Mr. Speaker, I do not know what the member thinks consultation means, but consultation does not mean taking the industrial parties which were involved in chasing the treaty negotiators out of the picture in the last two weeks of the negotiations so that the treaty could be completed without their input. That is the kind of consultation Liberals believe in.
The other part of consultation they do not believe in is the committee process of the House. We ended up last week, a week ago tomorrow, having to go to Vancouver to permit people who have qualified opinions on this topic to put their thoughts on the record.
Because the government chose to exclude some very important people in British Columbia who had valid opinions from the committee process, I will put on the record some of the comments these people made at the hearing which we conducted last week. I will be quoting two people.
The first person is Mr. deJong. Mr. deJong is the aboriginal affairs critic for the Liberal Party in the province of British Columbia. The second person whom I will be quoting is Mr. Geoff Plant, who is the attorney general critic for the Liberals in British Columbia.
It is unusual that persons belonging to the party of that name in this place have so little in common with the Liberals of British Columbia.
Mr. deJong said:
I guess the first thing that needs to be said is it is unfortunate in my view that this hearing was necessary. But it is, because of what has transpired, not just over the past couple of weeks, but what has transpired over the past couple of months, a process that has been designed from the outset, Mr. Chairman, to cut people off from these negotiations. And you didn't need to look much further than the hearings that several of you were involved with, just last week, the federal standing committee that travelled to this province, largely because I think of the efforts of several of your caucus members.
But when you are a British Columbian and hear the kind of comments that we heard from certain members of that committee, representing the federal government, it was difficult not to get angry. When members of the federal government are quoted as saying that this is a dog and pony show that will have no impact and is a waste of time and money, you really begin to wonder about whether or not people in Ottawa care about the views of British Columbians about a topic that is going to profoundly impact the way we live and are governed in this province.
This is a process that, beginning back in the 1980s, has been designed to cut people off, to restrict their access, to restrict their input. Previous governments, and I think you heard from a former premier earlier today, set in motion a process, a closed process. That was designed, I think, from the outset to guarantee failure, and it has.
I remind the House that this is the Liberal aboriginal affairs critic of the province of British Columbia speaking:
So here's what we would like to do today, Mr. Chairman. We would like to comment on that process. We would like to outline for you quickly what our main concerns with this document, this Nisga'a treaty is, and Mr. Plant will provide you with a brief summary of the court case that has been commenced by Gordon Campbell, Geoff Plant and myself in the Supreme Court of British Columbia questioning the constitutionality of the deal, and then we have some thoughts about how this process can be made better because, make no mistake about it, we do have to settle this issue. We do have to settle these negotiations.
But you don't do it by employing the kinds of tactics that we have seen by the government of British Columbia and the government of Canada. The invoking of closure, time allocation by both governments cutting off the ability of elected representatives, Mr. Chair, to scrutinize this all-important document, is the single most pathetic excuse for the democratic process I have seen in the time that I have been involved in elected life.
We were told, all of us as British Columbians, that we would have an opportunity to question, critique, profess support or non-support for each and every clause of this agreement. The government of British Columbia, the NDP government, broke that promise. Mr. Chair, I was in Ottawa when the federal government prevented more than half of the members of parliament from this province from even speaking to this document, from even indicating what areas, what clauses, what principles, they believed this treaty should reflect and doesn't reflect. How can British Columbians have any confidence in any exercise that muzzles their elected officials, and it did just that, Mr. Chair.
So when we get to discuss the substantive provisions of this agreement and we are met by a wall of silence from the two levels of government, you are compelled to ask yourselves this question, Mr. Chairman, what is it that the federal and provincial government is afraid of in allowing this debate to go forward? They either don't have the answers to the fundamental questions that people are asking, or they do and they don't want people to know what those answers are. In either case, it is in my view a recipe for disaster.
We have commenced a court action. We have concerns about what is in this treaty, we have concerns about the self-government provisions, we have concerns about a treaty that would purport to limit your ability to vote for a government that has a responsibility over you and limit that right to vote on the basis of your ethnicity. We think that's wrong. We think a fishery, a commercial fishery, based on an allocation that is tied to ethnicity is wrong, and we think there are alternatives. And we have, as you know, Mr. Chair, members of your panel, taken the matter to the Supreme Court, so if I can defer to my colleague, Mr. Plant, he will provide you with a summary of the basis for those submissions and that argument to the court.
We then hear from Mr. Plant who is the Liberal attorney general critic in the province of British Columbia.
Thank you very much, and thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to speak to you and the other members this morning. The lawsuit is an action commenced in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. It's commenced in the name of three members of the official opposition, who are Mr. Campbell, Mr. deJong and myself, as representatives of the official opposition. The lawsuit is what lawyers will call a declaratory action. We're asking the court to declare that the Nisga'a final agreement is unconstitutional. There are three basic pillars of the argument. The first is an argument that is not open to the federal and provincial governments within the existing constitution of Canada to create a new freestanding third order of government.
The second argument is that it is not open to the federal and provincial governments by negotiation with the Nisga'a or in any other way, short of constitutional amendment, to confer upon a new order of government paramount legislative power. And as I'm sure you are aware, the Nisga'a final agreement does expressly purport to confer upon Nisga'a government legislative power in 14 separate areas of lawmaking that is paramount to federal and provincial legislative power.
The third argument is that the Nisga'a final agreement violates the charter because it denies non-Nisga'a the right to vote for a government which will have the power to make decisions that affect their lives and as you know, the charter guarantees everyone, every citizen of Canada, the right to vote. Those are the three arguments that are the basis of the lawsuit. We are asking the court to rule, as I said, that the treaty, the Nisga'a final agreement, is unconstitutional on each of those grounds. So the question is what is the significance of that. If we're right on any of those points, then what has happened is that the governments have tried to negotiate a document which is outside their constitutional authority to do so.
In effect, they will have tried to amend the constitution of Canada by the back door, and in British Columbia, and I think it's important that people in other parts of Canada understand this: we have in British Columbia a made in B.C. process for ensuring that if you want to amend the Constitution of Canada—