Transcript
Transcript: Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Coast Guard Reconciliation Strategy
Carolina Bookless: I'd like to talk to you about the Fisheries and Oceans and Coast Guard, Canadian Coast Guard reconciliation strategy.
[Text on screen] Office of the Prime Minister, October 2017
«No relationship is more important to Canada than the relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Our Government is working together with Indigenous Peoples to build a nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown, government-to-government relationship – one based on respect, partnership and recognition of rights.»
Carolina Bookless: So at the time we're talking, three years ago, our Deputy minister was the chair of a Deputy minister's task force and reconciliation, and so all the Deputies from all the different federal departments sat around the table and discussed how to implement reconciliation throughout the federal public service.
And so we floated this idea to the Deputy that we had the strategy and we had a concept for it. And it was something that we wanted to do across every single business line in the department. And he was very supportive. So there's about, let's say, around 40 programs and internal services within the Department of Fisheries and the Coast Guard. The approach we were taking was very it was unique in the sense that we were actually amending the structure, our reporting structure, and so in essence, weaving in reconciliation into the fiber of the department. So then the next step was to develop a strategy where we went across every single business line and asked every Director general at that level to commit to stretch action, stretch goal that would apply to their particular program or internal service. So we did that over a year and then we came back the next year, which was last year, to say how are you making on that? Are you making any progress? Are you hitting any obstacles? What kind of themes are emerging? And one of the unanimous themes that came out was we need to socialize the reconciliation agenda broadly, a recognition that most people in the department, in fact, every person in the department didn't get educated and in the history.
So everybody has developed what we call a side. There's two sides to the strategy. There's one a public facing reporting side and then side B, we call them side A and side B because I guess we like our records. Side B is about what do we need to do internally? It's not public facing. It's internal facing. It's sort of, you know, chop wood, carry water. What is it that we actually need to do to raise up our knowledge and awareness? And it's not for us to define what reconciliation is. There's a saying that we use in our circles, which is Indigenous people say, you know nothing about us without us. So don't, you know, come to us and say, you know how we've developed this reconciliation strategy and here's the ticket. This is how we think we're going to resolve the relationship.
But what we wanted to do was connect with the people on the ground in the field because the people in the field are the closest, they have the closest contact with our Indigenous partners in many ways. And so they have a better understanding of what the long-standing frustrations have been from an Indigenous partner's perspective, interfacing with, in this case, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard.
So what I find fantastic is what's happening now that there's a strategy and each region has developed their regional strategy. There's a lot of people taking the initiative to put it into practice in ways that are very just common sense. And I'll provide an example from the Canadian Hydrographic Service in the Pacific region they were about to do every year, I guess they do a certain amount of hydrography, they do excursions out in the water in certain places that are uncharted. There's a lot of unchartered waters in Canada. So they were planning to do some charting off of Vancouver Island, I believe it was. And it occurred to them that, you know, if we're going to be out in the traditional territorial waters of this particular First Nation, that wouldn't it be amazing to invite a Knowledge Keeper onto the boat and then have that person educate the people aboard saying, OK, well, in these waters, we've lived here since time immemorial and this is what we know about the bottom surface, maybe some dangerous reefs or whatever it is, and then also the traditional uses. And if they had to label any of the features that they were discovering in their work, they thought, well, why don't we name them the traditional name?
