Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join my colleagues of the House in this debate, and particularly the members of my party who are standing to oppose the treaty which is before the House for ratification.
It has been interesting to listen to opposition and government members talk about the treaty. I hear them say that they have been there, they have seen this. I remember one of the Bloc members even describing the colour of the Nass River and I wondered what insight he had obtained on this treaty from the colour of the river.
I have spent some time on a reserve. After my university, seminary work and ordination I was the minister, or the missionary to use the traditional term, at an Indian village on the west coast. During the orientation, before I took that posting, I was told that I may think I would go there with my university work behind me, with my study of sociology, anthropology and the course work on native Indians, particularly in British Columbia, and I may have lived next door to reserves as a boy on ranches for virtually all my life; however, I was told that I did not know anything about what I would be doing and would not know until I had been there for two or three years, and that I would then begin to know.
I had a position to fill on that reserve, a place in the community, but understanding the people and their traditions only began to come when there was some way of hearing their stories and experiencing the familiarity between people that comes with sharing at that deeper level.
People who have been close to native Indian people, who understand the hardship and the effects of their powerlessness, understand also that they live in a power structure and most of the people in that power structure have not had the opportunity to exercise that power. There is power, but most people do not have an opportunity to put their hands on it.
Something else I have heard in the debate is that under this treaty people can own property. That is true, they can. The difficulty is that individual property rights come with power and those property rights come as that power is given to them. However, there is no guarantee that there will be individual property rights. Without those property rights and power, native Indian people will never have the resources they need to insist upon their rights.
How important are property rights? I will tell a story or two from my own personal experience. The first story begins probably before I was born.
I remember a friend of my father's who was a resident on one of the reserves near our home. His mother had a piece of property. Traditionally she had owned it. She had tried unsuccessfully to get title to it. His mother died.
I will not use names because these people are still living and still do not have the power to protect themselves.
This man wanted to own his mother's property. I remember, as a friend of my father's, they would discuss how this might be accomplished. I lost track of this story, but interestingly enough this man was one of the first constituents to come to see me in my office after I was elected as a member of parliament. It was a great reunion. I had not seen him for a long time.
He said “I am here for a reason. Do you know that property of my mother's?” He showed me all the papers of all the applications, rejections and the difficulty he had in getting the money. Finally it all came together and he got title to that property.
After that he included it in the reserve lands. The reason he came to see me was to see if there was some way he could get control of his property again because now the band owned it and the band would not let him use his own property for which he had worked so many years to get title to.
In my mind this relates pointedly to the need for property rights for individuals. Band members should be able to own their property, use it as they wish, buy it, sell it, mortgage it and take full advantage of it for themselves. Unfortunately this piece of property is still beyond the grasp of my father's old friend, but he is still working at it.
I also want to talk about property rights in a way that currently affects many native people. Native people know the value of the vote. They know that without being able to vote they do not have any power at all.
A man came to my constituency office and said “When I left my village I lost my house. Somebody else began to live in it. Now I want to go back. I went back to vote, but I was told that I did not have a house, that I did not live there, so I could not vote. So I said that I would like to have my house back and they said that was not possible”.
This is a man who was caught in the catch-22 of not being able to vote unless he had his property, but he could not get his property so that he could vote. He is a very unhappy person. I see this man regularly.
I want to talk about another instance where property rights are important. A man on a reserve in my constituency has agricultural land. He liked to cut and sell the hay. He had an agreement with one of the local ranchers who needed that hay. For a long time this agreement worked. The hay was cut, it was hauled to the ranch, the money went to the man who cut the hay and did the work. One day the chief of the reserve said to the rancher “The hay is coming from reserve land. The money that you pay belongs to the band, not to the individual, so I will be taking the cheque”. The rancher checked it out and that is what he had to do.
Needless to say, the man who did the work, who put the sweat into the effort, did not get the money and he does not cut hay any more. He has lost a big part of his livelihood simply because he did not have the right to the property and the right to take payment for the work that he had done on land that he considered his own.
As a minister on the reserve on the west coast one of the things that I discovered was that, according to the west coast reserves, there are a whole variety of little reserves up and down the coast, usually at the mouths of rivers or at points of land, places where it is reasonably easy to beach a boat. These traditionally belong to individuals and to families. They are passed down through families. I would not want to suggest that they go from father to son because that is not always the way it is done in native Indian culture. However, to say that the Indian people have no concept of private property and no concept of the right to private property is not correct. I know of native Indian people who own land on reserves in their name and it is held within the reserve system in trust for them.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of the right to personally own land, the right to personal property, if we are going to empower native Indian people to take responsibility for themselves by having the power they need to defend themselves. They cannot defend themselves according to their rights under the constitution if they have no means of grasping those rights, of defending those rights and of prosecuting those who would jeopardize those rights.
This is a bad treaty. It is going to leave people in the old system rather than bringing them into the new Canada of the new millennium with the same rights, privileges and freedoms that all Canadians expect and enjoy.