Agents from the Sûreté du Québec were dispatched to the First Nations communities late Sunday to replace the aboriginal cops until a new deal is reached, according to SQ spokesperson Sgt. Ronald McInnis. About 250 police officers were covered by the agreement, which costs about $60 million a year.
“If we get to a point where a deal isn’t reached, we can’t afford to pay our police out of pocket,” said Christian Awashish, chief of the Opitciwan band council, in an earlier interview with The Gazette. “Not renewing the agreement would be a huge failure on the part of the federal and provincial government. It would be an embarrassment and ultimately something that puts our community’s safety at risk.”
The remote logging town of Opitciwan has been hit hard by a decline in the reserve’s stake in the forestry industry, resulting in unemployment rates as high as 50 per cent, according to Awashish. Along with poverty, the community has been afflicted with a rising crime rates and substance abuse.
Awashish doesn’t think officers from the SQ would be equipped to handle the cultural uniqueness of a place like Opitciwan, where many of the elders only speak Atikamekw.
The town of 2,100 is about 700 kilometres north of Montreal.
“Our police force isn’t entirely made up of aboriginal officers, but all of the officers have a certain sensitivity to our people,” Awashish said. “We have 17 cops on hand, we just built a new police station and it would be a shame to lose a lot of the progress we’ve made because some bureaucrats couldn’t get a deal worked out.”
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one community member described the situation in Opitciwan as “quite tense.”
“People are worried, these are our institutions here,” he said. “We feel left behind right now. We don’t feel like a priority at all.”
The people of Opitciwan will be holding a community meeting with the reserve’s band council Tuesday in hopes of clarifying the policing situation. Awashish was in Quebec City Monday attempting to sign a last minute deal with provincial negotiators. As of Monday evening, there was no sign of an agreement being reached.
“Up until a few weeks ago, it looked like we were on our way to renewing the funding,” Awashish told The Gazette. “But at the last minute, the federal government said their funding was conditional on action plans from the 26 communities. It really came up at the last minute and we want to put an action plan together but doing it in such a short time frame is unrealistic and irresponsible.”
One aboriginal leader says the federal and provincial governments are on the verge of reaching an agreement.
“My understanding is that, at this point, signing the deal is a mere formality,” said Ghislain Picard, chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec and Labrador branch. “If there’s confusion and SQ officers have had to replace the community police, that’s unfortunate. I’m unaware of that. But it’s looking like we’ll sign an agreement soon.”
Although the majority of Quebec’s First Nations reserves are covered by the deal, some territories are policed by the SQ and others have their own arrangements with the federal government. Though the SQ wouldn’t offer any comment on the situation, it’s likely the officers they’ve deployed onto aboriginal territories are being paid overtime and have minimal experience working in First Nations villages.
Representatives from Public Safety Canada could not be reached for comment, but in a March interview with The Gazette, a spokesperson for the feds said that failure to renew the agreement before deadline would not affect policing on reserve.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Christopher Curtis
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