44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 2, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Saint‑Jean for her brilliant question, once again.
I think we must give ourselves the means to match our ambitions. If we decide that it is important to preserve heritage assets and places, we must provide the means to do so properly. How will this be done? Will this require a better education program, as I was proposing?
I am not necessarily speaking about teaching in schools, but that would be a great place to start. We will definitely need to inject money into these programs to ensure that our efforts to preserve and protect these sites continue to improve.
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Mr. Speaker, I recognize this legislation as something that means a great deal to Canadians, because we value our heritage. When we think of historical markers, we reflect on our heritage. There is so much we need to appreciate. Even though this legislation might not address all aspects of our national symbols and sites, it is a very strong, positive step forward.
Can my colleague provide his thoughts on how important it is to have a rich understanding of our heritage?
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Winnipeg North for his question. I think he should remember today as the day when I agreed with him almost all across the board.
Yes, it is a good step forward. Yes, it is an important bill for heritage preservation. Yes, we have some absolutely fantastic sites in Quebec and Canada. There are many places, monuments and buildings that are worthy of our attention and worth taking care of and protecting in any way possible. It is a good step forward.
Is there work that needs to be done to improve this bill? Yes, of course. I think there is room for improvement in every bill. When the bill is examined in committee, we will have the opportunity to discuss it with various stakeholders and experts. I think that we have something worthwhile and important here, and we will be ready and willing to make it even better, if that is possible.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech on the management of historic sites in Canada. We have a federal government that is having a lot of trouble these days just providing basic services to its citizens. Immigration and passports are a couple of examples, as is control of our border with the United States.
What would my colleague think about a new bureaucracy being created to manage historic sites? Would there be benefits to it?
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Mr. Speaker, it is always too far for people who are going nowhere. That is a well-known fact.
Yes, there are many shortcomings that the Conservatives and the Bloc try to point out. Just look at passport management, border management, immigration management. It is an utter failure.
Does that mean that we should do nothing for other things that are just as important in the long term for our history?
I think that the creation of an organization that will ensure the protection of our monuments, places, sites and historical heritage deserves our attention, despite the problems that currently exist in the system.
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Uqaqtittiji, I realize that the member did not speak much to indigenous issues, but I will ask this question quickly.
Can the member speak to his party's experience with first nations, Inuit and Métis communities and the ongoing efforts or struggles they have with preserving and protecting indigenous heritage?
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- Dec/2/22 1:02:15 p.m.
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The hon. member for Drummond has 20 seconds for a brief response.
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Mr. Speaker, I have 20 seconds to answer a question that I would like to spend 20 minutes on, but I will try to be quick.
I would say this to my hon. colleague: I think it is time for this government and all governments to withdraw from issues that pertain only to indigenous nations. Indigenous nations should be given the means to preserve their heritage, which is very important.
I always hesitate to enter into this debate because I think that we have no business doing this. The first peoples, the first nations, should be given the authority, the responsibility and the resources they need to protect their heritage.
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Mr. Speaker, if you seek it, I believe you will receive unanimous consent for me to split my time this afternoon.
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- Dec/2/22 1:03:10 p.m.
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Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to split his time?
Some hon. members: Agreed.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Gabriel Ste-Marie): The hon. member has the floor.
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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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Mr. Speaker, understanding and appreciating Canada's rich and diverse heritage is so very important, and that is what this bill is all about. I appreciate the fact that the member talked about the significance of indigenous people and paid respect in terms of recognizing the need for name changes. I suspect that same principle could be applied in many different municipalities, urban areas and so forth.
One of the things I would not want to overlook is that there have been other significant historic moments, the Komagata Maru, for example, where a boatful of people who were predominantly Punjabi or from a South Asian community was rejected and sent away, and the outcome and impact that had on society. Not everything is something that was of great benefit, but we need to understand and appreciate our heritage.
I wonder if the member could provide his thoughts on how important it is for us to have a true reflection of our history that we can recognize through things like reconciliation and historic monuments.
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Mr. Speaker, I would agree that we need to not only celebrate the parts of our history that make us proud, but also remember and learn from the parts of our history that we are not so proud of, that we may be ashamed of, so, yes, we have to remember incidents like that of the Komagata Maru and other incidents from our history, and we should perhaps have historic sites or plaques that teach us about those places and events.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
We just heard him say that we need to remember the darker moments in our history. Sometimes, there is some degree of politicization involved when we want to protect something. We were talking about workers' rights in the case of the Rossland Miner's Union Hall. It took time for funding to be granted to protect and promote it.
In the future, should we not find a way, if not in this bill then in another, to ensure that there is no politicization of the historic sites we want to protect, so that all sites are protected, not just certain ones depending on which party is in government?
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Mr. Speaker, again, I would agree with the member for Saint-Jean that we have to remember these incidents and events in our history.
The Miners' Union Hall represents the growth of labour relations in a Canada that was a very dark place in the 1800s, when those miners first came to Rossland. They made it a better place. That history must and should be known and celebrated. Whether things will change in the future around that or any of these other places and events, these historic sites and places should be marked and maintained so that we can learn about them.
