called Okanagan Falls Provincial Park, but in 2015 it too was renamed, and it has since been managed by the Osoyoos Indian Band as well. It is now known by the nsyilxcən name sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ Provincial Park, and that name means “little falls”. That signifies a connection to Kettle Falls, in Washington state, on the Kettle River.
The nsyilxcən name for Kettle Falls is sx̌ʷnitkʷ, which means “big falls”. These two falls were two of the most important fishing sites for the Okanagan Nation's traditional territory.
Kettle Falls was flooded by the Grand Coulee Dam almost a century ago, and while that was done in the United States, it reflects the complete disregard for sites that were critically important to indigenous people in the settler development of North America.
The campsite at sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ Provincial Park is closed annually on the third weekend of September for the Okanagan Nation Alliance's Salmon Feast. The event raises awareness of Okanagan history and culture, as well as the Okanagan Nation's effort to revitalize and restore sockeye salmon numbers in the Okanagan River.
Everyone is welcome to attend the celebration, and I heartily recommend it. It is a wonderful celebration.
There is one official national historic site in my riding, and that is the Rossland Miners' Union Hall. This building was opened in 1898 at the height of the mining boom in West Kootenay. Local miners had created the first Canadian local of the Western Federation of Miners in 1895, and each donated a day's pay to create the hall.
That local went on to advance many of the first labour laws in British Columbia and Canada, laws that brought in the five-day workweek, the eight-hour workday and laws enforcing safe workplaces and the first workers' compensation act.
Continued unrest in the mining camps after the hall was built resulted in the Canadian government's sending Roger Clute, a prominent Toronto lawyer, to Rossland in 1899. He reported back that compulsory arbitration would be less effective than conciliatory measures and, after another trip to Rossland, his reports led to the federal Conciliation Act of 1900, which helped create the Department of Labour and the Canadian system of industrial relations.
Rossland helped build our system of labour relations across the country, and the miners' hall was at the centre of that activity. It is even rumoured that Joe Hill, the legendary labour activist from the United States, lived in the attic of the hall while hiding out from American authorities, so the Rossland Union Miners' Hall can be truly held up as one of the most important historic sites in Canada, and it still plays an important role in the community life of Rossland and the surrounding areas.
It fell into disuse after the mines closed in the late 1920s, and it needed a lot of renovations to bring it back to light. More recent renovations began in 2015, and initial attempts to find federal funding to aid in that were unsuccessful, though I am happy to report that the most recent renovations received funding from all levels of government. In 2020, the Rossland miners' hall was designated a national historic site, and I was very happy to be there for that ceremony.
I wanted to tell the story of the miners' hall to make it clear that these historic sites need ongoing maintenance and renovations, and the sites that are not owned by the federal government, like the miners' hall, need this just as much as those that are.
In 2017, the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development recommended that the annual federal cost-sharing funding for historic sites be increased to a minimum of $10 million annually, but only $2 million is available for the next cycle. In 2018, the Auditor General reported that no resources are allocated to new national historic sites, and that these precious resources are literally falling apart. We need to do better to maintain the heritage that Canadians cherish.
I would like to finish with one more example of an historic place in Canada that as yet has no federal designation or protection, and that is the SS Sicamous in Penticton. The SS Sicamous is a historic paddlewheeler steamship that plied Okanagan Lake in the early 1900s, providing a vital link up and down the valley before roads were built. It is permanently docked at Penticton, along with the stern saloon of the SS Okanagan, an earlier vessel that actually brought my grandparents down the lake when they immigrated from England to Canada in 1910. This marine history park has also added the SS Naramata, an old steam tug, and another historic CPR diesel tug that pushed train barges on Okanagan Lake early in my lifetime.
These historic ships are a big part of the historic heritage of our country and deserve national designation. Like the situation with the Rossland miners' hall, maintenance and renovation of these ships is very expensive. There is a large, very talented and enthusiastic group of volunteers who work on them every day, but they need the funding for materials to help with their work.
This bill is long overdue, and the NDP will be supporting it, but we need to do more to ensure that indigenous voices and indigenous sites take their rightful place in our national historic places. We need to ensure that adequate funding is available to save these precious places for the future generations of Canada.
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Madam Speaker, I know the member's history and appreciate all the work he has put into this and where he is coming from.
It is a very important bill, and we should, at its core, recognize the indigenous history of Canada, which has been completely absent from most of our commemorations. To protect historic sites, monuments, places or whatever one wants to call them, we need funding. In 2018, the Auditor General found that there was not adequate funding.
That happened in my riding. The Miners' Union Hall in Rossland, which is the only site in my riding that is a national historic site, could not get federal funding to maintain its roof.
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Madam Speaker, I think it has been seven years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced its report and the calls to action, which is as long as the government has been in power, yet only 13 of the 90-something calls to action have been implemented. This would be one of the more basic ones to implement. Had we done it earlier, we would be further ahead.
I am wondering if the member can comment on why it has taken so long to get to this point and why the government is lagging so far behind in its promises to indigenous people.
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Mr. Speaker, the government has broken many promises to indigenous people over the last seven year, such as the promise to lift long-term drinking water advisories across the country by 2021. If this body had been set up before, would it have helped? If so, why did we not do this earlier?
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- Sep/26/22 9:50:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his speech tonight and for his on-the-ground reporting as to what is really going on on Cape Breton Island. He made the point that the reason behind this and other disasters we have been facing is climate change.
I am wondering, given the member's role in this, if he would like to comment on the role that indigenous people across Canada should and could be taking in leading the fight against climate change, the fight we all have to be engaged in.
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