Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the chance to speak to a bill, which, as I mentioned earlier, on first reading seems very simple and straightforward but reveals quite a bit about what the government has been doing over the last number of years and its failure to act correctly in this matter.
Even when the parliamentary secretary answered my question, it is clear that he chose to ignore the fact that in the first period of time the number of applicants were three times over what was originally anticipated. He only talked about the last four months of the program, where the number went over by 45,000 applicants.
How does government work when the process it is entering into with the expectation of 8,000 applicants blossoms to 24,000 applicants? The government simply seems to ignore that fact. Only when the second phase of the application process came in, with 45,000 applications being put on the table, did the government wake up and realize it had some issues with what it was trying to do. What a careless way to run a government. How careless the government is with its business with the first nations people of this country.
I want to get that point in because it was left undone by the parliamentary secretary in his comments in answer to my first question.
What we have is an interesting bill. There is a problem with the huge application process for registration for joining the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation membership order. In my own home community, membership lists of first nations, of Métis people, are very complex issues, and that is when we are dealing with 1,000 people. When we are dealing with 500 people, the complicated nature of these membership applications is quite clear. The government has known for 40 years that this is not an easy issue to deal with.
When we set this thing in motion, we had a failure. Let the government admit that it created a failure with the process it put into place. The first step toward fixing it would be to admit the failure.
Now a bill has come forward to fix some of the issues we are engaged with here, not to determine the nature of what has happened, but simply to find a way to reduce the government's exposure on this issue.
First the Conservatives want to have a system on any of the previously accepted registrations for this band. They have gone through a process with five individuals, two from the first nations, two from the government, and one independent person, who have examined the first 23,800 applications that were made. They were accepted and put in place. The minister now wants the opportunity to take those off that list as he sees fits. Further, he does not want to have any responsibility for doing that. He wants to walk away from that clean.
The minister indicated that he is worried about the taxpayers of this country being liable for the mistakes that the government made. The taxpayers are liable for the mistakes that elected representatives make on their behalf. That is part of government. That is the way the government should operate. That is the way that government has a responsibility to operate.
It is interesting. When it comes to liability, we have made many international agreements over the last 20 years, through the Liberals and the Conservatives. They have guaranteed multinational companies with the right to sue the government if any of the provisions they enter into when they come into this country for investment purposes are changed through government legislation. The Liberals and the Conservatives signed agreements internationally that the government is under obligation to allow itself to be sued, and we have seen many large suits come of that to date.
On one hand, the government is fine with protecting the opportunities to sue for liability on the part of multinational corporations. Now we come to the 23,800 citizens of this country, who under a due process were given registration for Mi'kmaq claims.
I am not saying that all of these people would have a case for damages if they were to be taken off of the list. I am not saying they would even bother to do that. I am saying that they took the time to put the application in. They felt that they had a right to be on the list because they put their application in. They were accepted. Many of them would have made decisions about their life and their time based on the decision that was made by the tribunal about their participation in the Mi'kmaq membership order.
Someone has made a decision. They may have changed their lifestyle. They may have relocated to a different community. They may have established a business in an area that could be considered reserve land in the future, with tax benefits. They might have done one of a hundred things that would have put their life in a different direction previous to the decision that was made by the registration tribunal.
There it is. On one hand, we have a government that is quite willing to sign international agreements to allow multinational corporations to sue us at any time that we change a law here in Parliament, but on the other, it wants to put a law in place to make sure that Mi'kmaq people do not have the opportunity to sue it for something it has done wrong to them.
What kind of logic is that? What kind of equity is that in the system? Why do citizens of this country have substandard rights compared to multinational companies?
I find that the parallel between the two is indicative of the nature of the Conservative government, and the nature of our country, in some respects. We have been governed by the Liberals and the Conservatives for many years, and they have permitted this type of differentiation to go on.
That is the philosophy that we are dealing with here. As with the first reading and second reading of any bill, we want to talk about what the philosophy is going forward. There it is, folks; that is what is happening here.
