Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Morgan Chapman. I'm here presenting on behalf of Havlik Metcs Limited. We're based in Vancouver, Calgary, and Victoria and we're here representing over 15 first nations in Alberta and British Columbia, namely the Lesser Slave Lake Indian Regional Council's treaty and aboriginal rights research program, and the Treaty 8 Tribal Association's TARR program. We also service several independent first nations that are not members of consolidated claims research units in British Columbia.
What I'm going to lead with today is something that you might not find in the material I provided a bit earlier, but is a theme that's come up in the prior presentations this morning. That's about the implementation of treaties. Our Treaty 8 first nations that we serve in Alberta and British Columbia signed their historical treaty in 1899. There are still numerous components of that treaty that have yet to be implemented. Those are the types of claims that we bring forward to Canada through the specific claims process.
As a firm, we've endorsed the 2012 National Claims Research Directors' joint submission, Justice at Last, with the main title “In Bad Faith”. Once Justice at Last came into effect under the specific claims process, we lost a number of categories of claims that were specifically rooted in those of an ongoing and variable nature or were breaches of treaty promise. We can no longer bring those categories of claims forward.
That is a unilateral policy change that was implemented by the government without consultation with the members of first nations communities who were taking advantage of the previous process and continue to take part in the process going forward. Claims today that we can bring forward are based on lands or assets promised under the treaty or issues of fraud on behalf of government agents. Those are three really big categories that we can still deal with. The Specific Claims Tribunal Act in that capacity has been used to strangle the specific claims process and the claims brought forward by first nations communities.
Changes to the act are needed in order to prevent that continued strangling of claims brought forward by first nations. As was also mentioned by Chief Judy Wilson this morning, the government itself wrote the rules to suit itself. It's always the judge, banker, jury, and executioner on the claims that are brought forward against itself. Court is seldom a desirable option because of the high cost, and the crown resorts to technical defences such as statutes of limitations.
On the funding side for specific claims, between 2010 and 2015, our personal clients received up to a 57% cut to the funding used to research and submit those claims to the government. Our colleagues on the other side of the table at Indigenous and Northern Affairs did not receive a cut. We were asked during that same time period to address workloads and changes implemented via unilateral policy implementation, namely the minimum standard, and we identified that as creating a 35% increase in our workload as a firm. That impact has cost us literally thousands of researcher hours just within our own firm. It has stalled the submission of claims, and it has been done by using make-work projects such as transcriptions for documents that are relatively clear, requiring clearer copies for documents that were photocopied askew or had highlighter marks on them but were still legible, and these are often things that do not impact the validity of the claim brought forward by the nation.
Other issues that we've experienced were cuts to other institutions such as Library and Archives Canada, and the inability of those institutions to provide us with records also strangled our progress on any claim research or submission.
One of the other big changes coming into Justice at Last was this idea of black-box processing of claims. Our firm used to have quite a high level of engagement with our analyst compatriots on the department side, and under the first few years of Justice at Last, namely the last 10, we lost that ability to collaborate with the analysts and have any sort of discussion. Counter-research reports used to be issued and submitted to the first nation that identified Canada's acceptance of a claim, on what grounds, or a denial of a claim. Evidence given to the first nation to explain those types of things are no longer received.
Members of the committee have not yet had an opportunity to read and review the 2016 Office of the Auditor General report. I would strongly suggest that document form part of your research into the issues around specific claims. Many, many, of the issues brought forward by first nations communities and by my colleagues in other claims research units from British Columbia—and I'm sure you'll hear from across Canada—have been bringing these claims forward for a number of years.
The Auditor General's report that was released last year solidified those claims as having evidence. So any issue that we've brought forward, the Auditor General found evidence of that issue being brought forward. There was proof, and it's undeniable. I would strongly recommend that you take that report into consideration.
We have seen some positive changes since the release of the report. We have been able to reach out to analysts. We have had some of those collaborative opportunity approaches come forward, and we've also seen a return to at least some information-sharing from the department when it comes to a reasoning for a claim being accepted. We haven't yet quite got to the point of a claim being accepted as valid after this period of change. But we are seeing some positive hints. Our biggest thing is we'd like to see those changes entrenched in the legislation because right now, it's at the whim of the director of the department or the head of INAC or the now-split department. Until those types of changes are solidified in legislation, there's no guarantee that this type of behaviour and that level of engagement with the first nations communities and the CRUs doing this work is going to be continued.
When we talk about the resolution of claims and the negotiation process, one of the biggest entitlements that you've heard today is this full and final release. The problem when it comes to the specific claim side is the government was willing to acknowledge partial acceptances, so they would find one of a number of allegations made in a file's specific claim to be valid but not find an outstanding legal obligation for the other allegations made by the first nation.
When it came time to negotiate those claims, if the claim was found to be a value large enough to determine that negotiations were possible, to agree to negotiate the first nation would have to agree to give up any right to pursue the other aspects of the claim where Canada didn't find an outstanding legal obligation. The way one of my directors has put it is Canada agrees to negotiate as long as the first nation agrees not to.
Another thing you see lots of is the elimination of the claim backlog. Again, this is a large part of the idea of partial acceptances, of getting a part of your claim recognized. That ends up pulling the claim back out of that process. It lands back in our CRU's lap. We end up splitting and resubmitting these claims, which doubles or triples workload for an issue that had it ended up at a negotiation table, Canada might have found a legal obligation or might have been willing to discuss those issues and resolve the concerns of the community.
As we've all identified, 10 minutes today is not a lot of time to go through all these issues, so as many others have said, a more fulsome report will be coming from our firm, we hope.
A couple of quick things, I didn't quite catch the time, but I'll keep going.