Madam Speaker, I appreciated very much the words that my colleague has just left with us.
When the justice minister appeared before the standing committee when we examined this bill, we were confronted-at least I was-with the fact that in the bill it transfers power or influence to the provinces, yet, there is no definition of province. We do not know for sure to whom we are transferring the power. Are we transferring the power of veto to the provincial legislatures, to the cabinet or to the people of that province? This is very important. We saw during the Quebec referendum that it was not the Government of Quebec that kept Quebec within Confederation. It wanted to take the province out of Confederation. It was not the cabinet or the legislative assembly that kept Quebec in Canada, it was the people of Quebec.
If a veto is granted to the provinces surely it ought to be to the people of the provinces. The recent history of attempts to amend the Constitution shows very clearly that politicians will not represent the will of the majority of their people, as was the case in Alberta and in a number of other provinces on the Meech Lake accord.
The people of my province had the Meech Lake accord forced on them simply because our premier had signed an agreement. He then came back, laid down the law to his cabinet and caucus and that is what we were going to be stuck with.
If we want to maintain the unity of this country, as the hon. member has just so eloquently spoken about, if we want to appeal to those people who have vital reasons for staying within Canada and remaining united, then we ought not to leave the power to tear our country apart in the hands of the politicians. We must place power in the hands of the people who have a common sense feeling for this country and do not want to engage in these enormous social engineering experiments.
I asked the justice minister when he was before the committee to whom this bill was transferring power because there is no defini-
tion of province in this bill. He said that it could be the legislature who could then transfer that power to the people by way of referendum. However, there is nothing in this bill that mandates that the provinces go to their people.
It is a little bit like the Charlottetown accord where there were provisions within the accord for the provinces to elect senators. However, some of the provinces, including Quebec, were not going to allow the people to elect the senators. It was the legislative assembly that was going to elect them. In other words, the power of appointment was being transferred from the federal government to the provincial governments and they were going to do the appointing. We cannot unite a country that way. If we are going to keep Quebec within Confederation we must transfer the power that this bill is going to provide to the people and not to the politicians.
I have heard hon. members say that the people of Canada want us to move forward on this, that they support this. That is not what we heard from those who appeared before the standing committee. We had four distinct groups of aboriginal peoples who do not support this bill. These people are referenced in the Constitution. They should have been contacted and consulted just as the governments of the provinces should have been consulted. They are referenced in the Constitution as well.
However, the government of the day did not have time for that. It rushed this thing through and it is still rushing it through. We were given 48 hours, as my colleague mentioned earlier. We were going to sit until midnight to hear witnesses if enough witnesses came forward on such short notice. Some of them would have to prepare with only 24 hour's notice. Is it not amazing that we were going to rush this thing through and we are being told that the people of Canada want this bill, yet we are not giving the provinces sufficient time to prepare, attend and express their views about this bill?
We had the justice minister appear before the committee and tell us that this bill was constitutional. Some witnesses could not appear in person but appeared using a video hook-up in their own areas. Professor Morton, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, stated the following concerning the constitutionality of this bill:
The Chrétien veto law is unconstitutional, in as much as it proposes to legally change the amending process, without following the rules of that process. Section 41(e) of the Constitution Act, 1982, states explicitly that there can be no amendment to the part V amending formulas except with the unanimous consent of all 10 provinces and the federal government. The government's position is that because the "veto law" is not a constitutional amendment, it need not follow the amending formula. But this misses the crucial point that the amending process will have been changed and that this change will have the force of law.
He said that is the key point.
The justice minister is telling us it is constitutional. This professor, and I am sure others if they had had time to prepare and
appear before the standing committee, are telling us that there are very serious concerns about the unconstitutionality of the bill. There is an inconsistency in legal opinions on the constitutionality of the bill.
I want to touch on some of the testimony made before the committee and some of the concerns raised by the aboriginal people. There were four groups. Grand Chief Matthew Coon-Come of the James Bay Cree appeared. Ovide Mercredi, the chief of the Assembly of First Nations appeared, as did Rosemarie Kuptana of the Inuit Tapirisat and Wendy Moss, her legal adviser. There was Zebedee Nungak from the Makivik Corporation. They all spoke against this bill. Why? They said it is going to affect their constitutional rights that are guaranteed under section 35 of the act. In fact, Rosemarie Kuptana said:
Last week the Globe and Mail reported on a leaked federal memo that explicitly recommended our exclusion from national unity and constitutional discussions as well as recommending the means to achieve that exclusion. It was based on a cynical and wildly inaccurate view that our silence or acquiescence on national and constitutional issues could be bought by making financial commitments at the local level on unrelated files. In its worst light, this strategy can also be viewed as a form of blackmail, progress on matters outside the Constitution or national unity will only come in return for silence on our constitutional rights.
That formed part of the presentation from the leader of that aboriginal group. I do not have time to go into all of these comments, but the Grand Council of the Cree indicated this:
Bill C-110 is inadequate and unacceptable from an aboriginal perspective and we think will be found to be inadequate and unacceptable from the perspective of all Canadians.
We did not hear that many witnesses, but we heard many things said about this bill. The individual who spoke the most and made the most fundamental comment was Ovide Mercredi, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, who said: "No autocrat is going to unite Canada". He pointed out very clearly that Bill C-110 has not united Canada; it has divided the provinces. It has not brought the aboriginal peoples in; it has divided them.
I simply cannot support the bill for the reasons given.