Mr. Speaker, I do not want to instruct the members from British Columbia. They know their corner of the country best.
However, I can tell them their provincial colleague, Bill Vander Zalm, of the Reform Party, is not quite on the right track in saying we should buy the Indians “Let us give them $100,000, get rid of the reserves and that will be the end of that”. I think that is a poor approach, and I would say to Mr. Vander Zalm that, if he wants to be elected, if he wants to be a Reformer, this is the right way to go about it, as he does not recognize the aboriginal peoples.
Buying people, telling them that we will assimilate them and saying “Let us pay out $100,000, and that will be the end of the aboriginal nations”, is not the approach to take. That means they know very little about them. That means they know very little about Quebec too.