Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. It is very clear that the plight of native people in Canada, the tremendous social problems that we see on reserves, are a direct result of the huge welfare state that we built up around them. It is the arrogance and the elitist notion on the part of government that it can fix problems by throwing money at them and creating new programs and so on that entrenches these very serious human conditions on native reserves.
What is required is for the government to say first, stop treating aboriginals as if they all think and act and want the same things. They are not communists. They are individuals just like we are. They are individuals who have individual aspirations, desires, visions, hopes and dreams.
We need to break that welfare state, start dismantling it. We need to give a hand up to those people and encourage them to get out into the private sector, to become ordinary citizens and provide them with a one-time opportunity to make that transition easier.
We have to understand that the corollary of success is failure. The government cannot guarantee success and it cannot guarantee that people will not fail. That is axiomatic. That is something that we have to live with. It is a human condition. It is natural law, if you will. One cannot guarantee that anybody is going to be successful. All one can do is try to make the conditions as fertile as possible for success to happen.
I believe very strongly that when the government backs out of this interventionist mode it is in right now and allows native Indian people to take the bull by the horns and start controlling their own lives, we will see some failures. There is no question about it. However, we are going to start seeing successes. We will see more success as time goes by.
When we talk about having native Indian people as ordinary Canadians, I am not saying that I do not respect the culture. I respect the culture and I respect that there are differences. Those differences can and should be celebrated, but not celebrated in law, not entrenched in the Constitution, not entrenched in distinctiveness and separateness in law that is going to keep us apart forever.
The gulf between native and non-native people is widening all the time because of the policies of government, not because there is a fundamental problem. It is the policies.
The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans announced he was going to increase access fees for fishermen, but the access fees were only going to go up by 50 per cent for native fishermen but 100 per cent for everyone else. I am convinced the native fishermen did not ask for that. It was this minister who came up with some woolly-thinking policy that this was what he should be doing. What it does is create division. Why is it that we have the problems with the native and non-native fishermen on the Fraser River system? It is because government created a policy that allowed access to a resource on a different basis based on race. That has to be done away with.