Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure today to speak to Bill C-39, an act to amend the Nunavut Act. This legislation will transfer powers to the new Nunavut assembly. It will implement measures for territorial elections and the appointment of senators.
I am going to talk to a number of issues today, but I want to address the long history of dealing with the aboriginal people in a way which has created a welfare state. This dependency has compromised the health and welfare of aboriginal people to a great extent. They have some of the worst health care in this country.
This bill will allow the government to appoint senators for the Nunavut region. That concerns democracy. Should the people who represent the people of Nunavut be appointed or elected?
We have always maintained that the election of individuals representing the people should be the way to go. An appointment circumvents the democratic principles of the country and prevents individual members of the community from getting the person they want as opposed to the person a prime minister would like to have.
If the Prime Minister would take a courageous leadership role in ensuring that from now on senators would be elected by the people and for the people, he would be doing an enormous service to institute an element of democracy in the House that it so desperately needs.
For years we in the Reform Party and others in the community have asked for a triple E Senate, an elected, equal and effective Senate, a Senate that would bring power to the people, not power to the leadership of a political party. We have asked for that repeatedly. If the Prime Minister would take that initiative he would be demonstrating enormous courage and leadership. I implore him to do that.
With respect to the powers of the Northwest Territories, those powers will be transferred to Nunavut through the bill. I want to get to the heart of my speech, the real reason I wanted to speak on Bill C-39.
For decades we have created an institutionalized welfare state. The institutionalized welfare state has been put forth through the Indian Act, an act that is discriminatory. It balkanizes, increases prejudice and keeps the boot on the neck of aboriginal people by preventing them from having the ability and the power to develop, to be the best they can be and to be masters of their destiny.
We have circumvented that by creating a separate act for a separate group of people. That attitude has compromised the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of aboriginal people and will continue to do so as long as we treat aboriginal people as separate and distinct members of the country.
It is possible and advisable to ensure that aboriginal people are integrated into Canadian society and not assimilated. Assimilation would destroy the incredible culture and language they have to teach all of us. Integration will enable them to become integrated, functional members of Canadian society.
Let us look at the situation in New Brunswick today where aboriginal people are flaunting the law and cutting down trees. The response from those aboriginal people is that there is no way they will allow anybody to take away their chain saws. For the first time in their lives they have been able to earn a living, generate funds and provide for themselves and their families.
The result has been a dramatic decrease in substance abuse and violence. The community is stronger. Individuals have a sense of community. They are pursuing that course because they have the ability to generate the revenues, the funds and the wherewithal to be masters of their destiny and to take care of themselves, as opposed to the situation we have today where aboriginal communities are forced to look to the government to be their paternal father, the one who will take care of them.
We in the House are members of different ethnic groups. If any of us were to come under the Indian Act and be forced to ask permission from the Government of Canada to do a number of things, what would happen? If we were forbidden to own land or we had to ask permission to get services, what would happen? If we had a separate group of services and opportunities different from the rest of the country where things were given to us instead of our being forced to earn it, if instead of being given the opportunity to take care of ourselves and the chance to have the tools to take care of ourselves, and if money were given to us, what would happen?
We would suffer from alcohol abuse. We would suffer from other substance abuse. We would suffer from sexual abuse and violence. Our communities would be in tatters. If a system were created where things were given freely to no matter whom, it would erode the very soul of a person. As a result the society the person lives in would be eroded as well.
The situation on some reserves is appalling. In my job as a member of parliament I have investigated allegations by members of reserves who have said that the resources their reserves are earning are disappearing. It is alleged that those moneys are being taken by members of the reserves.
Generally aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in leadership positions are alleged to be taking moneys that should be going directly to the people for education, health care and treatment programs and to enable them to have the tools and the power to stand on their feet.
The minister of aboriginal affairs said there was no problem and that if I had a problem I could go to the RCMP. The result is that the people on the ground, the average aboriginal people in the trenches, are being hammered.
An aboriginal woman on a reserve I visited said that moneys which were supposed to go into schools had been taken by the leadership of her reserve. If she went to the leadership she would be ostracized in her society. If she went to the department of Indian affairs it would tell her to go to the leadership.
What should that woman do? Her children will be educated in a school that does not have the resources because the money has potentially been stolen. Such people are caught between a rock and a hard place.
This is not uncommon. When I investigated allegations of misappropriation of funds on a reserve in my riding the minister said I could go to the RCMP. Before that happened the people who were allegedly doing it, individuals on the reserve in positions of power, threatened to sue me to shut me up.
What happens to aboriginal people in that community who are seeing the money disappear and do not know where it goes? There is no accountability. There is no responsibility. There is fear that if they complain they will be ostracized within their community or worse.
They come to me. I go to the minister. The minister says that it is not a problem and asks me to go to the RCMP. With the resources going into the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development a significant amount of money is potentially in the wrong hands. The Canadian taxpayer would be completely appalled by that.
