SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
May 9, 2023 09:00AM
  • May/9/23 4:00:00 p.m.
  • Re: Bill 71 

Well, maybe it’s not 0. I think you may have won one, but I’m not sure.

In all seriousness, here’s the problem with the court challenges. It’s not about winning or losing; it’s actually about what happens to the project you’re trying to do when you go to court and you’re not successful. That slows down even further your ability to get the project done.

So I’m kind of torn. There are good things in this bill that talk about development and the extraction of resources in the north for prosperity for all, but the duty to consult is not met. It’s a very clear duty, and it’s different from—like I say, it’s not like you’re trying to build an expressway somewhere and you’re going to expropriate somebody’s land. There’s a process by which we do that here in Ontario. There’s a totally different process and it has to do with the duty to consult. It’s nation to nation.

It makes it very hard to support a bill that has very supportable things in it. That’s the problem when you exclude people, when you say to a group of people or groups of people, “What’s happening on your land or around you doesn’t matter. We don’t need to listen to you. We don’t need to talk to you.” You’re picking winners and losers.

The end result of this is we’re not moving forward in the spirit of truth and reconciliation and what our duties are as a government. That’s not right. It also puts the projects that we want to move forward with at risk because of the legal jeopardy.

I think that that duty to consult gets confused with what we call consultations here in committee, which is, we can call them up in a couple of days and we sit down and listen to people, and then what we see happens—and it’s not just with this government; it’s with other governments that I’ve seen before and other governments in other provinces—is people come and say what they have to say, and we totally ignore them.

It’s different. It’s nation to nation. It’s about our relationship with the people who were here before us. It’s not easy, and sometimes it takes way longer than we all want it to. But if we don’t do it, we put the things that we’re trying to do together to make the north more prosperous—everyone in the north more prosperous—at risk.

I’m going to repeat this again: The process of consultation is different than the thing we do when we’re going to put a new park in, or Ontario Place—oh, wait, no; there was no consultation on Ontario Place, sorry.

The reality is, it’s established through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—which we’ve committed to—the process by which there is a duty to consult and the nature of those consultations. They take longer. They’re harder. That’s just the way it is, folks. If we want to build together, we have to respect that process.

Thank you for the question. You might want to take a look at the history of the file.

566 words
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