Mr. Speaker, following up on the intervention of my hon. colleague and friend from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, I was not going to talk a lot about Senate reform, because I know that we have covered that off very well already. But in response to the questions that my hon. friend from the New Democratic Party asked, I would say that scrapping the Senate is the easy way out.
The reason that polls show Canadians are in favour of abolishing the Senate is that they feel so frustrated and so angry over a Prime Minister who is only too willing to use the Senate for his own political partisan purposes, much as we had previously with other prime ministers, including the one immediately preceding this one. Canadians are really sick to death of this. I can understand that frustration. I can understand why the polls would indicate that they would just as soon see it abolished as have the ridiculous situation that we have right now which has no legitimacy whatsoever.
I would argue with my hon. friend and I would take this to Canadians and engage in a national debate that if we abolish the Senate, we lose any opportunity in the future for having the Senate provide a sense of regional balance and fairness within this great country of ours where we have a democracy which reflects representation by population. This is an opportunity to have representation by region as a control mechanism or as an overriding safety feature to ensure that the interests of the regions are not overridden by the provinces with large populations, particularly those in central Canada.
It is very important that we engage Canadians in this debate. Yes, at the end of the day we will follow the wishes of the country, but if it were laid out for them and if it were done properly, I am convinced that Canadians would support it.
I thought that was really worth dealing with prior to getting into the substance of my remarks.
A member of the Progressive Conservative Party made a remark during the course of debate. I know it was not on camera and it was not on the microphone, but he was quite right, and the member is still sitting here. He said that this bill and the whole creation of Nunavut is not about creating a new territory, it is about creating a new province. The member understands that well. I certainly understand it well. And there are certainly some legal and constitutional experts out there across the land who understand it.
That is one of the main concerns and one of the main objections I have to this bill and to the bills that preceded it which gave rise to the territory of Nunavut. In effect it does create a new province in everything but name.
Mr. Speaker, you would know I am sure that it is not proper, it is not right and it is not legal for the federal government to create a new province or for this country to see a new province created without provincial consent. That is right in the constitution. A new province has been created in everything but name, and it has been done in a very underhanded and deceitful manner.
The original bill which gave rise to the creation of Nunavut back in the early 1990s was passed through the House. Did it take a week? Did it take three days? No. It passed first reading, second reading, report stage, and third reading in one day. Only one lone dissenting voice voted against this bill and that was Reform's member for Beaver River. Other than that, it went through the House as fast as any bill has ever gone through the House from beginning to end.
Let us consider for a moment what this bill does. I am sure my hon. friend from the Progressive Conservative Party would be interested. I hope he is listening.
This bill creates a new province or pseudo province as it does not use the term province. It does so at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer to the tune of $300 million. That is the cost of implementation, or at least that is the budgeted or projected cost. By the time the Liberal government gets done with it who knows what it is really going to cost because as we all know that is the way things work around here.
There was a tax program that was going to be the program to end all programs. Mr. Speaker, I am sure you were in the House when the former Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Mr. Tobin, introduced it. It was a program to end all programs for the east coast, $1.9 billion. This is it, it will never happen again. Where are we now? We are looking at TAGS two. Just a little aside to remind everybody that the government continues to budget money for programs and then down the road it goes way over the cost. It is likely to happen here as well.
There is $300 million to implement Nunavut. It is a fairly large area but how many people are we talking about, half a million people, or 200,000 people? No, we are talking about a population of 25,000, including children, people below the age of majority. There are hundreds of communities across this land and hundreds of communities in Ontario that have more population than what Nunavut is going to have once it is created.
Can you get any more ridiculous than that. Can you get any more ridiculous than to spend $300 million creating a territory that is going to have a population of 25,000? It is going to create a legislature. It is going to have all the trappings of a territorial government. It is going to have its own environment building, its own fisheries department and its own department of Indian affairs. All those buildings are going to be somewhere, probably in Yellowknife. Who knows where it is going to be, but for sure it is going to have all trappings of this federal government somewhere in the new territory of Nunavut. The long suffering Canadian taxpayer is going to enjoy the right to pay for this politically correct nonsense in perpetuity because in perpetuity it will last.
The amount of $300 million for 25,000 people would be a real knee slapper if it were not so serious, if it was not creating a new province through the back door in such a deceitful manner. It is such an affront to the Canadian taxpayers who are going to be asked to put out hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars over time to pay for this.
