Many good intentions, but few concrete commitments. This is what emerged from the debate on the priority issues of First Nations held Tuesday evening at HEC Montreal.
“There are not enough commitments, it is very limited. I expected them to go further, especially on the UN declaration,” said the Chief of Lac-Simon, Adrienne Jérôme, at the end of the event organized by the Assembly of First Nations. Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL).
Chief Ghislain Picard also said he was “disappointed” that the candidates who crossed swords had “not taken the trouble to speak out on behalf of their respective parties”, with the exception of Québec Solidaire.
“Is Quebec ready to get to work on the progress we are seeing on the international scene? This question remains unanswered,” lamented Chief Picard.
“Tonight, everyone talked about the nation-to-nation relationship, but there is no one exercising it,” he added.
He says he hopes that the debate will not be just a “parenthesis” in this election campaign where, despite a record number of Aboriginal candidates, issues affecting First Nations are struggling to find their place. “I hope that the debate will not be a way to put our conscience to rest for the time of a two-hour debate to move on. Well, we’ve seen that too often. »
Housing priority
For a little over an hour and a half, the representatives of the CAQ, the Liberal Party, Québec solidaire and the Parti Québécois debated with respect and in a certain collegiality. The Conservative Party had been invited, but could not free itself to participate in the exercise, specified from the outset the facilitator and Cree lawyer Marie-Ève Bordeleau.
And despite sometimes opposing positions, particularly on systemic racism, they all agreed on the fact that more and better had to be done for Aboriginal people, particularly on housing in Aboriginal communities, with or without the help of ‘Ottawa.
In a long preamble, Ms. Bordeleau recalled that housing is the “absolute priority” of the chiefs, because the problem of overpopulation which prevails in the communities has impacts on all the other aspects of daily life.
“I’m going to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to live in those conditions, so how could I allow that to happen? It is clear, we must act on this, ”launched the solidarity MP Manon Massé.
His colleague Greg Kelley, of the Liberal Party of Quebec, also made very clear his wish to “accelerate the construction” of residences in the communities and to find a way to give residents access to a mortgage. “That has to change,” he said. He added that it was “tiring” to depend on Ottawa to be able to provide decent living conditions for natives. “We can build and send them the invoice!” “, he offered.
“In my great naivety, I did it in Wendake, when we did the CHSLD La Tortue, I sent the bill to the federal government and they confirmed to me that there would be no response, replied tit for tat the outgoing Minister of Indigenous Relations, Ian Lafrenière. It’s a federal responsibility, but that’s no excuse. All the communities say it: the first priority is housing. »
Ian Lafrenière indicated that the CAQ had “done a lot outside the community”, in particular for student housing in Sept-Îles and Trois-Rivières. “Is it over? No. Is that enough? No. Are we going to continue to put pressure on the federal government? Absolutely. »
For his part, the candidate of the Parti Québécois, Alexis Gagné-Lebrun, professor of physics at CEGEP, argued that his party was the one that was going to invest “the most money in housing in general” and that he was counting on put “a relevant part” that would be given to aboriginal housing. “As an independentist party, I can tell you that we have no problem acting within federal jurisdiction! “, he said with a big smile.
Rewrite the laws
The parties also seemed to all agree on the fact that we must find a new way of taking into consideration the opinion of the First Nations in the very writing of the laws. “There is certainly a way we can rethink the way we write our bills,” proposed Liberal Greg Kelley. He observes that often, the natives are consulted once the bills are written, but that it is then too late. An opinion shared by several colleagues.
Indeed, the subject came back on the table on the issue of consultations for energy development. “Greg talked about it, we have to work upstream,” acknowledged Minister Lafrenière. “When we look at our way of doing things in the National Assembly, it does not correspond very much to your habits, he said, speaking directly to the members of the First Nations gathered in the room. Often, we invite you, you come to committee, we hear you, it lasts a few minutes. That’s not the way to work. »
Balance sheet
With very little time to answer complex questions, party representatives agreed on the importance of doing better for First Nations. They all spoke out in favor of better funding for Indigenous police forces, on the importance of offering cultural security in health establishments – but without the application of Joyce’s principle among caquists, to remove the barriers to education and to develop natural resources in collaboration with the First Nations. But it is often on the way to do it that the positions diverge.
For the CAQ, which was defending its record over the past four years, the answer often came back to the nation-to-nation agreements that its government had signed in recent years – five in two years – and the minister referred a few times to the draft currently being negotiated with the Regroupement Petapan, a “very promising” agreement, he repeated, looking at the Innu leaders who were attending the debate.
“This evening I present to you a balance sheet which is not perfect, it is clear, immediately recognized the outgoing minister Ian Lafrenière. However, I will not accept that we say that we did nothing, because we did several things. »