Mr. Speaker, seeing as I was made reference to a number of times in that address, I want to clarify a few things.
What I said in my remarks is that it is intellectually dishonest to try to take a bunch of isolated incidents of problems with funds and try to thread that together into an overall picture that aboriginal people in Canada are not ready for or capable of self-government or the implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission which our party stands for. I am not saying they are allegations. I am saying they probably are well founded incidents.
I made a number of connections with anti-Indian organizations like FIRE. The hon. member can deny any connection to them if he likes. As the ONFIRE begins now, the Ontario version of the anti-Indian organization, the director is a Reform Party member and activist Judy Kilgore. Brian Richardson, the founder of the Ontario FIRE organization, left his job with FIRE so he could run for the Reform Party in the last federal election. He did not want that crossover too public I guess.
Mel Smith, who was the salaried, paid consultant for the Reform Party's Indian task force, is the author of the book Our Home or Native Land . It is a play on words instead of our home and native land. The three major points are that aboriginal self-government must be stopped; that some government treaties with first nations should be either ignored or modestly interpreted; and that all government programs related to native people should be phased out, i.e. first nations people should be made real Canadians. In other words, no special affirmative action measures to try to recognize the historic imbalance.
Does the Reform Party stand behind the implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission on aboriginal people or does it subscribe to Mel Smith's points?