Mr. Speaker, I am happy to take part in the debate at report stage of Bill C-49, and specifically the group one amendments that are before us today.
It is clear that this is an area that needs a lot of work. From my own experience in my riding of Peace River there are a number of reserves with significant problems which I think need to be addressed down the road by disbanding the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and letting the reserves take control of the situation themselves. One aspect that is really hurting that prospect right now is the fact that they still have to have communal property. I will speak to that in a moment.
The glaring problem in Bill C-49 is that it fails to require a band to consult with adjacent municipalities on land use issues. These issues have a potential impact and implication for other municipalities. There needs to be consultation and co-operation, otherwise it may lead to conflict which quite often hurts and delays industrial development, environmental clean-up and many other issues.
That is why my colleague from this side of the House suggested that we should have consultational amendments that will help ensure that bands have local community support in writing, to create a much smoother transition from the remote control aspect that we have seen under this government and Indian and northern affairs to what we might have, which is local control by bands that do not meet development problems that exist when we have two municipalities existing side by side.
I suggest in many respects that is what we really should have here. These reserves should really be municipalities.
I hear the NDP members talking. I guess they will probably have their turn in debate so I would hope they would use this opportunity to listen to others while they are speaking.
I believe that we need to have local government at the band level, a municipal style government, not government that gets into provincial or federal areas but which is a delegated government from the province on down. It seems to me that by having municipal type government on reserves, if we had a good municipal style election process, we would have greater responsibility on the reserves as well. We would have an election process that was under the courts and would have to be adhered to more openly.
My big concern today has to do with the communal property aspect as I was suggesting earlier. It is one important change we could make by repealing the Indian Act and moving away from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and establishing a better relationship with the local reserves.
I suggest that as long as we have communal property aspects rather than fee simple title on the reserves, we have the potential for a lot of problems. We know that the communal property aspect has not worked anywhere around the world in the socialist or communist countries. I am not sure how we intend it to work here and work effectively.
I want to tell the House about a friend of mine who passed on about two years ago. A Cree Indian from northern Alberta, from the Beaver Lodge Hythe area, Archie Calihou was a friend of mine and I talked to him at great length. Archie told me that he had some of the best advice of his entire life when his father said to him when he was a young man, “Archie, don't take treaty”. The reason, his dad said to him, “You are going down a dead end road, Archie”. Archie took his advice. Archie went on to become a war hero for us. He fought in the second world war. He worked very hard to help his people out with substance abuse counselling and he worked very hard as an advocate for people on personal issues. Archie said to me when I was elected, “You have to do something here to address this communal property aspect. Down the road in 100 years my friends out there on that reserve at Horse Lake and their descendants are going to be no better off in 100 years than they are right now. Look at my situation. My wife and I did not take treaty. We have our own home in Beaver Lodge. My friends on the Horse Lake reserve are having a great deal of difficulty. They try to get ahead, yet what happens to them with the communal property aspect? There is no reward system”.
Private property gives that reward. We take chances in life when we have private property. We have a farm ourselves. We make investments. We know that sometimes we make good investments, sometimes we make bad investments. We make good decisions, or we make bad decisions, but we live by them and we learn from them. But when people have a piece of property that does not really belong to them, when they are working a piece of land and all they can do is lease it for a farm, and they do not know about the long term tenure of that lease, and there is no possibility of it ever becoming theirs, what hope do these people have?
We have to move beyond this situation. Clearly we have to move to a system where people have fee simple title to land. Fee simple title is an aspect of life we enjoy in Canada and I would suggest it has worked very well for us.
We see what is happening in some countries, for example Russia, which still has not been able to make that transition out of the communist system to go to private property. They are wallowing. They cannot produce enough food for their own people under that kind of system. I talked to people who were here from Estonia. I asked them if they had been able to move back to the private property aspect and they said that after having communal property it is very difficult. People get used to that security of the government over all those years.
I suggest there is an analogy here with what we are talking about today. They get used to that security blanket and they are not willing to take any opportunities and chances for themselves. They said that the result is very little production. The production levels in Estonia need to be increased.
I believe that will happen over time, but only when we make the transition back to the fact that people can have private property and it will be their decision to go ahead or not based on their own industry.
I support the amendment by my colleague which suggests that we need to have a consultation process between Indian bands on their reserves and the local municipalities.
I know from firsthand knowledge in my area that it is important that we have that. It seems to me that municipalities should work together. In fact, it is a requirement in all other municipalities in Canada that if one is suggesting an industrial development that will affect the other they have to consult. I am not sure why we would want to move away from a model that is working well throughout the rest of Canada.
It is a very good amendment. I look forward to further debate on the other aspects of this bill later on.