Tribunal to hear discrimination complaint
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has agreed to investigate allegations that Quebec’s 22 First Nation and Inuit police forces are being discriminated against through chronic underfunding.
That complaint was launched last fall by the Quebec Association of First Nation and Inuit Police Directors (QAFNIPD). Both Quebec and Canada jointly fund the police services through tri-party agreements with each of those police services.
“It’s been a long time coming. The realities are there, we have lots of evidence that proves it,” said Kahnawake Peacekeepers chief Dwayne Zacharie, also the association’s vice-president.
He mentioned the recent Quebec Court of Appeal decision last year that ordered Canada and Quebec to pay $1.6 million in damages to the Pekuakamiulnuatsh Takuhikan First Nation in Mashteuiatsh, in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region, saying he’s feeling “cautiously optimistic” about their chances of winning.
The three judges assigned to the case agreed both governments had failed in their legal obligations by shortchanging the community’s police force. Quebec has since appealed that decision, meaning it’s now headed to the Supreme Court.
The QAFNIPD got word their complaint would be heard by the tribunal in mid-September, Zacharie said. Since then, the association has been reaching out to the chiefs of the 22 police forces they represent to ask how they’d like to participate moving forward.
“First Nation police forces have been calling on the federal government and the provincial territories to recognize First Nation policing as an essential service. They haven’t done that yet. We’ve been asking for 20 years or longer,” Zacharie said.
That’s despite prime minister Justin Trudeau mandating then public security minister Bill Blair to draft legislation to recognize those services as essential back in 2019. He again reiterated his commitment to the demand to the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) in 2020.
“Now we’re into our third public security minister since then, and they still haven’t done anything,” Zacharie said.
His association is also actively looking to see how it can get involved in another human rights complaint originating from Ontario alleging the same type of discrimination. It was launched last March by the Indigenous Police Chiefs of Ontario (IPCO), roughly five months after their own complaint. Quebec’s First Nations and Inuit police forces are also funded by Canada, the defendant in the complaint, Zacharie noted.
“Some communities might join on as interveners. Some may not, but they might support the complaint. Others may actually want to file a writ against Canada for damages,” Zacharie said. “There’s a number of possibilities, and that’s up to each individual community to determine how they would like to participate or not.”
Two federal auditor general reports corroborate complaints long brought forward by various associations representing the country’s 36 Indigenous-led police services.
One issued this March by auditor general Karen Hogan revealed Canada leaves much of its funding allocated for Indigenous-led police forces untouched.
“We found that $13 million of program funds related to the 2022–23 fiscal year went unspent,” she wrote then. “As of October 2023, Public Safety Canada was at risk of not disbursing over $45 million of funds for the 2023–24 fiscal year.”
While funding to those police forces has increased in the last decade, Hogan wrote there still remains “critical shortcomings.”
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“Many issues have not improved since we first identified them in our 2013 audit of emergency management on reserve,” she wrote.
Just this year, the Kahnawake Peacekeepers had to turn to the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) for $4.5 million in funding for the creation of a specialized highway patrol division. It was an unprecedented move that came after requests to Quebec and Canada went unheeded.
