Meegwetch. Thank you, Speaker. Remarks in Anishininiimowin. Good morning. It’s always an honour to be able to stand up in this place on behalf of the people of Kiiwetinoong. It’s also an honour to be able to speak on this bill, Bill 102, the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act. We know that there are many parts to this bill. There are amendments to the Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019, as well as the Comprehensive Ontario Police Services Act, 2019. In the last four years since then, I’ve heard a lot of lip service from this government as it relates to policing. Some of it is good, if you live in a town or a city where there’s lots of funding and resourcing made available to your police services, but it’s not that good if you live in a First Nation, if you live on a reserve, also referred to as an Indian reserve; it’s not good for police services that are on-reserve. I know that First Nations police services need better funding from the federal and provincial governments to serve their people effectively.

In my language, there’s a name that’s very descriptive of what a policeman is. My language, Anishininiimowin, also known as Oji-Cree, is a very descriptive language. What we call a police officer is tukaanaawehnineh—that means a person who takes somebody away. That description comes from the old Indian residential school days, because the RCMP were used to take away our children, to take them to Indian residential schools. I just wanted to share that.

What many in this House may not know is that Indigenous police services are not essential services, and legal and funding frameworks are needed to change that status.

I want to sidestep a bit. I know there is a recruitment issue for police officers in parts of Ontario, particularly in the north, and I know that this bill will not solve that. I know that there are many staffing shortages in some communities in Ontario that are largely because officers are affected by PTSD. In the OPP, Ontario Provincial Police service, constables on long-term leave make up 30% of the vacancies. I believe that.

I believe that there are a lot of officers who are off right now. I was just talking to one this morning. He’s a good friend of mine. He has been an officer for about 30 years, and he’s off right now on PTSD. His name is Jerry Mosquito. He’s up in Big Trout Lake, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, this morning. About two or three Christmases ago—it was during the holidays, in between Christmas and New Year’s—we were talking on the phone in my language. After I hung up—I didn’t know what he was saying—what clicked after is that he was actually saying goodbye to me. I could hear him talk about the stuff that he was doing, how proud he was of what he was doing, but also how proud—because we’re good friends. It took me maybe an hour to call 911 on him. I was afraid to call 911 because I thought I would upset him, and me and his wife—actually, I think it was his wife who finally made a decision to call 911. It was hard. Then we didn’t talk for maybe a year after that. The OPP should be reaching out and saying, “We’re going to help you”—and make sure that you are providing the proper clinical support, the mental support that he needs.

I think we need to start hearing stories of what officers actually do to protect us. I hear the other side talk about defunding the police, but in the north we need more funding to provide that service. In my home First Nation, I think it was in 1992, 1993 maybe, when we got our first officer in the community. That’s when the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service started.

When we talk about police services in the north, currently, First Nations’ policing are funded as programs—not essential services—under the First Nations Policing Program, which was implemented in 1991 and gives Public Safety Canada the authority to administer funding, which comes from both the federal and provincial governments. Just over half of the funding, about 50%, comes from the federal government through Public Safety Canada, while the remaining 48% is funded through the Ontario government.

The First Nations Policing Program hasn’t changed much over the course of its more than 30-year lifespan. The system is broken. It maintains an unequal status quo between Indigenous and non-Indigenous policing services. But, also, I can flip it and say that it’s not broken, because it’s designed the way it’s designed to operate because that’s how oppression works; that’s how colonialism works; that’s how racism works. It’s not broken. It’s working exactly the way it’s designed to. It has always become a way of life for First Nations programming, First Nations services.

Right now, the current system basically requires First Nations police services to justify their existence, year to year to year—or for however long their policing agreement is. So First Nations police officers, generally speaking, are underpaid and do virtually the same job as an officer off-reserve.

Right now, First Nations police services are not funded to meet the adequacy standards of the OPP. The ongoing chronic underfunding affects every facet of police work on-reserve, whether it’s training, whether it’s equipment, whether it’s victim services, whether it’s employee retention or pensions. I don’t know why I call it “chronic underfunding.” It is strategic underfunding. I have learned the ways of these colonial systems that we live under as First Nations people. It’s not by accident. It’s by design.

Other provinces have made moves toward equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous police services. The province of Alberta has amended their policing law to uphold First Nations police services as essential—nope, not in Ontario; it’s a program. In the wake of the tragedy in James Smith Cree Nation, Saskatchewan is making its own set of commitments—nope, not in Ontario.

