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Chiefs rap land policies

Reserve expansion can take decades

By: Mia Rabson

Posted: 02/15/2012 3:19 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

About 300 people gather on Parliament Hill Tuesday to draw attention to a lack of opportunities on First Nations. (PAT MCGRATH / POSTMEDIA NEWS )

OTTAWA -- First Nations in Canada don't have enough land for viable economic development and that has to change, a Senate committee heard Tuesday.

Several Manitoba chiefs and national treaty and land-acquisition groups testified at the Senate Aboriginal Peoples Committee urging Ottawa to rejig the policies related to expanding reserve lands.

The existing process, known as Additions to Reserves, is cumbersome and laden with loopholes that prevent good land from getting into the hands of First Nations, which could use it to create businesses and start to become more self-sufficient, the committee heard.

Chief Nelson Genaille of the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation said there are lands available but for First Nations to get their hands on them sometimes seems impossible.

"I see industry, I see the government disposing of Crown land, entering into agreements on the private business sector, meanwhile we as First Nations are left behind," he said. "I see general media telling me, telling us, we are a tax burden. It's a catch-22. How can we be given that opportunity?"

The Additions to Reserves policy allows First Nations to expand their land base either by securing land owed to them through treaties or by purchasing land in agreement with a willing seller.

The seller is normally, though not exclusively, a provincial or municipal government.

First Nations must satisfy more than half a dozen conditions, including concerns by municipal or provincial governments, environmental issues and strike agreements with utilities such as Manitoba Hydro, who might need ongoing access to their infrastructure on the land in question.

The process can take decades.

In Manitoba, there are more than 445,000 hectares of land promised to 17 First Nations in Manitoba as part of Treaties one, three, four, six and 10. Since 1997, just 187,774 hectares have been converted to reserve land, Genaille said.

"We are not even halfway there yet after almost 14 years," he said. "Clearly there is something wrong with this process."

Chief Robert Louie, chairman of the First Nations Lands Advisory Board and chief of the Westbank First Nation near Kelowna, B.C. said the system to add lands to reserves is "absurd" and seems to be made more difficult when the land in question is valuable to non-native governments.

The policy, he said, is not designed to encourage or support additions to reserves but rather to discourage them.

Louie's reserve is one of the most successful in Canada, with economic growth ahead of the regional average and an annual GDP of more than $500 million.

"The current policy makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to add land to a reserve for economic development purposes. Which in today's world makes absolutely no sense."

But he said it is in everyone's interest for reserves to be given the tools and land needed to become economically viable.

Genaille said reserves often have ideas, business opportunities and development chances waiting right at their back door but can't do anything about it.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 15, 2012 A6

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