Mr. Speaker, it is with mixed feelings that I rise today to speak to Bill C-16. Certainly there are some positive developments in the bill. Negotiations toward aboriginal self-government for instance have been a long time in coming. Although the Reform Party does not adhere to the concept of inherent self-government we support self-government negotiations on a voluntary basis where neither party is coerced to come to the table. To my knowledge this is a voluntary agreement and that part of it is good.
Our caucus is also pleased that the agreement has been put before Parliament in the form of a bill so at least we get a chance to discuss this particular agreement before Canadians and in public.
The presentation of this bill sets a precedent. Members on this side of the House fully expect that every negotiated settlement in the future will also come under the scrutiny of Parliament. We only regret that the last bill, the one approving the Nunavut agreement, received such a cursory examination by the House.
My remarks therefore will be confined to the understanding that when agreements move aboriginals toward more self-reliance they are positive agreements. In concept the land claims settlement we are talking about tonight, a historic reconciliation between the Sahtu Dene and Metis people and the federal government could be and has the framework of a good deal.
The Reform Party has long been on the record as wanting to settle outstanding land claims issues. However, since this is the first such agreement to come before this current Parliament and the Reform Party of Canada, it must come under more careful scrutiny than might otherwise be the case because it sets yet another precedent that other groups will surely point to in the future.
Reformers must do their utmost to lay down principles that will guide lawmakers in this and future agreements because for all its good points there are many deficiencies both in the process of negotiation and in the bill itself that must be corrected before it can become law.
Unfortunately the media and our intellectual establishment have done the country a disservice by pressuring the government to make sweeping agreements without regard to such minor details as cost, political process, definition of self-government or the wishes of non-aboriginal Canadians. It has been left to the Reform Party of Canada to ask searching questions on this subject and we are prepared to do just that.
Reformers feel that barriers to free thought on a number of issues like this have been erected in the country. The political forces that have run government for the last 15 or 20 years have consistently confused reason and reasonable criticism with radical thought.
For the media and our academics to do so much as question some topics is to reveal some sort of subversive, dangerous tendency. This is a sad commentary on the state of intellectual life in this country. The one who questions First Nations' policy in the minds of the media is quickly hounded to the wall as a racist and a bigot.
This notion of the politically correct can occur in any country and it becomes an oppressive straitjacket that is truly dangerous to public policy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells an interesting story in his great work The Gulag Achipelago in which a large number of people gathered to hear a government official make a speech. In those days it was customary to applaud a political speech after it was done by clapping your hands over your head.
After the speech the crowd began thunderous applause but no one dared stop or even slow down because secret agents were watching and the one who stopped clapping first might be seen as disloyal. The room was crowded and hot. Everyone was standing. There were no chairs and the clapping went on and on and on.
Finally, after a few minutes, an old man fainted in the crowd and then a brave fellow standing on the platform, tired of all the foolishness, abruptly stopped clapping and sat down. Of course the rest of the room immediately fell silent as well.
This somewhat comical example is sobered by the fact that the man on the platform who stopped clapping was later done away with by the communists.
In a very small way this situation finds a parallel in our country today. The leaders of our country, the academics and special interest groups, have all made the same speech. That speech has been reiterated over and over again by them and then taken up in turn by the media. Then the politicians, willing to do just about anything to gain political victory, begin to include these thoughts in their speeches until all of them are clapping in unison.
The fact that a particular policy may not really be in the best long term interest of the country is no longer addressed. Everyone is clapping. It would be a sign of disloyalty for the speech to somehow quit. The first one to do so much as stop this enthusiastic clapping might lose his career or his money or his power or prestige or face or tenure or something.
What does it take to correct this situation? It takes someone on the platform with a little bit of spine and backbone to get tired of this foolishness and stop clapping.
I am relieved to say that there is someone on Canada's national platform today and that is the Reform Party of Canada. It has the spine and the backbone it takes to stop this foolish applause so that Canadians can hear finally the public interest.
