Organization wants certification

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Keith Maracle has been working in construction all his life and has been inspecting houses in First Nation communities for close to 25 years. He's well aware of the problems that exist with on-reserve housing, and he and other inspectors have joined together to try and make improvements.

Maracle is a Mohawk of the Bay of Quinte and is technical building advisor for the Southern First Nations Secretariat based in London, Ont. He is also co-chair of the First Nations National Building Officers Association (FNNBOA), a newly formed organization that hopes to provide building inspectors on First Nations with a network through which they can share information and improve the way houses on reserves are built and renovated.

The main way the association plans to accomplish this, Maracle explained, is by developing national occupational standards for inspectors and a process by which they can be certified as meeting those standards.

One of the problems that currently exists for building inspectors on First Nations is that their skills, training and experience are only recognized by the First Nations they are working with, Maracle said.

"I myself have probably gotten 15 or 20 courses that I've taken over the years, and none of them are recognized other than on the reserve," he said. "So that was one of the reasons for us to start [FNNBOA], because we wanted to get ourselves in a position where our skills were transferable, not only from on-reserve to off-reserve, but from province to province, reserve to reserve, across the country."

Certification will also provide inspectors with a higher degree of professionalism, because all certified inspectors will have had to meet the same standards in terms of skills, knowledge and experience.

Under the current set-up to be designated as a building inspector for First Nation communities, all a person has to do is pass an exam based on Part 9 of the National Building Code, which deals with housing and small buildings.

The idea of mandatory certification has so far been a hard sell to inspectors, Maracle said, because they don't see any problems with the status quo, but the association's goal is to bring in certification for its members before certification is forced upon them by the federal government.

"What's a designation? I can designate you. Anybody can designate anybody. So yes, you wrote a Part 9 exam, but was it a sanctioned exam? Was it a certified exam? No it wasn't. It was an exam that we made up," he said.

"We have no certification, and the auditor general questioned that in the auditor general's report on housing. And we feel that within the next three to five years ... they're going to make it mandatory that we be certified. And what we're trying to do is be proactive instead of reactive," he said.

The association will also help to improve the quality of housing on reserve by providing members with networking opportunities that hadn't existed previously. Through that network, inspectors can keep up-to-date on the latest developments in the construction industry, Maracle said. That opportunity will be especially beneficial to inspectors in remote communities, where exposure to new ways of doing things has been limited.

The network will also provide a way to get information directly to the people who need it. Many times when conferences are held dealing with housing issues it's the chiefs and councillors who attend, but the information doesn't filter down to where it will do the most good, Maracle said.

"A lot of the information about how to make changes never gets back to the grassroots person, the person with the hammer in this hand."