Mr. Speaker, I suppose I should open by offering my eternal heartfelt thanks to the governing party for giving me the privilege of speaking in the House because it has the opinion that nobody is allowed to speak unless the Prime Minister and his minions believe it is okay. Here I am, one of the chosen few.
Some people might want to know why I am speaking on behalf of British Columbia because clearly I am not a British Columbian. However, the ramifications of the Nisga'a treaty extend far beyond the boundaries of British Columbia. This is not simply a provincial issue. It is a national issue. It is about the balkanization of Canada. It is about legislated race based government.
It has often been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, always with the expectation of a different and better result. What we see here is the extension of more than 130 years of policies by successive Canadian governments toward the native people based on racial segregation, paternalism and legislated inequality.
Treaties, the reserve system and the department of Indian affairs have conspired to keep Indians out of the social and economic mainstream, but only for their own good of course. The Nisga'a treaty will not only perpetuate the evils of separate status, it will accentuate them.
One does not have to be terribly observant to see what has happened to Indian people under the system which the government likes so well and now wishes to extend to the Nisga'a, a group of people which up until now has not had a treaty and has been relatively independent. Are they entitled to a land settlement? I would say yes, of course, but not in the shopworn treaty concept of collectivism. Let each adult have a piece of land to manage, dwell upon, sell or whatever as he or she sees fit, just as European settlers could do with their homesteads or land grants.
Why, where, when and how did we introduce this concept of communal land ownership, which is socialism, into the Canadian mainstream? Give the people substantial seed money to establish themselves, but give it to individuals, not to some unaccountable collective, and let that be the end of it. End this cycle of dependency. Throw away the bureaucratic urge to subordinate Indian people to bureaucrats or to an Indian elite. Stop treating them like dependent children and financing the venture by stripping the hides off the backs of other Canadians.
I have a long memory. It is rather instructive that a former Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the current Prime Minister, had some progressive ideas on the subject. He introduced a white paper that recognized the evils of the old collectivism with these ringing words: “To be an Indian is to lack power, the power to act as owner of your own lands, the power to spend your own money and, too often, the power to change your own condition. To be an Indian must be to be free, free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians”. Note the word equality.
The white paper proposed to repeal the Indian Act and wind down the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development within five years. It went on to state:
The Government believes that its policies must lead to the full free and non-discriminatory participation of Indian people in Canadian society.
The paper recommended that dependency be replaced by equal status, opportunity and responsibility. The paper stated “it is no longer acceptable that Indian people should be outside and apart”. Those are fine words, but we all know what happened.
The current Prime Minister continued for a year or so to speak eloquently in favour of an end to the determination of status by race. Even that great collectivist, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, jumped on to the equality bandwagon with these words:
—the road of different status has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration. This road...cannot lead to...equality. The government will offer another road that would gradually lead away from different status to full social, economic and political participation in Canadian life. This is the choice.
What happened? The chiefs and the Indian affairs bureaucrats fought like tigers to retain their powers and privileges. The dilatory Trudeau lost interest and the minister, now the Prime Minister, made a strategic retreat. Had he followed through with his ideas, racial integration would be an established fact and many of the horrors of life on reserves and in urban Indian ghettos would be behind us. It is useless to dwell on what might have been, but surely we can try to move forward instead of reinforcing the same old mistakes.
It is time to put aside historical divisions and bind up the wounds of injustice from another century. The fact that some of our European ancestors felt free to treat Indians as an inconvenient life form to be displaced in the name of progress does not make me guilty of anything. I did not participate. Nor is the fact that some Indians—not the Nisga'a by the way—killed some white people, who pressed them beyond endurance, a matter of consequence for the 21st century. This is the new age. We cannot continue to wear the scars of the past.
My ancestors arrived in North America hundreds of years ago. Does that entitle me to more rights and privileges than first or second generation Canadians? I think not. The ancestors of the Nisga'a reached this continent thousands of years ago. Does that mean they should be treated differently from the rest of us? I submit that it does not. We must remember that the Nisga'a do not have an existing treaty to set them apart from other Canadians, but the government is deliberately proposing to create a different status.
The legislated entrenchment of social and political differences along racial lines in the United States was known as segregation. A handful of determined activists created a few ripples of dissent which ultimately grew to a great wave that washed away an evil system. Even South Africa, which I have been told modelled its racially based homelands on Canada's Indian reserves, now recognizes that all people are equal before the law regardless of skin pigmentation.
Some may say that when our society becomes more mature we will be able to remove inequalities from the proposed arrangements with the Nisga'a. Sadly the more noxious and discriminatory clauses of the treaty will be immune to correction by a future government because they will be constitutionally entrenched. If we proceed with this folly, future generations including the Nisga'a will justly curse us and curse this parliament for the race based balkanization of our country.