Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak against the motions put forward by the Bloc Quebecois, and the reason that I will be speaking against these motions is because they fundamentally do not change the principle of the bill. It is the principle of the bill which the Reform Party has great difficulty with.
Behind the principle of the bill is the notion that aboriginal or other people require separate, exclusionary education in order to be successful in life. When the federal government brings forward legislation like this, what is the government saying? Is it saying that the Mi'kmaq children cannot obtain a proper education in the public school system? If that is what it is saying, then indeed we are all in trouble because the public school system is the system that provides an education for most Canadian children. If that system is failing in any way, we had better know about it and we had better deal with it right now for the good of the future of our nation.
I know that the public school system certainly has its shortcomings, but if the education system is by and large delivering a product that is acceptable in terms of the success rate of students going through the system, then why indeed look at a separate, exclusionary educational system for Mi'kmaq children?
I submit that the entire philosophical foundation upon which this bill is formulated is wrong. It is divisive and it presupposes that Canadians cannot work together, be educated together and coexist in an environment of peaceful co-operation. It presupposes that we have to divide ourselves and further divide ourselves as Canadians into groups and subgroups in order to get ahead. I submit that is a very wrongheaded and in the long run a very divisive and indeed destructive philosophy.
I am perhaps most disturbed, though, by the aspect of this initiative which I call the potential for a misapplication of scarce public funds. Scarce public funds refers to that great pot of money that the finance minister collects every year from Canadians, the taxpayers' contributions to the federation. The idea is that the federal government has unlimited money to put into education or into anything. Of course we have all come to understand differently over the last few years that government resources are limited and indeed we have found out just how limited because we have been living well beyond our means for so long that it has caught up to us and virtually every Canadian is feeling the pinch. We have very limited resources to be applying toward education.
I will give the House some facts. They come right from the department of Indian affairs, lest anyone think I am making them up. The department gave us a briefing a few short months ago to advise us of what a wonderful job it was doing in managing the affairs of aboriginal people in Canada. Officials of the department talked about this wonderful educational budget they have and the fact that it was being used to provide an education service in aboriginal communities across Canada.
In most non-aboriginal communities the cost of educating one child per year in the elementary and secondary school systems is about $7,000. It varies by province and it varies by region, but in general we can take that number as a fairly safe estimate of what it costs to educate one Canadian child in the regular public school system on an annual basis.
The records of the department of Indian affairs show that it is spending approximately $20,000, which is about three times as much for every aboriginal child in the separate aboriginal school system. I and many would argue that the success rate of this separate educational system is far from sterling. It is very obvious when more aboriginal youth in this country go to jail than to university that something is wrong. It is very obvious when the proportion of aboriginal youth who actually finish grade 12 is far less than it is in the non-aboriginal population that something is really wrong.
I could not for the life of me understand how so much money could be going into a system when the results coming out at the other end were so dismal.
I had the occasion a few years ago to visit a small school on a rural countryside reserve in British Columbia. I want to tell all members what I found there. I was invited by the then chief and one of the counsellors. They were quite proud of this school, and rightly so. It was a beautiful building. It was new and I could understand their sense of pride.
The building was virtually new. I do not know what the cost of it was, but I would venture to guess it was well over $1 million. It was for a group of 11 children. The reason for that is that most of the parents of the children in that community had already voted with their feet and had sent their children to the regular public school system because they felt their children had a much better chance of getting a good education in the regular school system than they did in this special aboriginal only school system.
Let me tell the House what else I found. For these 11 children there were two teachers, full time I presume, and a clerk working behind the desk who greeted visitors and who, I assume, did other clerical duties. So there were three full time, paid staff. On top of that there was a school board comprised of eight school board members, all receiving an annual remuneration for being school board members. There was also a chairman of the board who, I assume, received remuneration for being a school board member as well as chairman.
This was an extremely expensive school and school board set up for the benefit of educating 11 children of various ages. One could imagine how difficult it might have been for the teachers in that environment to focus on the children properly when the range in ages was so great. This is an absolute fact. This exists today in British Columbia.
If we find this in one circumstance and we look at the department of Indian affairs' own numbers and see that it is spending three times as much on aboriginal children's education as the regular public school system is spending, the results speak for themselves in terms of the attainment of those students. Something is horribly wrong with the picture.
I would submit and the Reform Party would submit that we are not going to address the problem by measures such as those which are in the bill before us. For that very reason we cannot support the philosophical underpinnings of this bill or the cost of it. The fact is that the whole concept of aboriginal only, exclusionary education has not succeeded in delivering a product. For all these reasons we cannot support this bill and we cannot support the amendments because they do not change the principle of the bill. I am thankful for the opportunity to present my views on this bill and I look forward to hearing what other members have to say.