Madam Speaker, I know that was not a point of order, it was a point of debate.
The fact of the matter is I said that it was Reform Party supporters who came out. One lady who came to me said she was a Reform Party supporter. She was asked by a member of the Reform Party to come out and demonstrate and disrupt the meetings as much as she could.
When I gave over my time to the member for Prince George so that he was able to speak, he thanked me and said I was a gentleman. He did not think he would have enough time to express the views of his constituents. I did not go out there with anything evil on my mind or any hidden agenda. I went out there to hear evidence.
Let me quote the evidence I heard from the B.C. Federation of Labour. It said that provincial leader Gordon Campbell was against a referendum last summer when he said the people of the lower mainland should not be determining the future of the people of the Nass Valley. Suddenly he is now in favour of a referendum because he is a Liberal-Reformer. There is a whole pile of people who are just a bit to the right of Attilla the Hun and nobody playing left wing. If one is a hockey player it would be a great place to be a left winger. Vander Zalm and he are in a leadership race for votes. It would appear as though they swim out of a very shallow gene pool when they are vying for votes on the right wing.
The B.C. Federation of Labour also said that it was especially important for the labour movement to discuss the Nisga'a agreement everywhere it could since David Black who publishes 60 community newspapers in B.C. had given instructions to his editors to publish only editorials opposing the settlement. Is that freedom of the press?
Then we have the other Black. If one is a Reformer I guess two Blacks make a right. The press is skewered, narrow and biased. I challenged the press. I said I would be more than happy to withdraw my comment that members of the press did not report the news in B.C. They try to create the news in B.C. They try to create it when 13 newspapers in my riding publish both sides of the story. Generally the B.C. press is a very sick organization, promoting only bad news concerning the native population.
In 1994 the governor general asked the press to give good news a chance. I challenge the press in B.C. to send me one item which shows something good being said about natives and native agreements, that they are not buying into scare tactics and fearmongering.
One organization on the Reform list, which was agreed to by both parties, brought in by that party was the Fraser Institute or the C.D. Howe Institute in British Columbia. As a rookie in 1994 I went to the Chateau Laurier to hear the Fraser Institute tell us that the present Minister of Finance would destroy the country, that we would never get out of the $42 billion debt we were in. Everything was doom and gloom and would never work. Obviously two back to back balanced budgets have proven that statement wrong.
In my favour, I did not jump into the canal on the way back. To say that we did not hear evidence to the contrary is just not honest. We heard from Alpha Omega Capital Management which was hired by the member for Delta—South Richmond. There was someone who owned a calculator and asked them to skew the numbers so they would look bad. We listened to this group and asked questions. We received answers that had nothing to do with the truth. If someone is buying the guy who owns the calculator, then there will not be much of a debate.
What evidence did we hear from the B.C. Treaty Commission? The B.C. Treaty Commission conducted hearings all over the place. The one question I asked at every meeting was for it to tell us what it would do to improve the treaty process.
It is a treaty process. It is not the old Indian Lands Act where we take a bunch of people, set them on a reserve somewhere, send a cheque every month and tell them they cannot do anything. One can see that by going to the Sheshatsui reserve in Labrador which has the highest suicide rate in Canada. People have been taken and put 90 miles from nowhere. They are sent a cheque every month and told not to bother us. They have no hope. They have no future. They have no history. They have no caribou to hunt. They have no fish to fish. They have no industry to lean on.
What is it that they want to do with these people? Do they want to go back to that? Is that what they are doing? The treaty process is one that gives people fee simple, the right to own the land they build their houses on. Is there something terribly wrong with that? As a real estate agent for 30 years I say that it would be really nice for them to have fee simple as a basic right. Why would that not be a basic right in the Nisga'a agreement? Why would that not be something the Reform Party would adhere to?
What did we hear out there? We heard all kinds of evidence for and against. We had demonstrations by the Reform leader, Mr. Vander Zalm screaming, yelling, calling us names, insulting us, trying to do everything to make us feel as unparliamentary as possible. That was my 13th trip to British Columbia, by the way. I have skied there. I have been at Whistler. I have travelled extensively throughout British Columbia and it is the first time I have met people who were hostile.
I have always found the people of British Columbia to be caring, to be people who used reason and logic. They were basically a very friendly people with a very beautiful province. There I was faced with all this hostility. One of the people yelled out the name of the member for South Shore and said “Keddy, you are next. South Shore, you are next”, as if they were going to get him next because he smiled at somebody in the audience. That is how sad it was. That is what we were dealing with out there.
To hear the evidence, to conclude from it, and to be told that I am less than a Canadian for even thinking that I could go out there and make an honest decision is beyond my scope of reason. I say shame on them for whipping up the crowd, for trying to skewer things so that we would not hear evidence, trying to manipulate the witness list and then trying to throw it back on us.
I know I am out of time but I could go on for a long time. No, I do not have notes. I speak from the heart.