Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am glad to see that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People was a priority for this Assembly and was at the heart of many of our Premier's mandate letters to Ministers. I am thankful that direction went in to those Ministers. However, those words seem to have a disconnect with actual changes within the over 5,000 civil servants on the ground. Our mandate committed that, by summer 2020, a terms of reference would be developed, as well as a working group with Indigenous governments to create an implementation plan for the United Nations declaration. That work has not been completed. I have not seen a terms of reference, and I have not seen who is on such a working group. It is now winter 2021.
I am still confused about who is in charge of this work. I have yet to see any public announcement of what this mandate item actually means and what has been done to date. I have yet to see a piece of legislation that actually changes the system of laws we operate on and devolves powers to Indigenous governments. I don't think it is clear where we are going with this item, and I don't believe it is properly funded nor set out.
Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of work to properly implement the declaration. This was passed in 2007 by the General Assembly for the United Nations, and Canada, for over a decade, resisted implementing it. We in this House took the step of making it a priority because we see a different Canada and a different system of laws that truly gives Indigenous peoples their rights. I would like to see an education act that devolves education truly in the spirit of UNDRIP, to give Indigenous peoples control over the education authorities, their own curriculum, their own hiring processes. I would like to see a proper clause setting out free, prior, and informed consent. For decades, lawyers fought over what free, prior, and informed consent meant, and this is why we never implemented the declaration. I am still confused about what the GNWT's position is on that matter.
More needs to be done in this area. We need those terms of reference, we need that working group, and we need an implementation plan to see what those words actually meant in the mandate letter. I will have questions for the Premier. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.