Charlie Angus Timmins—James Bay, ON

Mr. Speaker, it is a real honour, as always, to rise in the House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay and speak again to Bill C-15 on the devolution of powers in the Northwest Territories.

At the outset, certainly the New Democrats support the principle of devolution, and I will speak a bit about the importance of devolution in a country as large and diversified as ours. However, we are concerned about clauses 136 and 137 of the bill, which would fold the regional municipal planning boards into one. We believe those changes would not be in the spirit of the negotiations with the people of the Northwest Territories and first nations. This is an outstanding problem that needs to be addressed. We can do good devolution, but we need to ensure that the voices of the people are properly heard.

My own region of Timmins—James Bay is larger than the United Kingdom, but there are many isolated fly-in communities. There are attempts under way to develop hydro resources and copper and diamonds, yet we also have communities that live in intense poverty, a veritable fourth world. Some of my communities are called “Haiti at -40°C”.

When we go into these communities, we see that the federal government has done a very poor job in fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and in basic credible management to ensure that development occurs. If we were to talk to people in my region from the mining sector and first nations, we would hear one common voice asking, “Where is the government? Why is the government not doing its job at the table?”

We are trying to get development off the ground in a community that has no doctors, no grade school, and 20 people living in shacks. If a mining company is attempting resource development where people will be hired, we have people who have not been able to graduate. We need the federal government at the table doing its job. We also need the province doing its job. This is why I think that with the issue of devolution in the Northwest Territories, we have to look at it through the lens of how to ensure that development is equitable across the vast terrain of our country where we have smaller populations.

I will give a few examples of the failure of vision in how things have been handled.

The Ring of Fire is a massive mineral resource development project in the northwest of my riding that could impact development for generations to come. Members will remember when the member for Parry Sound—Muskoka was appointed. He was going to be the special point person and the Conservative government was going to make the Ring of Fire happen. The Conservatives were going to be the champions of the development of the Ring of Fire. Well, they all ran away from that one; we do not hear a peep out of them. We also saw how the provincial Liberal government completely botched it.

When we go into the communities, there is frustration because of the extremely high level of poverty. If we asked people in those regions about mining, they would say they understand that mining is going to happen, but it has to be done right with environmental protections and proper consultation.

Consultation is not just a matter of a fiat from Ottawa telling all the little people how they are going to live; it is about respecting the land and the traditions. Without the federal government or the province at the table, this multi-billion-dollar project is sitting on idle.

In my region, simple projects could have been moved ahead through devolution of authority. For example, Attawapiskat has been without a grade school for years. Children are being educated on a toxic brownfield, but the current government walked away at the eleventh hour on a long-term plan to build a school. The then minister of Indian Affairs, Chuck Strahl, said at the time that building schools for children was not a priority. The community was ready to build that school. This was a big project, and the community had financing through a bank. This was innovative. This was grassroots. They had bank financing and all they needed was the federal government to sign a tuition agreement. We could have had a new way of getting schools off the ground, but we had a belligerent government and a closed-minded bureaucracy, and that school was not built. This led to the whole push for Shannen's dream, which ended up at the United Nations with Canada being shamed on the international stage about its basic legal obligation to build schools for children.

As for the outcome of the Attawapiskat housing crisis, in 2011 we had a plan to build 30 new rent-to-own houses in the community. They were not asking for handouts from the government. This was a community that had gone to the CMHC. They were ready to move forward. All they needed was a ministerial guarantee to sign off. The minister refused to sign and those 30 houses were not built.

However, it was not just the current government that dropped the ball, it was also the provincial government. In communities on the James Bay coast, we do not even have the land base to expand the community, despite the fact we have growing populations, because the province sits and claims the land. There is no one up in those regions on the James Bay except the Mushkego Cree, yet Queen's Park has the temerity, the gall, to say it is all provincial land, that they need its sign-off. Why is it not signing off? We will never see the province show up at the table when these simple things need to be done, so our communities are stuck in a catch-22 between a belligerent and incompetent federal government and a provincial government that believes its citizens of the James Bay region, because they are Cree, are somehow not citizens of Ontario. As a result, simple projects do not move forward.

We have the same problem with policing, just as they do in the far, far north, with our Nishnawbe-Aski police service that represents all the peoples of Treaty 9. I was at the funeral of the two young men who burned to death in the police detachment in Kashechewan in 2006. To call it a police detachment is incorrect; it was a shack out of which the police were delivering services. Two young men were trapped in there and burned to death, horrifically. Out of that inquest, light was finally shone on the substandard conditions that police face in these regions, with high levels of PTSD and young police officers killing themselves. There is no support from the federal or provincial governments.

One the issues we had was the need to ensure that we just had basic, proper police units. In Kashechewan the government did not want to put in fire sprinklers because it would cost money. It would be illegal anywhere else in the province of Ontario to have a public building without sprinklers, but they got away with that on a reserve because the feds were not going to worry about it and the province was not going to spend the money, and two young men burned to death.

We now have a situation in Fort Hope where plans to build a proper police detachment to ensure security for the police officers, as well as the citizens, has been derailed by the current government after multiple negotiations. It has simply abandoned it.

We hear from Chief Elizabeth Atlookan, who has written the government, saying that “It is imperative that construction of this new detachment commence immediately as costs for the transportation of materials will increase as the end of the short winter road season”.

In writing to their member of Parliament in Kenora, she says, “I request you to do everything possible to secure funding for the construction of this new detachment”.

These are communities that live with very narrow building windows, where if we do not get the sign-off to get this police detachment soon and we do not get those supplies up the road, then we will lose another year. In consequence, the police and communities are left at risk, and the cost to the taxpayer goes up and up.

It is the serial incompetence of the government in managing files in the far north that has led us, time and again, to see good projects sit on someone's desk and not be signed off on until the price has gone up 30% or 40%, because every year it gets harder and harder to move supplies up.

This is the situation that we face in our region, so is the lens that we should apply to the issue of devolution.

We support devolution in the Northwest Territories. This is a good, important step. However, taking the regional-municipal water and planning boards and folding them up, despite the opposition of first nations and the concerns raised, is another example of the government just not getting it. It does not understand that if we are to do proper development in Canada, we have to do it credibly and do it in consultation with people. People are not against development, but they want it done right. When we have a good program like devolution, I am very sorry to see the government undermining it and throwing a monkey wrench into it by playing around with the development of the water boards in the region.