Implement Kelowna deal on native poverty: Fontaine

The Harper government should move immediately to implement the Kelowna accord on improving the lives of Canada's aboriginal people, Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine said Tuesday.

Speaking to the House of Commons committee on aboriginal affairs, Fontaine said mass poverty in native communities was "the single most important social justice issue facing the country."

He told MPs that the $5-billion deal agreed to in Kelowna last November between native groups, provincial premiers and Ottawa was a comprehensive, practical approach to that challenge.

The agreement came just 72 hours before the previous Liberal government led by Paul Martin fell in a parliamentary vote.Stephen Harper's Conservatives won the subsequent election and the Kelowna deal has been effectively shelved since then.

Aboriginal issues had not been atop priority in the Conservative campaign.

The last federal budget commits the government to meeting funding targets agreed to in Kelowna but says that will happen "by working with aboriginal leaders and provinces and territories to develop a new approach with workable solutions."

Aboriginal leaders and even Conservative Premier Ralph Klein of Alberta have expressed disappointment with this approach.

Significant gap

"We're talking about quality of life," Fontaine told CBC Newsworld after his testimony to the Commons committee, "and about the significant gap that exists between our communities and mainstream Canada. This plan [Kelowna] was about closing that gap."

His appearance at the committee hearing was in support of a private member's bill introduced in June by former prime minister Paul Martin,which calls for quick implementation of the Kelowna accord.

Federal Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice has said he's not even clear on whether the deal reached in Kelowna is anactual agreement.

"The province of Quebec wasn't even engaged in the process," Prentice told the Commons aboriginal affairs committee in earlier testimony, "so don't portray this as a national consensus that exists in an accord, because it doesn't exist."

Tuesday is the 10th anniversary of the release of the findings of theRoyal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, co-chaired by Dene leader Georges Erasmus and Rene Dussault, now a judge on the Quebec Court of Appeal.

Among other things, the commission recommended significant investment in a healing process for victims of abuse in the residential school system.

Many of its other recommendations have yet to be implemented, which Fontaine and other First Nations leaders are expected to highlightat a function Tuesday evening in Ottawa.