What do the Mi'kmaq peoples think about this? The Mi'Kmaq First Nations Assembly of Newfoundland was set up to try to deal with what is going on with this bill and the process of registration. It is not impressed with this legislation.
I would like to quote from The Western Star, a newspaper from Atlantic Canada, about Bill C-25, the Qalipu Mi'kmaq first nation act. It said:
While the federal government is saying the bill will be an assurance that everyone applying to become a member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation will be treated fairly and equitably, there are concerns that the proposed legislation’s real purpose is to protect the federal government from being sued by people who feel they are not being treated fairly or equally.
[Mr. Hector] Pearce is vice-chairperson of the Mi’kmaq First Nations Assembly of Newfoundland, a group which was formed to fight for the rights of those who feel they are being wronged in the process of enrolment in the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation.
“Once I started reading it, my blood started to boil a little bit,” said Pearce after reading the wording of Bill C-25. “We’re not shocked but we are very disappointed with the legislation. This government has put up so many roadblocks to this Qalipu registration process that nothing surprises us anymore”.
Of course, not only is he concerned about the bill; he is concerned about the process that was followed earlier. Every Canadian would be a little concerned about a process that the government initiated when it thought it was going to get 8,000 applicants and then part of the way through the process that number was exceeded by 300%.
One would think that the government would have taken some action to ensure that what it was doing was correct and working in a good fashion. Now that it has received 100,000 applicants, of course, it has to do something. It has been forced into it. It realizes, too, that is has created some liability for itself if it starts limiting the nature of registrations. If 100,000 people want to be registered and 23,000 people in Newfoundland have already been given membership in this band, one would have to say that maybe some of the qualifications should be changed so that more people are not put into this registration process. We are going to see a backtracking on the registration process and some new rules.
We should remember that this process is subjective. The government itself said it. It said that the registration is determined by people's heritage, but also by their contribution to the community and Mi'kmaq society. That is very subjective. Throughout my time in northern Canada, I have seen membership lists that have been fought over on that basis for years and years. Those are very difficult, time-consuming, and subjective ways of determining membership.
Once we get past the idea that people have the blood heritage of the Mi'kmaq in relationship with others in a similar location in the country and they have rights of membership, and we get into the area where they have to show they have been active participants in the community and the community accepts them, those things become very subjective, difficult to determine, and very likely to be the cause of some dispute, which may lead to liability.
Those are things that the government ought to realize going forward. It has put itself in a position where many people are going to be disappointed with the results of this work that is going ahead right now. It has made choices, and those choices are going to come back and haunt it. What it should do, very clearly, is to reduce its liability for its mistakes and ensure it can make any choice it wants with the 23,800 people who have already been registered and the 70,000 people who have put their names forward for registration. This is a very difficult issue.
New Democrats want to take this issue to committee because we want to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened. That may be part of what can be done. I am not holding my breath over this because I saw the action on Bill C-15. The government made some changes to the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act in the Northwest Territories which took away constitutionally protected parts of land claims agreements. That process is now going to court. The lesson that the government is learning is that it should take away the opportunity for first nations people to go to court over things that are inherently their right to do.
Land ownership is something that people have a right to in this country, and first nations, through their processes, have a right to land and resources. What is being said is that the government is going to arbitrarily determine who has a right to that land and resources through this membership process. If we told private citizens in Canada that we were arbitrarily going to determine whether they have a right to the land and resources that they think they do, I suspect that would not sell very well to Canadians.
Canadians understand that with heritage and the ownership of land through that process of one's ancestry, if it has not been legally taken away from them, they have some rights to it. This is something the government has to operate with carefully. It is taking a very strong step toward this limited liability, which is something it would never think of doing to multinational corporations that exist outside the country but is quite willing to do to the citizens of Canada.
This is an interesting proposition. We will take it to committee. We will have a chance to give it a good, thorough airing, I hope. With the Conservative majorities we have had, the committee has had a tendency to slow down accepting witnesses, The committees have been abysmal in their ability to open up to have the type of examination many of these issues take. I will once again give the instance of Bill C-15, where one day was given to the people of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife to give their evidence in front of the committee.