Just like the Solzhenitsyn story where the room fell immediately silent when one leader stopped clapping, perhaps now for the first time intelligent, rational discussion can take place on these so-called delicate issues.
Although everyone was afraid to question government policy on these politically correct issues, as soon as someone stood up tall and proud and said in front of the whole nation: "I'm no longer willing to agree to a policy that is not in the public interest, a policy that people don't really want", finally we are getting down to the crux of some of these important issues that have never been discussed in Parliament before. What we have
done already to break this stranglehold of intellectual faddism is a credit to our party and a great service to our country.
The first question with regard to Bill C-16 that must be asked and answered is the question of fairness. The seeds for this question were planted by our forefathers who negotiated treaties with different Indian bands in the last century. They did it piecemeal and so different bands negotiated different agreements. Today the government is doing exactly the same thing, sowing new seeds that may produce the fruits of division and jealousy in the future.
This problem was recently addressed by the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Ovide Mercredi, when he said:
Each First Nation in Canada that has a treaty must benefit equally from the Liberal promises. There cannot be a selective approach by government as to what region or what First Nation will be able to move ahead on treaties or self-government or education.
Just a few weeks ago the Star-Phoenix quoted Mr. Mercredi as saying:
The inherent right of our people is not a pilot project. It cannot be implemented as a model in one province or one region for all First Nations to copy-he said chiefs throughout the country must accept self-government as a national policy.
Non-natives want to be fair to all aboriginals in Canada, but if the government cannot be as generous to the Sto:lo Nation in my riding as it is to the Sahtu under this agreement, what will stop groups from returning to the table in 20 years and saying: "We still have an historic grievance. We were shortchanged in the negotiations. Look what the Sahtu received in 1994. Now we want a fair deal".
How do we know that Bill C-16 is a fair settlement? Is this a national standard, a benchmark by which we judge all other agreements?
When we bring all these agreements together, and a couple of the others have been discussed in Parliament tonight, and we find out their total cost, we must ask the Canadian people somewhere along the line if they are willing to pay this much to establish this land claim settlement and self-government.
As the hon. member for Athabasca mentioned earlier, this bill should be put on hold until national negotiations have been completed and Canadians properly consulted. There is no rush. It is a mistake to rush ahead with this. Otherwise we will be renegotiating many of these deals well into the next century. By that time standards will have changed completely. This type of negotiation is irresponsible and the government is setting the stage for continuing conflict over land claims and self-government for decades to come.
The next problem with the bill flows logically from the first and that is the huge cost of this agreement. One thousand, seven hundred and fifty-five people will benefit from this agreement. Each adult will receive 285 square kilometres of land. Over 42 square kilometres of land will be given in fee simple to each member. I should probably repeat that, 42 square kilometres for each person.
For instance the land that is in the province of Ontario belongs to all Canadians, but under the Sahtu agreement 74,000 square kilometres of land will be owned by individual natives and they will control four times that much.
Do Canadians realize how big this settlement is? Two hundred and eighty thousand square kilometres of Canadian land, that is one-third the size of my province, British Columbia, will be removed permanently from the public domain. Together with the last three agreements, including the ones I mentioned earlier, soon there will be very little public land north of the 60th parallel.
No legal precedent equates aboriginal title with land ownership. The courts have always categorically rejected that idea. Where does it come from then? It stems from the Liberal Party of Canada, the party that has for the last 20 years nurtured interest groups and catered to their every whim. The Liberal government always gives first place to its political children and second place, I believe, to the people of Canada. This latest massive giveaway is a political present wrapped up in the backrooms of the Liberal Party.
There is more. There is also a cash component of this agreement. One hundred and thirty million dollars will be paid out to just 1,700 people over 15 years which works out to $100,000 each, plus a percentage of resource royalties, plus fishing and hunting rights, plus a new complicated bureaucracy paid for by the taxpayers, plus the benefit of programs already available to natives elsewhere in Canada.
