Madam Speaker, I am honoured and privileged to stand here today having come back from the aboriginal hearings in British Columbia.
We travelled extensively throughout British Columbia, to Terrace, Smithers, Prince George, Victoria and Vancouver in inclement weather and in awfully poor landing conditions on a small aircraft which we renamed. We will not go into that because First Air is a very nice airline but hon. members can figure out what we renamed it. We celebrated when we were actually able to land in Terrace. As beautiful as it is, it is very hard to get into at this time of year.
I want to talk about what happened there. The Reform Party went out to try to whip up a crowd of protesters to show us that this treaty process was terrible and that they want to go back to the Indian Act.
I talked to some people on the streets of Prince George. They had no idea what was going on, other than that finally we were giving back the land to the natives which we had away from them. They asked who had decided the Queen owned it. It was native land. It always has been and it always will be.
It is different to go out there and be spat on and to hear someone say to one of my colleagues from Nunavut “Go back to your reserve”. It is sad, sad, sad that the Reform Party would stoop that low.
Then some guy at a radio station in Vancouver was giving out the room numbers of the members so people could call their rooms and threaten them. My first call of the morning which I thought was a wake-up call was a lunatic saying that if I showed up at the meetings I would be dead meat. Was it not great for members of the Parliament of Canada to be told to go back to the reserve, to be told one would be dead meat and to be spat upon? I found these kind of tactics to be absolutely disgusting. There was even a lower one than that, but I will not talk about it because I do not think the Reform Party wants to hear about it. There was a lower one and I will keep that in my back pocket for another time.