Honourable senators, I am very pleased to rise to speak in support of Bill S-272, An Act to amend the Director of Public Prosecutions Act. I will remind my colleagues that this is a companion piece of legislation paired with Bill S-271, An Act to amend the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act, to which I just spoke.

As these two bills are closely intertwined, I will refer all honourable senators to my more comprehensive speech, as I hope my comments will be brief. Again, I urge all senators to review Senator McCallum’s twin speeches on these bills.

In 2021, the House of Commons Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee led an in-depth study on enforcement on First Nations reserves as an essential component to their self-government and self-determination, addressing: first, jurisdiction enforcement and prosecution; second, targeted funding for enforcement; third, the First Nations Land Management Act; fourth, First Nations debt certificate processing; fifth, the prosecution of First Nations violation tickets; sixth, enforcement agreements with policing agents; and seventh, enforcement capacity development.

The committee was conclusive in assessing that First Nations face barriers in having their laws and bylaws enforced. The committee report, tabled in the other place in June 2021, made 10 recommendations to the government focused on the urgent need to address the lack of enforcement of First Nations laws and bylaws. Notably, the recommendations presented in the report aimed at moving this issue forward in the short term, recognizing that in many cases, longer-term solutions are still required.

Please note that over the course of recent decades, various pieces of modernizing amendments to the Indian Act have been introduced, all intended to further the self-governance and lawmaking authority of First Nations. These include landmark legislation such as Bill C-49 in 1999, the First Nations Land Management Act, which was replaced by the more comprehensive 2022 Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management Act.

The framework agreement expanded the range of autonomous powers that First Nations could exercise, removing the need for approval from the Governor-in-Council or minister. Under the framework agreement, a First Nation is empowered to create an independent land code that outlines how the community will work together to develop laws and policies for governing and managing their reserve lands and resources.

Another key piece of legislation was Bill C-428, the Indian Act Amendment and Replacement Act of 2014, which eliminated the prerequisite for the minister’s oversight in regard to the submission coming into force and disallowance of bylaws, which is to say that it granted to First Nations the autonomy and responsibility —