You or I might think this would be satisfactory, Mr. Speaker, but not at all. Canadians who hope that this agreement at last defines what self-government really means will be bitterly disappointed. This agreement is not a self-government agreement. It is simply a land claims agreement. Self-government has yet to be negotiated. No doubt it will confer many more benefits on the Sahtu, Dene and Metis. This is not the end of the process. It is just the beginning.
I want to address another problem with this agreement. Many of the aboriginal people in Canada are concerned about this headlong rush into self-government and land claim settlements. During the Charlottetown accord debate aboriginal women's groups urged the rejection of that agreement on the grounds that they had not been included in the negotiations and that they were not secure in approving an agreement that could take away the protection, privileges and freedoms they now enjoy.
In my own constituency of Fraser Valley East many of the grassroots aboriginals who try to live with these agreements negotiated behind closed doors, things like the aboriginal fishing strategy or the make-up of local government structures, find themselves frustrated by decisions and a process that leaves the power in the hands of a very powerful few in these government structures.
Obviously the demands for honest leadership, fiscal accountability and democratic principles transcend cultural boundaries. Canadians of all backgrounds want an open government and an open process.
I have been approached by two different aboriginal leaders from my home town about this matter. There are 20 some bands in my constituency. Some of them doubt whether the concept for self-government is something whose time has come. Allow me to quote from a letter I received from a native official who is currently active in leadership. He says: "The bands in my area cannot agree on the manner in which lands should be held or how control should be structured. The Chilliwack Area Indian Council and Sto:Lo Nation Group do not seem to be able to agree on the simplest matters. As far as funding is concerned everything is chaotic. There are many instances of funding abuses".
He goes on to cite instances of mismanagement of government funds, including federal money designated to create new positions used instead by the bands to increase existing salaries. The Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development has been notified of this problem.
If the bands demonstrate this type of behaviour now, it is no wonder that they are questioning whether this behind closed doors process is the proper process that will give them the type of leadership and the type of control that they are hoping for in the future. We need to take a close look at current band management before we entrust these sorts of things to legislative power equal to that of the provinces. Will the majority of aboriginals benefit at the hands of their own governments?
Let me cite one more example that has been brought before me, a personal experience. The aboriginal fishing strategy is an agreement granting unprecedented authority to natives to catch and sell salmon from B.C.'s Fraser River. The management regime over this resource is controlled by natives but native officials have approached me with allegations of surprising proportions, the latest one being that a proper audit has not been submitted on time, at the end of May as required in the original agreement, causing further doubt as to whether these funds have been used and allocated properly.
The department again is aware of all these problems and doing nothing about it. One native leader wrote to me and said: "It is disappointing to realize our Indian government prefers to impose authority on its membership rather than to be guided by it". The same man told me personally that in their case, in their band, they are not ready for self-government.
A century and a half ago Canadians ruled by the British were champing at the bit to have a little more say over their own lives. Responsible government was finally granted by Britain but it was a long time in coming. It was only given after Canadian political leaders had demonstrated through action that they were ready for it. Budget by budget, decision by decision, crisis by crisis, the leadership of the colony built up a store of experience and dedication that showed they could be trusted to act in the public interest.
Should there not be a companion requirement for aboriginal leaders? Is it not wise to require many small demonstrations of responsibility, sound management, compassion and trustworthiness so that we can ensure natives will act in the interest of other natives in all of Canada? Power and money alone cannot solve the problems of our aboriginal people. In fact they may only make them worse.
Many aboriginal people want and need assurances that any new agreements move them toward a better, more responsive and responsible form of government. No one has the inherent right to govern; the privilege of governance must be earned.
I want to draw on for a moment the process of this agreement. The Meech Lake fiasco provoked a general outcry about constitutional processes in Canada. No more were there to be negotiations behind closed doors. Canadians from all walks of life, except those in the old line parties, were quick to issue their angry denunciations. The group which felt the most betrayed, the ones who uttered the most embittered and angry denunciations, was none other than aboriginal people themselves. They condemned the deal and the deal makers alike.