In the future, I do not know how any of these might be politicized. We see some of that happening now, especially with statues and things like that. However, we must know and remember our history, so that we are not doomed to repeat it.
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Madam Speaker, Chief Ken Watts waamiiš from Tseshaht First Nation, one of the Nuu-chah-nulth nations, has been advocating for funding directly to first nations, to enable their museums to repatriate artifacts and honour their culture. There is lore and there are stories and oral histories in those intellectual artifacts.
Could the member speak about how important it is to get those resources to those nations as part of reconciliation?
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Madam Speaker, I totally agree. The Osoyoos Indian Band, which I mentioned, are a prime example of that. They have built the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, which does exactly that. I am very proud of that centre being in my riding.
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Uqaqtittiji, I rise today with fond memories, having attended Ataguttaaluk High School in Igloolik in my riding. I send out a special thanks to the Igloolik District Education Authority, Igloolik elders, Nunavut Research Institute, the late Graham Rowley, Susan Rowley, Carolyn MacDonald and John MacDonald. These amazing groups and individuals delivered an archaeology credit course that contributed to my high school diploma. I share my speech today, realizing how investments for youth can have lasting impacts. Qujalivakka. I am so grateful to them.
Bill C-23, an act respecting places, persons and events of national historic significance or national interest, archaeological resources and cultural and natural heritage is of particular importance to indigenous peoples in Canada.
I am glad to see, in Bill C-23, that roles are provided for indigenous peoples in determining historic places. It is great to see that the bill responds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's call to action 79. Specifically, the bill would add three members to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, from first nations, Métis and Inuit groups. In addition, it would compel Parks Canada to incorporate indigenous knowledge into the designation and commemoration of historic sites.
Unfortunately, what the bill would do is not enough. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action set a framework, and this framework should have been used in ensuring a better legislation.
The TRC call to action 79 specifically reads:
We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal organizations, and the arts community, to develop a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration. This would include, but not be limited to:
i. Amending the Historic Sites and Monuments Act to include First Nations, Inuit, and Métis representation on the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and its Secretariat.
ii. Revising the policies, criteria, and practices of the National Program of Historical Commemoration to integrate Indigenous history, heritage values, and memory practices into Canada’s national heritage and history.
iii. Developing and implementing a national heritage plan and strategy for commemorating residential school sites, the history and legacy of residential schools, and the contributions of Aboriginal peoples to Canada’s history.
In 2017, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation raised concerns about the state of conservation of the 17 remaining residential schools and said it was urgent for the government to respond to call to action 79. It is unclear to me what has happened since 2017, and whether this bill addresses those concerns.
The Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development's 2017 report entitled “Preserving Canada’s Heritage: The Foundation For Tomorrow” provided clear recommendations, which I will speak to in more detail later.
During its study, the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development learned that Canada is the only G7 country that has not passed legislation to protect historic places and archaeological resources under its jurisdiction. Unfortunately, alongside many other recommendations not implemented by this government and previous governments, this is not a new recommendation. In 2003, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada also recommended that the federal government strengthen the legal framework built for heritage in Canada.
The committee I mentioned earlier examined the issue of preserving indigenous heritage places. Unsurprisingly, the committee found that indigenous peoples define their heritage in a more holistic manner than the western model. As a result, solutions currently used to protect heritage places must be adapted in order to preserve indigenous heritage places.
The committee amplified the need to implement TRC calls to action 72 to 75, which create the process to commemorate the indigenous children who never returned to their families. Canada’s heritage includes genocide of indigenous peoples. As such, incorporating these calls to action is just as important as implementing call to action number 79. Indigenous peoples should be able to protect their own heritage. Indigenous-led heritage would involve coordination among communities, elders and knowledge keepers.
I will conclude by entering into the record recommendation 17 from the committee's report.
Recommendation 17 of the report also recommended that:
The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada revise the policies, criteria, and practices of the National Program of Historical Commemoration to integrate Indigenous history, heritage values, and memory practices into Canada’s national heritage and history.
Parks Canada develop and implement a national heritage plan and strategy for commemorating and, where appropriate, conserving residential school sites, the history and legacy of residential schools, and the contributions of Indigenous peoples to Canada’s history.
The federal government, in collaboration with Residential School Survivors, commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools National Monument in the city of Ottawa to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities.
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Madam Speaker, one of the important aspects that maybe has not been noted strongly enough is that within this legislation there would be a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, and the member is so correct in terms of the general assessment in regard to the importance of reconciliation. It is important to recognize that this legislation could go a long way, in terms of ensuring there is a great deal of truth that needs to be said. Protecting and encouraging that particular industry would be healthy for all of us.
I am wondering if she could just provide her thoughts in regard to that educational component.
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Uqaqtittiji, I do recognize that TRC call to action 79 would be implemented, but there are also calls to action 72 to 75, which would not be implemented. Given Canada's heritage of genocide against indigenous peoples and trying to hide for years that indigenous children were buried and have grave sites next to residential schools, this needs to be part of that education. It would help to make sure more Canadians understand why it is so important for reconciliation to happen in this time.
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