Madam Speaker, I would like to comment on the last two speeches made by the hon. member for Calgary East and the hon. member for Okanagan—Shuswap.
It seems to me that what we need to understand is something which has not been mentioned.
The Mackenzie River Valley is one of the greatest river systems in the world. It ranks up there with the Amazon, with the Nile, with the Mississippi, with the Yangtze Kiang and with others. We could probably put the whole of the maritime provinces into the Mackenzie River Valley and have lots of space left over for some of the huge caribou herds that used to roam there.
My hon. colleagues seem to forget that we are not dealing with tightly knit southern Canada, a fully developed area; we are dealing with thousands of acres, thousands of hectares, and disparate people. Many people still live off the land, they eat food produced on that land and their wish is that the rivers continue to run cleanly and freshly. Their wish is to maintain that land as closely as they can to the way their great spirits left it to them.
I never saw the word mining in the bill when I was studying it. It never came up. If we allow the Chamber of Mines of the GNWT to tell us how to do it there may not be a Mackenzie River Valley worth talking about.
My friends say that there are too many boards. As the parliamentary secretary has already said, the Gwich'in want to have a board. They want to be represented. They want to have control over the large area in which they live. The Sahtu want to have a board. Depending on what agreements are made with the Dene and the Treaty 8 nations and the Deh Cho we might have six more boards. We might have three. We might have one. That is the way things are done. People's responsibility has to be allowed to work.
I would ask my colleagues whether they have considered that the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples spent $6 million over five years, or maybe it was $5 million over six years, to write many pages containing over 400 recommendations dealing with our fiduciary and our constitutional responsibilities to the aboriginal people of this country.
We are not going to solve the problem if we keep looking at this as “this is not quite as efficient as it should be” and “the miners have not got full control” and “development will not occur because the investors will not put money in unless they can control everything” and so on.
Time is running out. We have a report which some of us have studied and done some work on. I said it this morning and I will repeat it now. The report says that the solutions to our problems with respect to the aboriginal people becoming a functioning part of this country—and they were the original inhabitants—are four: recognition, respect, sharing and responsibility.
This Parliament has the total responsibility of seeing that we come to terms with this problem in our Constitution, with these people, who are the original inhabitants of this land.
I have heard nothing more than fine words. I have heard no practical ways to deal with this matter that are not at least suggested in the bill, such as boards that are local.
I want my hon. friend to tell me how things like these little enclaves or masters of their own destiny or an institutionalized welfare state are going to help the situation and how Bill C-6 is not going to help the situation.