Mr. Speaker, as this is my first opportunity to speak in the House, I would like to congratulate you and your colleagues on your election. I am from that part of Canada lying between the Pacific salmon dispute and the Atlantic groundfish strategy called Saskatchewan. Since this is my first opportunity to speak in the House, I do want to thank the people of Prince Albert for the trust they have placed in me.
Prince Albert has been called Canada's most illustrious constituency. This is because of its history of having elected three of Canada's previous prime ministers. I contend, however, that Prince Albert remains Canada's most illustrious constituency for more reasons than that.
The Saskatchewan River runs through my constituency. Historically it was a major trade route for the fur trade. Today it provides hydro-electric generation and recreation areas enjoyed by people from across Canada and around the world.
The constituency has a progressive and innovative farming community which, by the way, has a strong interest in the Canadian Wheat Board legislation which passed quickly before this House.
We have forestry. We have diamond exploration. We have small towns and the city of Prince Albert. We have pioneers and visionary business people. We have it all. We are Canada's most illustrious constituency and I am proud to represent it.
One other thing I would like to mention this morning is that I am proud to wear the red poppy that commemorates the sacrifice by so many Canadians in defending our nation, its democracy and its freedoms. I trust that we will be worthy of their sacrifices which were supreme.
Having said that I will now turn to the business at hand which is the consideration of Bill C-6, the Mackenzie Valley resource management act.
The stated purpose of the bill is to provide for an integrated system of land and water management in the Mackenzie Valley and to establish certain boards for that purpose. The bill is enabling legislation which implements obligations between the federal government and the Gwich'in, the Sahtu Dene and Metis.
Those agreements, proclaimed September 22, 1992 and June 23, 1994, called for an integrated system of land and water management to apply to the Mackenzie Valley through the creation of certain boards.
The Gwich'in claim was negotiated, debated and proclaimed during the 34th Parliament by the Tory administration. The Sahtu Dene and Metis land claim, Bill C-16, was debated in the spring of 1994 and was opposed by the Reform Party due to the excessive size of the land claim agreement. Its provisions called for a settlement area of about 108,200 square miles or about 280,200 square kilometres which comprised roughly 27% of the entire Mackenzie Valley.
To put this in perspective, the land area alone included in the agreement was roughly five times the area of the entire province of Nova Scotia. It was for the benefit of only 1,755 persons, of whom only 982 are adults. Taken on a per person basis, the claims average about 61 square miles each and the economic cost of the agreements was in the order of $130 million.
The Reform Party opposed Bill C-16 because there was no legal rationale for this fee simple conveyance. A new bureaucracy was created and, furthermore, the commitment to self-government made really no sense given the small and highly dispersed population.
The Reform Party's position respecting land settlement claims is clear. It supports honouring treaties according to their original intent and according to court decisions. The agreements made in that legislation and those which this legislation enables were negotiated rather than subjected to court decisions.
In addition to the foregoing, the Reform Party's policy further states that settlement of land claims will be negotiated publicly and all settlements will outline specific terms, be final and conclude within a specific timeframe and be affordable to Canada and the provinces. I believe that the agreements on which this bill rests fail the test of finality and affordability and as such have serious consequences for Bill C-6, which is currently under discussion.
Lastly, in setting the background, the Reform Party supports the right of individuals entitled to reside on settlement lands to choose to hold their entitlement privately or in common. Nothing in the agreement gives the people any individual rights over the land in question. All rights are held in common.
This is a context in which the bill is drafted and for our party's consideration of it.
As a new member there is a lot to learn and, like most members, I suppose there is far more teaching than there is learning at times. As this is the first piece of legislation for which I have prepared, I was not sure where to begin. I found out, though, that the office of the minister transmits the pertinent information to the office of the critic who in this instance forwarded it to my office for review in preparation for the debate.
Included in the material is a list of the organizations with whom the minister has consulted in drafting and reviewing the proposed legislation. I found in the material several one page letters. Some congratulated the minister on the initiative and some were non-committal in tone, but they all expressed a hope that the proposed legislation would be useful in pulling together some of the loose threads in the regulatory and approval processes.
I submit that will be a vain hope as we look further through the legislation.
