Mr. Speaker, it is with mixed emotions that I rise today to speak to Bill C-9.
From my perspective, it is a shame that the bill in its current form has come to the House without the adoption of solutions that my colleagues in the Reform Party have put forth, and in particular the member for Skeena, who in my view has done an excellent job on this particular bill.
I am going to take a different tack. I am going to look at what the government, aboriginal people and Reform would agree on with respect to this issue. If we looked at the heart of what we do not agree on, at the end of the day I think we would find that we agree on a great deal. However, we disagree on the way to pursue it. In fact, we would counter that what the government is trying to do in achieving this goal will do the exact opposite.
We agree with the emancipation of aboriginal people. In the words of an aboriginal gentleman who wrote an editorial countering mine in the Ottawa Citizen about a week ago, “We agree on the integration, not assimilation of aboriginal people. We also strongly believe and support the ability and the right of aboriginal people, as guaranteed under our constitution, to engage in their traditional activities for traditional purposes”.
We agree with all of that. We also agree wholeheartedly in reversing the appalling socioeconomic conditions that aboriginal people find themselves them in: a suicide rate four to five times that of the non-aboriginal population; a diabetes rate that is three to four times higher than that of the non-aboriginal population; a high mortality rate; a shorter lifespan; a high infant mortality rate; and, in effect, socioeconomic conditions that rival those found in third world countries.
I can say from personal experience, having flown into reserves where the unemployment rate is 80%, there is a very high rate of fetal alcohol syndrome, people living with many in a house that does not have proper ventilation, where elderly people are sleeping in the middle of the living room on soiled mattresses. When I do house calls to these homes, it breaks my heart to see that and to watch the children with infections on their faces that I have not seen since being in a developing nation.
Let us take a look at what is going on here. The government wants to pursue a treaty negotiation. If it was good, let us take a look at what treaty negotiations have done. We need not look any further than what has taken place east of the Rockies where treaties have been signed.
If treaty negotiations were effective then we would find the people east of the Rockies who have had treaties negotiated with conditions that are a lot better. But their situation in many cases is as appalling as the conditions in British Columbia where treaties have not been signed.
Treaties in and of themselves and the way that they have been negotiated rather than integrating, not assimilating aboriginal people have actually been a boot on the neck of aboriginal people, causing their separation. This is the crux of the argument that my colleagues and I are proffering to the government.
The member for Yukon, an aboriginal lady herself, spoke eloquently and mentioned the important point we agree on, that aboriginal people want to be treated the same as everyone else. If that was the case, then all we would need to do is remove the barriers that governments in past years have instituted in law to separate aboriginal people from non-aboriginal people. If we remove those laws, instead of hindering aboriginal people with such things as the racist Indian Act, those restrictions on aboriginal people will be removed. It would still leave them with socioeconomic conditions that are appalling. It would still leave them far behind the eight ball, but instead of investing moneys into a bureaucracy, exemplified by the department of Indian affairs, and putting money into the sink hole, we could make sure that those moneys are used on the hard edge of helping aboriginal people help themselves. We could give them the tools, give them the ability to provide for themselves.
This brings to mind another problem that we have with this whole process. Members on the other side say “This is going to empower aboriginal people”. Every member in the House knows that the powers do not go to individual aboriginal people. It goes to a collective.
We are not doing this out of spite, but there is a fundamental lesson. Regardless of racial background an individual human being cannot be empowered if the power is not given to them, but is given to a collective. The Nisga'a treaty in Bill C-9 is an extension of what the government and previous governments have been doing for decades. They have been empowering the aboriginal people on top at the expense of the individual aboriginal people.
A person living in Kanesatake, Kahnawake, Yukon or downtown Vancouver off reserve, how can that individual aboriginal person ever be able to have self-respect and pride if they are unable to provide for themselves, unable to provide for their families, unable to contribute to their society? How are they and their society going to get the pride and self-respect that they so richly deserve? They cannot. No one can. People cannot get pride and self-respect unless they take it. They cannot get pride and self-respect unless they have the power to be able to provide for themselves. They cannot do that by living in an institutionalized welfare state.
In point of fact that is what the government has been doing for years. This is the system that we have for aboriginal people today. We have an institutionalized welfare state. It has rotted them. What a profound tragedy that this has happened, not for all but for most. For those bands that have been successful, their leadership has acted in a very responsible way to share with and involve their people. Unfortunately, that is not the case in too many situations. In fact, of the 660 bands that exist in the country today, roughly, 150 of those or more had to be investigated by the department because of misappropriation of funds. There are bands into which millions of dollars are poured, yet the people live in abject poverty. Why? The department will turn its back on that.
There is no protection in the treaty for individual aboriginal people. What we would like is to make sure that aboriginal people do have the right to engage in their traditional activities for traditional purposes as protected under the constitution. We want to see them integrated, not assimilated members of Canadian society. We want to see the changes in those socioeconomic conditions and we want to see the money that is poured into the situation go to help the people, not to create a bureaucracy.
Nunavut may be a case in point to see what has taken place. Rather than creating a system where people who live in Nunavut can live according to their traditional ways congruent with their traditional activities, we are creating a society of pencil pushers. We are creating a society of bureaucrats. That is no more congruent to the history of a person living in Nunavut than it is for us to be hunting polar bears. It does not work that way. In the creation of Nunavut we are actually committing cultural genocide in slow motion.
The government needs to take a careful look at what is going on up there. It is rotting the heart and soul of a proud people. That is unfathomable and unforgivable.
We need to work with grassroots aboriginal people to make sure the limited resources that exist today go to the people who need them so they will have the tools to be employed, the health care they deserve, the educational opportunity, the employment opportunity, the housing opportunity and they will take charge, as individual men and women, of their destiny as an integrated, not assimilated, part of Canadian society.
We are not being spiteful by pursuing the course that we have. We are not being spiteful by standing alone in the House against the Nisga'a treaty. We do it because we care. We do it because we want to see, as all members of parliament do, the situation change. If we ask members from all political parties behind the scenes they will admit that we are creating a Gordian knot. We are tying ourselves up in a situation from which we will not be able to extricate ourselves and it will be a system that will affect all of us in an egregious fashion.
I hope that the government will listen to my colleagues' constructive suggestions that we have put forth so that all of us can work with all aboriginal people to ensure that they are empowered and have the same rights, responsibilities and hope for the future as non-aboriginals have.