Have the Liberals learned from the Meech Lake and Charlottetown agreements? Not at all. Now that the Sahtu have a 125-page agreement, every word of which will be entrenched in our own Constitution, what do we hear? A deafening silence. When 200 Canadian municipalities want input into the process they have to write a letter. Listen to a quote from their brief: "Municipalities have felt excluded from a process that has so far involved only aboriginal leaders and federal and provincial governments".
Even the provinces are in the dark. Even though negotiations for instance with the Manitoba chiefs are ongoing right now to dismantle Indian affairs in that province, the Toronto Star quoted the premier of Manitoba as ``having absolutely no information on which to build a provincial government policy''. Where is the openness of the process? Where are the promises of
the Liberals about candour and public trust? Let me quote from page 91 of the vaunted Liberal red book:
The people are irritated with governments that do not consult them, or that disregard their views, or that try to conduct key parts of public business behind closed doors.
The Liberals criticized the Conservatives about their lack of openness but it is all just politics. They are the pot calling the kettle black. Mr. Speaker, could you or I listen to the dismantling negotiations in Manitoba? Will they be public? Could you appear before the negotiators to make a presentation? Not on your life.
I asked the minister a number of important questions about the Manitoba process. I wrote to him on April 5 asking how I might have input. I received a statement in return that ignored the questions I asked, although it did reveal that the government had given $400,000 to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs to help them make their case against the Canadian people.
This process is worse than Meech Lake. It is shut tight. Ordinary Canadians are totally excluded. Not even the media has access to them. The Sahtu package is presented before Parliament today as a fait accompli without the benefit of public discussion beforehand. The Liberal government will use its majority to ram it through the House, putting its trust in the continuing silence of the silent majority.
While aboriginals, the media and the academic community exploded in anger over Meech Lake, they are all curiously silent today. Who speaks for ordinary Canadians who have to pay for this deal? They are the ones excluded from the process established over a decade of constitutional struggle, a process promised in the red book, a process ignored by the Liberals today.
It makes a travesty of red book promises. It makes a mockery of the constitutional process. It treats the people of Canada and members of Parliament like children who cannot eat at the table with the big folks. They have to sit at the card table in Parliament and eat the leftovers thrown to them by the negotiators. This is unacceptable.
There are principles of fairness and equality that every agreement should contain, principles that should be acceptable to the Canadian people. They would be. Let me enumerate them. The first is an open, national negotiating process.
The second is definitive reasonable costs acceptable to non-aboriginal people throughout the country.
The third is to ensure the supremacy of Parliament by agreeing that the charter will apply to every person in Canada. It disturbs me greatly to read in the May 12 edition of the Gazette that Canada's criminal law and the charter will not necessarily apply to aboriginal people. ``That is something that remains to be determined'', the Minister of Justice says. All Canadians, native and non-native, must be equal under the law.
The fourth principle is that the text of these agreements must not be entrenched in the Constitution. Its complex details are too difficult to change and the process for changing them is not specified in the Constitution. Details need to be legitimized by practice over a long period of time before, if ever, they are entrenched.
Fifth, every agreement must contain the extinguishment of aboriginal title. We want to know if the demands on Canada will be finished by signing any one agreement. I want to add that the Sahtu agreement does contain this necessary element. I am pleased about that one part of it. Every agreement should require aboriginals to be subject to some form of federal taxation. Every agreement should reduce native dependency on government, and finally no agreement should create parallel bureaucracies. The creation of one bureaucracy must be accompanied by the dissolution of another.
To sum up, I am worried today that our government is recklessly making revolutionary changes in public land, public authority and public institutions without public input. It is doing so in the interests of a very few.
So that I am not misunderstood, allow me to repeat my conviction once again. I do not oppose self-government. I do not oppose an agreement with the Sahtu Dene and Metis people, but I strenuously oppose the deal making process. On behalf of all Canadians I oppose the overly generous terms of the agreement.
The minister needs to take the process back to the people and his legislation back to the drawingboard.