One letter which came to my attention later and did not come through the office of the minister was not so very complimentary. It was submitted by an organization by the name of the Northwest Territories Chamber of Mines which has an interesting motto, especially in the context of the debate over debt, spending and taxes “digging Canada out of debt”. I would think that any organization or for that matter any person committed to digging this country out of the debt hole in which it finds itself is worthy of serious attention.
I do not believe these people have been consulted in the preparation of the legislation and certainly I feel that is a serious deficiency. They believe “that the sheer complexity of the new regime will overload the capacity of northerners to deal effectively with resource management issues”.
This House must listen to the concerns of all those outside the land claims process and take immediate steps to review the legacy of a former administration which was out to right every wrong, whether real or perceived. Canadian taxpayers will be burdened for years to come because of their policies. Job creation will suffer and resource development may be slowed down and investors will begin to look elsewhere for investment opportunities as the cost of doing business in Canada's north increases as a result of Bill C-6 and similar legislation.
Legislation of this nature is the reason for many mining development hold-ups such as Voisey's Bay. We know the importance of development in the north due to the unemployment figures in the north.
Resource companies, we know, must conduct their affairs in an environmentally sound manner. There is a necessity for regulatory regimes and they must ensure compliance with the regulations developed for the common good. Those facts are not in dispute.
What is also not in dispute is the need for rules which are capable of clear interpretation, fair and equal in their application. The standards set by regulators must be high but must also be capable of being achieved. The decisions rendered must be timely and arbitrariness must be minimized. The process should be unified so as to minimize cost and uncertainty for those to whom the system applies.
Finally, it should provide for predictability both in the cost of compliance and in the likelihood of approval being granted after review of the application. The system as it exists today is both complex and cumbersome and achieves none of the goals previously set out.
The express goal of the new legislation is that it would address the flaws in the current system, but instead it delivers the same uncertainties and adds yet another layer of bureaucracy with poorly defined jurisdictions. The net result of the legislation as it stands would be to substantially increase uncertainties and cost to development while failing to deliver benefits to the environment or to the stakeholders identified in the agreements.
Among the many concerns this bill has raised among stakeholders are the potential for interference in the staking of mineral claims, change in the status of leases and land use permits, new powers to boards to suspend permits and leases, poorly defined terms for new rights for compensation, unfair enforcement policy, poorly defined jurisdictions which have the potential for serious delays in even beginning a review of an application to develop a promising area.
The proposed legislation does not address, apart from a numerical formula, how members of the committee are to be selected, although one of the letters supplied to my office mentions beginning the process of training members of the various boards and panels before the proposed legislation was even introduced in the House. That letter was received in the office of the minister in the spring of 1996.
The bill does not specify what criteria will be used in determining who is eligible for appointment to the boards and panels, if any, nor does it specify the process for appointment.
The proposed legislation calls for the creation of separate boards in each settlement region with offices to be maintained in each. There is a mere suggestion in the bill that the boards could share technical facilities but there is no requirement to do so. This arrangement is likely to cause uneveness in the development of regulations and in their application. Developments crossing jurisdictional lines may be subject to several boards with the likelihood of different results from their review process.
The fears of developers as litigation will be required to resolve the disputes arising from lack of clarity in the proposed legislation were not put to rest in departmental briefings. The possibility of litigation is a major concern and need not have arisen had the government held extensive public hearings throughout the process of developing Bill C-6 rather than waiting until it had passed the point of no return.
Given the immense area of land to be administered and the possibility of duplication of technical resources with lower individual budgets and staffing as a result, the boards will be unable to perform adequate evaluation of projects stretching over those vast distances. This is particularly troubling in transitional times when everything must continue without interruption. We know that people's livelihoods depend on these things.
During the debate on Bill C-16, Reformers warned of the potential for the creation of a massive bureaucracy as a result of those agreements. Those fears have now been realized with the proposed boards and panels exercising broad powers over both claim and non-claim territory. Hunting, trapping, resource development, forestry and more will fall within their authority.
With a population of only 40,000 people, the western Arctic will be subject to a proliferation of administrative authorities. There is also no limitation of the board's authority within the settled claim areas.
For these reasons the Reform Party respectfully opposes this bill. Opposition to this bill should not be seen as opposition to the settlement of outstanding land claims with Canada's aboriginal people. As has been stated earlier, the Reform Party does support final affordable settlement of all outstanding claims. We believe that wider consultations are the answer to those negotiations.