I'm Grand Chief Robert Pasco, and with me is the executive director of our tribal council, Debbie Abbott.
I want to acknowledge the homeland of the Tsawwassen people. I also want to say Ya dk shin wen wen, which is good morning to you all.
I'm hear to speak to our experiences with the specific claims process. One of the things right off the bat is that the terminology “specific claims” is the wrong one. We're really not claiming anything. We're trying to correct something that someone else made incorrectly. That's one of the reasons why we have such a problem. It's the language. Just like “comprehensive claims” which I heard this morning; we're not claiming anything. We're just trying to correct things to the way they should be.
I want to start out by giving you a layout of where we're from. I'm cognizant of the time. Our nation is in the Fraser Canyon. There is a transport corridor through the canyon. We have two railroads that go through there and a high-tension transmission line. We also have the Trans-Canada. The Fraser is also a famous river for salmon as you all know, but it hasn't been very good for salmon this year. It has been one of the worst years we've ever had.
Some of you have probably heard of Hells Gate. That's right within our homeland. I'm not sure who named it, but that's not our name for it. It's a rough passage area. When our reserves were set out, a lot of them were set out as fishing stations. As time went on, the railroad came in, and it took a chunk. Everybody has taken a chunk until we're left with very little. Whenever they wanted to take a piece of land, they just enacted something. They put forth a reason and legalized it in whatever way they thought was right without any consultation with us. Ever since the reserves were formed, we've been living with that problem.
I want to present a situation where I really became involved, and where we became involved. It was back in the early 80s when the federal and provincial governments, the CN railroad, and all governing agencies agreed there should be double tracking. They agreed it was going to go ahead, they signed off on everything, and then they established a federal environmental review panel. I was asked to sit on the this panel.
As we went around the countryside going through our hearing, indigenous people would get up and say, “Look, here's the problem we have.” As time went on, more and more of these things came forward. Our chairman at that time was Bob Connelly. He was in Ottawa. He was head of the federal environmental review panel. He stated that it wasn't in our mandate. We would go into our committee meetings after our session. Then the day came when we were writing the final report. There were all of these excuses that we didn't have a mandate to deal with indigenous issues. All of us told the committee that we were going to run into trouble. We were ignoring something here. The government had approved it to go ahead. Now we were just nickel-and-diming this thing.
To make a long story short, just when we were writing the final report, I got a phone call from Lloyd Hostland who was the head engineer at CN. He said to me, “Chief Pasco, we're going to start double tracking at your place.” I said, “Oh, yeah?” They were going to go 100 and some feet into the river there, and they were going to double track.
Anyway, I had to resign from the panel, and a lot of things happened.
Eventually, we got an injunction and it's a long-standing injunction that's going today. David Crombie was the minister at that time and John Fraser was the minister of fisheries. Anyway, they all came out. They could see the dilemma we were in. We went down a railroad track and we showed David Crombie some of the communities and some of the issues of the communities. There were a lot of them. He went back and said, “Okay, we're going to develop an accelerated process"—I'm going to run out of time. We got into the specific claims process, an accelerated process, and that was 30-some years go. I had no grey hair.