Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague from Saint-Jean and my colleague from South Shore. I have been in the House all afternoon and I hoped we would get around to talking about Nunavut and what it means to this country and to the people of Nunavut, and my two colleagues have done that.
I would like to put on the record one or two points about this Senate which seems to have consumed our friends from the Reform Party, that our need for reforming the Senate is somehow more important than our need for having our aboriginal people become part of this great nation, I mean a real part.
There is a senator from Nunavut, Senator Willie Adams, in the other place. He was appointed in 1977. He was not appointed by the present Prime Minister. There is a Yukon senator, Senator Lucier. What we will have to do is appoint another senator for the western Arctic, Northwest Territories, the territory that Mr. Adams represented all these years. With the split another senator is necessary.
I am reminded in this historic debate, as my colleague from South Shore has said, of a comment by a former colleague, Elijah Harper, the former member for Churchill. I remember him standing in his place at the other end of this Chamber and telling the then third party in the House that it just did not get it. My colleague from South Shore tried to put that across in gentle terms. I am not prepared to be quite so gentle. Quite clearly it does not understand.
The chief representative for that party on the standing committee, where we have done a lot of good work on this in my opinion, spoke for a minute and a half. Then like a trained dog he proposed the amendment, completely unknown to anyone else in the committee, his colleagues or anyone who worked with him. We have spent hours debating something that is secondary or tertiary or maybe quaternary instead of the important parts of the act.
One of the Reform speakers said to scrap the Indian Act. We have tried scrapping the Indian Act on more than one occasion. We tried to scrap it when the present Prime Minister was the minister of aboriginal affairs. We tried to scrap it two years ago. The aboriginal community do not want to scrap it.
One of the previous speakers spoke about ownership on the reserves and ownership of land. My colleague for South Shore and I visited villages, both aboriginal and Inuit in the northern part of Quebec. We also visited Iqaluit just two weeks ago.
I ask my hon. colleague whether in those villages that we visited he found a forward looking, positive attitude, a feeling that they were going to get somewhere with their rights as aboriginals, with their homes, health care and institutions. That is what this act is about.
I hope that every member of the House will allow Nunavut to come into being as a fully functioning member of the Canadian federation. I expect all worthy members who see the Canadian federation as first in the world, as I do, will support it.