I think here, in Ontario, the amendments to the Police Services Act have stalled. In 2019, legislation permitted the province’s nine stand-alone Indigenous police services to opt into the Police Services Act in order to become an essential service, but there has been no resourcing put towards this legislation in Ontario to be able to make this change.

The legal counsel for Nishnawbe Aski Police Service noted earlier this year that this government has a lot to answer for: “The failure to act on this legislation over four years has to represent one of the longest delays in proclaiming legislation, certainly that I have ever seen. How is it that this happens to First Nations in this day and age?”

I cannot imagine any important legislation that goes to the heart of protecting people’s lives getting delayed like this in a non-Indigenous setting. It simply makes the point that when it comes to the safety of members of Indigenous communities, it simply sits on the back burner year after year after year while you have communities in crisis, you have deaths every day and communities being grossly under-policed, underserviced.

Just going back a little bit about policing, in the 1960s, the RCMP announced its withdrawal from policing First Nations in Ontario and Quebec. The change was transitional—announced in the early 1960s, begun in the mid-1960s, and officially completed when the Indian agent role was abolished in 1971. Before this, the RCMP policed First Nations.

Talking about police, the first Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, got the idea for the Mounties from the Royal Irish Constabulary, a parliamentary police force the British created to keep the Irish under control.

I’m going back because I told that story about tukaanaawehnineh, a person who takes somebody away. That’s how we describe how we know what we call a police officer—a person that takes somebody away.

The role of the Mounties was to clear the plains, the Prairies, of Indigenous people. They were there to displace Indigenous people, to move them on-reserve, to move them to Indian reserves—I grew up on an Indian reserve; we became an official reserve in 1976. That was done to displace people, whether they were willing or not.

Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls talked about the RCMP this way in the findings on the right to justice:

The government of Canada used the RCMP and its predecessor, the North-West Mounted Police, to implement and enforce laws and policies designed to control, assimilate and eliminate Indigenous people. I’m not supposed to be here. We are not supposed to be here. But we are here.

You have to be able to fund Indigenous policing the way you fund non-Indigenous communities. We are not a program. The Nishnawbe Aski Police Service, treaty police and Anishinaabe police should be essential services as well.

I was here in 2019, and I spoke at length about the Comprehensive Ontario Police Services Act. I said this earlier, but in essence, the government passed this act that would allow First Nations police services, again, to opt into the provincial policing framework. We know this cannot be done without resources to close the gap in service standards between on-reserve and off-reserve police forces.

In March, the Indigenous Police Chiefs of Ontario filed a human rights complaint against Public Safety Canada, accusing Ottawa of ongoing systemic discrimination perpetuated by the government of Canada through its deliberate and willful underfunding and under-resourcing of the safety of Indigenous communities through the First Nations and Inuit Policing Program. Their complaint states that the government’s First Nations policing policy mandates that Canada’s own self-imposed standards for equity, requiring, at minimum, that First Nations benefit from the same standard of policing available to non-Indigenous communities—and that policing be provided in a culturally responsive manner. Ontario is responsible for that, too. Just because it doesn’t mention Ontario—you are part of the problem. Meegwetch.

You weren’t here when I spoke about an OPP officer who is on PTSD. He is up in Big Trout Lake right now. He has been off for a few years. His name is Jerry Mosquito. I spoke earlier about how sometimes he calls me. He is struggling to live. I said to the Solicitor General that at some point you should reach out to him. I think it is very important to reach out to people who are struggling, especially people who have served the community and who have seen so much stuff. I encourage you; I will even send you his phone number.

Remarks in Anishininiimowin. Good morning. My question is to the Minister of Transportation.

Speaker, you know we have a transportation network as well in Kiiwetinoong. There are 24 airports in Kiiwetinoong, and these airports are owned and operated by the Ministry of Transportation. Airports are critical in the north, critical infrastructure, especially during medical, police and evacuation emergencies—they’re actually lifelines. But if you ask air carriers they say that flying in the north is like flying in the 1950s, because we still have gravel runways, and that’s not acceptable. They’re only 3,500 feet. When is this government going to improve the safety standards of northern airports in Kiiwetinoong?

We need better runways to improve delivery of goods. When is this government going to make the runway improvements needed for better delivery of goods?