It has to be assumed that these are somewhat intelligent people in the government, but why would they create this territory at such a huge expense? Why have they done it?
The only conclusion I can come to is it is nothing more than a bandage, a poorly considered politically correct response to the massive failure of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. That is really what this is.
That department has had a demonstrated track record of failure for over three decades. Year over year there are increases in unemployment. Year over year there are increases in dependency. There are increasing rates of social pathologies on reserves across this country where the infant mortality rate is double the national rate, where suicide is seven to eight times higher than it is in non-aboriginal communities, where more aboriginal youth go to jail than go to university.
The government in its politically correct scramble to try to find a way of obfuscating and hiding its own failure is creating Nunavut as a politically correct response. It says this is the way of the future for people in the Northwest Territories.
What we are seeing here is a bureaucracy that is in the process of swallowing itself whole. Frankly, I think the Canadian public, largely as a result of work that the official opposition has done over the last few months but even before that, has common sense and is slowly coming to the conclusion that the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development is a fraud of enormous size.
I think Canadians are understanding that more than $6.2 billion goes into the top end of this department yet few benefits trickle out the bottom end to grassroots people living on reserves.
I think the Canadian public is beginning to understand that the department of Indian affairs is not much interested in accountability within its own organization as the auditor general has continued to point out year in and year out for decades. This department has no interest in the truth. It is a department which has no interest in looking at the real problems of aboriginal people and trying to find constructive ways of dealing with those problems.
It is the simple things. We live in a country that recognizes, albeit with a whole long list of Liberal governments in a very muted way, private property rights. Our Liberal forebear Mr. Trudeau did not have the courage to put it in the constitution. It is not in the charter of rights and freedoms although everything else is in there. No private property rights are in there.
We do have as a foundation to our economy the notion of private property rights. Way, way back when Mr. Diefenbaker was prime minister it was put into law. We do follow that in most areas of the country.
There is not the right to private property on reserves. That is a huge impediment for aboriginal people. They cannot mortgage their property. They do not own their property. They do not own their own house.
If a family breaks up, there is no process like there is in non-aboriginal society for courts to determine who is going to have custody of the family home and so on. That does not happen in aboriginal communities.
A person cannot open a grocery store or a corner store. They cannot open a gas station on an aboriginal reserve and arrange the capital at a bank because they will be laughed at. The bank will not lend them money against a piece of property that they do not own. It is ridiculous.
In response to the historical and contemporary failure of the department of Indian affairs, the government comes up with these kinds of absolutely ridiculous ideas regarding how to deal with the problem.
We are parliamentarians. We are supposed to be able to come here on behalf of the constituencies we represent and we are supposed to have access to information.
I have a simple question. How much money has the federal government spent in the Northwest Territories over the last decade? I would like to know the answer to that.
I would like to know how the federal government would defend that expenditure against the population in the Northwest Territories. I would like to see that expenditure per person applied to all of Canada in a theoretical sense to see what kind of expenditure the federal government would be engaged in if it expended money on the same basis for all Canadians. I am sure it would be a sum all the countries in the world could not afford, let alone poor little Canada with a population of 30 million.
The whole idea is crazy beyond any words I could use. It is just ridiculous to spend $300 million to create a territory with a territorial government, its own legislature and its own non-elected senator for a population of 25,000 people.
It is one more opportunity for a partisan prime minister to reward his Liberal friends as he is wont to do and as we have seen recently with the appointment of the Liberal senator in British Columbia who just happens to be a long time crony, former business associate and a good Liberal recognized by everyone in British Columbia. It is another opportunity for the Prime Minister to do the same thing in Nunavut.
We in the Reform Party would like to see a little more sense and a more rational approach to the expenditures of federal funds, of taxpayers' money. We would like to see more careful husbandry of scarce resources.
The government says it cannot find the money to compensate hepatitis C victims. Yet it finds money to award contracts in the amount of $2.8 billion to its friends in Bombardier. This is the kind of nonsense that drives Canadians to distraction and has driven the Reform Party into being. In the last election we sent 60 members to this place.
I tell those people across the way as I told them in the last parliament that they should look out. Their day is coming. Canadians have had enough of this nonsense. The $300 million for 25,000 people because it is politically correct and it is such a do good, feel good kind of thing are coming from Canadian taxpayers. They are paying attention. They are catching on and the Liberals' days are numbered.