Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to address Bill C-79, which seeks to amend to the Indian Act. As you know, the Indian Act is over one hundred years old and has often been referred to as a measure which is obsolete, does not reflect the reality and, more importantly, does not meet the needs of aboriginal people themselves.
This act is so flawed that it should be changed, not merely amended, as the Minister of Indian Affairs wants to do. The minister is doing the opposite of what was recently recommended by the Erasmus-Dussault commission, which is to recognize that there is currently an injustice done to aboriginal people.
I sat on two committees of the House. First, I was a member of the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development, and I now sit on the Standing Committee on Health. When I was with the human resources committee, we toured all across Canada and visited a number of aboriginal communities.
Following the testimony heard not only from aboriginal people themselves but also from people working with them, it is obvious to me that aboriginal people have much greater health problems than the rest of Canadians.
Unfortunately, aboriginal people are still the victims of a great deal of prejudice. As the hon. member for Drummond knows, the Standing Committee on Health conducted many studies on the health of aboriginal people. It is rather sad and even disappointing to see that, in spite of these studies, and in spite of the fact that a commission of inquiry released a five-volume report on the condition of aboriginal people, we end up with a bill that only seeks to amend the Indian Act, this in a rather dreadful, embarrassing and nonsensical way.
This bill runs counter to a lot of other legislation. Legislation must apply to everyone. This bill, however, will create two classes of natives: those to whom the old act applies and those to whom the new one applies. It is optional. It will concern only those bands of Indians or aboriginal groups that wish to submit to it, to take the goodies being held out as an enticement to them to give up their ancestral rights. This is something many Indians cannot and will not do.
Despite the opposition of the very great majority of native people in Canada, the minister is deciding to go ahead with this bill. For what purpose? Obviously, to give Canadians the impression, before the election, that he has done something. He dared to
change a statute that has existed for 100 years. What an extraordinary feat. But it is a bill that would not affect everyone, only those who wanted it to.
Has anyone ever seen legislation that is optional like this? It is as though you were told you could not drive faster than 120 kilometres an hour in Quebec; only those who drove under this limit would be affected by this legislation and the rest could decide to have other legislation apply to them.
It is not an acceptable way of doing things. Some people might say that it is interesting, that all legislation should be like that, that people could then take advantage of their freedom of expression, their speed of adaptation we could call it. The law does not work like this. It is not my understanding that the law works like this.
A piece of legislation must apply to everyone. What the minister wants to do is to blind Indians to the facts. He wants to show other Canadians that he has just done something important, when in reality, the proposed legislation, in most cases, would not be applied. It will change nothing. It will only give the impression that he has done something, a bit like the health minister, who boasted about his bill C-71. In the end, he has left himself so many options with this bill that it is not certain if it will be enforceable.
I do not know whether or not it is parliamentary to say so, but I will take the chance. I call this hypocrisy. It is deceptive at the very least, it is misleading. Pretending to do something, when you know in advance that you will do nothing. This is not good government.
It is time the Liberal government held an election, because it seems to be catching. All of the ministers want to do a little something to show that they can get something done before the election, before they change portfolios. If the Liberals do get back in, we know there is a risk of their changing portfolios. They can boast in their c.v. that they have changed a hundred year-old law. But history will say: this law did not change much, because it was obeyed only by those who wanted to. That is extraordinary.
I have made light enough of this serious subject. It is serious: 438,000 status Indians in Canada, and the minister wants to divide them into two categories: those who follow the new act and those who follow the old. There are already two types of Indians: there are the non-status Indians, 112,600 in 1991, and then there are the Metis, 139,491. There are 37,800 Inuit. That makes a total of 720,000 individuals.
In Quebec, the total is 69,300. Now, that represents 1 per cent of the total population of Quebec. A group must not be ignored just because it accounts for only 1 per cent of the total population. At the present time, the Department of Indian Affairs is maintaining a paternalistic system, one which keeps the Indians, the aboriginals of Canada, in a system of dependency. What the aboriginal nations are calling for is the opposite: more autonomy.
You may perhaps reply that they want a bit too much, that this is a negotiation. We in the Bloc Quebecois have always said that they had to be given more.
The day after the commission of inquiry's report was tabled, the Bloc Quebecois even tabled a motion in the House urging the Liberal government to join it in saying that the First Nations are distinct nations. In other words, they should be given the means to promote their distinctiveness, to preserve their culture and especially to obtain the financial resources that will liberate them from this dependency so that at last they will become more autonomous and be able to manage their own health services.
The suicide rate figures, which I will not mention here, are incredible. Which group in Canada has the highest suicide rate? Amerindians. Which group in Canada has the highest rate of alcoholism? Amerindians. Drug addiction? Amerindians. This is also the group that has the lowest life expectancy. Which group has the highest death rate? Amerindians again.
The situation is so bad that Lise Bissonnette wrote the following in the newspaper Le Devoir :
The story we read in the five volumes of this report-and I am referring to the commission of inquiry-is on the whole a story of domestic colonialism that was unique in its brutality and still is, at a time when racism and exploitation should be a thing of the past. The United Nations may have given Canada first prize for being the best place in the world to live, but the fact remains that all social indicators, when applied to the First Nations in this country, are in free fall, indicating a third world in the midst of abundance. From education to health care and employment, the rule is under-development, from coast to coast. According to the commissioners "aboriginal people are 90 times as likely as other Canadians to be without running water. On the reserves, more than 10,000 homes have no inside plumbing". How can we read this and hundreds of other horror stories, in one of the most comfortable places on the planet, and keep on accepting awards?
Or doing what the minister of Indian affairs and the ministers opposite are doing when they tell us that we live in the best country in the world.
It goes on to say that today, one child out of five in Canada lives below the poverty line. We treat aboriginal people this way and would have them believe we are living in the best country in the world, as the situation deteriorates.
This afternoon, the Minister of Finance will tell us how he managed to speed up deficit reduction, either by cutting assistance to the needy, by cutting spending on health care and transfer payments to the provinces and by cutting health care to aboriginal people. Are we supposed to believe that everything is okay, that we
are in good shape? No, Mr. Speaker. The aboriginal people, like the poor in Quebec and Canada, deserve a better deal.