Exasperated by the lack of listening from the Legault government, the Chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL) announced Thursday the launch of a “Strategy for the affirmation of their rights to self-determination”.
Posted at 4:36 p.m.
Gathered at the Sheraton Hotel in Montreal in assembly, the Chiefs decided after two days of deliberation to create an “Office of Self-Determination and Self-Government”.
“I would like to remind Premier François Legault that no, we are very much alive, the First Nations are very much alive and committed to their future,” declared AFNQL Chief Ghislain Picard, closing the event. . He was then referring to a joke criticized by the leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) launched the day before at the place of the Liberal MP Pierre Arcand.
Except that Ghislain Picard, he was in no mood to laugh. Since the beginning of the CAQ’s mandate, in 2018, the First Nations “have lent themselves to consultation exercises, to propose solutions, to propose amendments to key bills”, but “we feel that the door is far to be open”.
Many complaints
Among the many recriminations of the AFNQL: the absence of its recommendations in Bill 15 aimed at reforming the Youth Protection Act and the decline of Quebec on the inclusion of the notion of cultural security in the modification of the Health and Social Services Act.
As another example of the lack of consideration given by Prime Minister François Legault to First Nations issues, Chief Ghislain Picard remembers his visit to the Great Economic Circle of Indigenous Peoples and Quebec last November.
“We went out of our way, we had to negotiate to allow the chiefs to ask the Prime Minister three questions, three questions. After that, he went to spend 45 minutes with you, media representatives, he recalls. It is not a relationship that is taken seriously and there are surely as many examples as leaders behind me today. »
A few months before the next general election in Quebec, the AFNQL intends to make its demands heard.