What are we doing? We are pursuing a course that will balkanize our country. What will the Delgamuukw case that came down in British Columbia do? It will drastically undermine crown ownership of 94% of B.C.'s land mass; put almost insurmountable hurdles in the way of the provincial government over land resource decisions; supplant common law with a new system of law in which equal credence is to be given to aboriginal cases, to the aboriginal perspective; and replace the longstanding rules of evidence in civil cases with two sets of rules, one for aboriginal cases and one for other cases.
The aboriginal title as defined by the court may be supplanted by other forms of land tenure only if there is rigid testament by the government and only if compensation is paid. It failed to confirm in constitutional terms the right to make laws where they are fully vested in either parliament or provincial legislatures. It turned over to the federal government the right to exclusively legislate land management for natives on lands found to be covered by aboriginal title.
The Delgamuukw case also prompted the first nations summit for an immediate freeze on development of land resources anywhere in British Columbia. What did that do for aboriginal people who want to earn a living? It destroyed the ability of that land to be utilized for aboriginal people and for non-aboriginal people.
The attitude in the Delgamuukw case and in the federal government as in previous federal governments has been to divide, which does not bring aboriginal and non-aboriginal people together in an environment of mutual respect and tolerance, with a vision and goal of pursuing a common and united purpose for the betterment of the health and welfare of all people. It pursues a course that will balkanize our country and will tear apart aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities.
What has been the outcome? As I mentioned earlier in my speech the health care parameters are appalling. I have worked in emergency rooms and visited aboriginal reserves. The incidence in some reserves of fetal alcohol syndrome approaches 60 per thousand live births. The unemployment rate can be 50% or higher. The incidence of diabetes is three times higher than that for non-aboriginals. The incidence of infant mortality is much higher than for anyone else. The birth rate is nearly 3% higher than in other communities. The tuberculosis rate approaches third world levels. Why?
Does the federal government not understand that the pursuit of separate developments is apartheid in Canada? Does it not realize that will only fail? If its actions are to work we would have seen that by now. Instead we have seen a decline in the health and welfare of aboriginal people.
Members should walk for a few minutes through the inner city of Vancouver and through some aboriginal communities. They will see a scene that is reminiscent of a third world country. This is not to say that some aboriginal communities do an outstanding job of providing for themselves and their people. They have managed to do it because they have the ability to work with surrounding communities and the power to be the masters of their own destiny as we are in our communities.
What is so wrong with giving aboriginal people the same municipal type powers as those of other communities? What is so wrong with ensuring that the traditional rights, responsibilities, goals, objectives and cultural needs of aboriginal people are to be preserved in perpetuity?
It would ensure that aboriginal people could engage in the cultural activities they have always engaged in for the betterment of their society. What is so wrong with that? Instead we have a situation of separate development, balkanization of my province of British Columbia and balkanization of our country.
Nunavut may proceed in that direction. Furthermore who will pay for it? Will the moneys be generated there? The federal government and the Canadian taxpayer will foot the bill for separate development that has been demonstrated so clearly to fail.
I cannot emphasize enough that the apartheid, the attitude of balkanization of the country, the Indian Act and the department of Indian affairs and its goal of creating separate development for separate peoples will compromise everyone but particularly aboriginal people.
My colleague from Skeena has spoken eloquently many times and produced many different constructive solutions to the government along the lines of aboriginal affairs under the umbrella of mutual respect, understanding and tolerance, with an objective to move forward to develop as individual societies linked together with the common purpose of a united, positive and healthier future.
The government is doing a separate development which, without accountability, will only increase the problems of aboriginal communities today. If for once I could get the minister of Indian affairs to sit in the House or to come with us to see what is happening in the reserves, in the trenches, she might change her tune. It does not serve her to meet the aboriginal leadership alone, because the aboriginal leadership has a certain goal. It is forced perhaps by circumstance to pursue an objective that is politically correct, given the current politically correct attitude we see today. It is this politically correct attitude that we have toward aboriginal people, this attitude toward separate development, that is causing enormous problems for aboriginal people.
Aboriginal people want their culture and language to be preserved. They want to be able to work. They want to be able to take care of their own. They want to be able to stand on their own two feet. They want to be masters of their own destiny and they want to interact peacefully with non-aboriginal people. That is the objective we should have. Those are the people we should be meeting with, because if we do not the problems we see today will only get worse.
It breaks my heart to see the situation on some aboriginal reserves with the situation I mentioned before of the incidence of diabetes, tuberculosis, premature death of children, the squalor, the destitution and the hopelessness these people have. Furthermore, it is simply not necessary that this occurs.
We have to change our attitude. If there is to be a creation of separate mini states within a province, say in British Columbia through what the Delgamuukw case would provide, what is going to happen when 110% of the land mass of British Columbia is called for and staked out by aboriginal people?
We cannot go back in history 110 or 120 years and try to use that to justify what is happening today. We have to move forward and look forward. We have to repair the damage of the past, but we can do that only by moving and looking forward.
It is imperative that we are able to use our resources to help the aboriginal people to help themselves and move forward in a constructive united front for all Canadians. If we do not, the blood will be on all our hands.