Mr. Speaker, this House is discussing a bill of surprising relevance. In theory, a government should work in collaboration with the first nations in order to improve governance—not just administration, but the results obtained. It should not use administrative obligations as a weapon to silence anyone. Unions, environmental groups, charitable organizations, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Rights and Democracy, and Development and Peace are all facing administrative roadblocks, some of them so huge that the organizations may disappear.
The Conservatives have eliminated funding for institutions that support governance, for instance the First Nations Statistical Institute and the National Centre for First Nations Governance and, to top it off, they are preventing many young aboriginals from getting a post-secondary education. This is a case of giving someone orders but taking away the resources needed to carry them out. It is Machiavellian. It is demoralizing to give a person an order but make it impossible to carry it out.
The minister’s power to withhold payment of any money due to a first nation or to cancel any agreement concerning grants or contributions to a first nation if all requirements have not been fulfilled is a truly excessive penalty. It turns a person’s ability to fill in an administrative form into a matter of life or death, although the form changes absolutely nothing about the service provided.
There is no mention of social housing. There is nothing about health care. Public education is missing. There is nothing about running water. In short, the means needed to overcome poverty are not there. However, there are administrative rules. This is a huge defect. It will do nothing to relieve the problems of infrastructure, but administrative rules will be imposed—the kind of rules the Conservatives themselves do not obey. They have eliminated the obligation on polluters to respond to environmental assessments. In terms of navigable waters, they have slashed so much that 95% of our bodies of water are no longer protected by the law.
On one hand, some people who no longer have to fill out forms in order to carry out a project get preferential treatment, while people the government does not like get no such favours. More red tape is added, lots more. For a government that claims it wants to eliminate red tape, it is creating a lot. It is generous with red tape for its adversaries, but not for its friends. It is a double standard.
If we apply administrative rules rigorously, then we set up a rule and apply it to everyone. That is what is called GRAP--generally recognized accounting practices. First nations, unions and businesses are applying them already, but the Conservatives have decided to use their imagination when dealing with their ideological adversaries.
We in the NDP believe that the changes in first nations financial statements do not require a law. It could be covered in the requirements under the financing agreements the minister signs with each first nation.
In short, the solution to the problem they claim to see is already there. If they have some problems now and then, the solution already exists.
They show up with their horror stories and generalize from a few back-page news items, when this government already has the solution but is not applying it. Why is it not applying it? That is an interesting question.
In one of her last reports, the Auditor General said the government was inundating the first nations with administrative problems and forms to fill out and it did not even have the staff to check them. That is the height of futility. People are being asked to fill out administrative forms and threatened with financial cuts if they do not fill them out, when there is no administrative infrastructure in place to check the reports. And the government claims to be a good manager. It is actually amazing that the country has not gone bankrupt yet.
It is quite something. The Auditor General and her senior officials gave the government instructions, but it is not listening and it is looking around for something else. It hears some back-page story, it generalizes from it, and it comes in with a club, a coercive law, and a means of eliminating a problem that does not exist. The law already gives the department the means to remedy any impropriety in first nations funding. The means exist. Why is the government not using it?
If a member of the first nations embezzles funds, the Criminal Code is available. All it takes is a phone call to the RCMP to report a theft, a fraud, or problems with management or administration. The department already has flying squads to help people deal with these administrative difficulties.
The department is getting craftier; it does not have flying squads of public servants anymore: it has consultants. It has big accounting firms that come in and tell it they are going to teach it, for a fee, how it should manage itself and deal with the administrative forms it demands. I presume that some day it is maybe going to think of hiring these accounting firms to audit the administrative reports it has demanded. That will be interesting to see.
Obviously, the problems it is facing have nothing to do with the sponsorship scandal. Let us talk about that scandal. The government has been very quick to bring in a bill to deal with these back-page cases. But the Gomery report, which called for a solution in relation to the sponsorship scandal, has still not been implemented to prevent a repeat of the sponsorship scandal.
What it comes down to is that we are faced with threats for which the government does not want to apply solutions. And for problems that do not exist, it invents solutions that are worse than the problem itself. The little bit of money that it might save has nothing to do with the orgy of spending on accountants and consultants that it is going to take to administer this legislation.
Instead of dealing with the real problems facing first nations communities, this bill contributes nothing. And that is disgraceful.
For all these reasons, the NDP will be opposing a bill that produces nothing, a bill that is typical of the government and serves only one purpose: to impose constraints on an adversary.