Madam Speaker, on November 6, 1998, I raised a question in the House regarding the loss of tax revenue by western rural municipalities when land is converted to Indian reserves.
In responding, the government House leader clearly did not have the faintest idea of what I was talking about. He stumbled and stammered that his government fully understood its obligations to aboriginal Canadians and as always he adhered to the standard Liberal policy of when you do not understand the issue, obfuscate. In order that the government can compose a rational response, I will now pose my question in great detail.
There are two types of native land claims being settled by federal and provincial funding of land purchases by Indian bands. Treaty land entitlement claims involve lands promised by the government as part of the original treaties with the Indian bands. Some bands were shortchanged mainly due to incorrect counts of band members. A recent recalculation has resulted in the awarding of huge additional entitlements based, not on the original 19th century populations, but on recent counts.
Using remarkable Liberal mathematics, I suppose that the treaties should rationally be reopened in 10, 20 or 30 years hence until ultimately all of the west has been returned to its original owners. However I am digressing. That is a subject for another debate. Tonight the subject is taxation.
Land purchased under treaty land entitlements and transferred to reserve status is land removed from the tax base of rural municipalities. However, for the loss of these particular lands, the rural municipalities are very fairly given a grant of 22.5 times the annual tax revenue as compensation.
Unfortunately there is a second type of entitlement which has a totally different outcome to the rural municipalities. Specific land claims are to return lands lost through unlawful acts or land arbitrarily taken away from a reserve without compensation. For such claims, rural municipalities will only be compensated at five times the previous year's taxes. This is blatantly unfair and it represents a disavowal of federal commitments made to the rural municipalities in 1991 and 1993. It is a breach of trust. The only rationale for the reduced rate seems to be that it is cheaper for the senior government to download its responsibilities onto the municipalities.
However, it is certainly not cheaper for rural taxpayers who will pay more to cover the shortfall. They are hit twice, once as Canadian taxpayers to purchase the lands and once as municipal taxpayers to provide the services in perpetuity, the roads primarily, for these alienated pieces of land. That is not fair.
It is very easy for a government to be generous at the expense of someone else. If a debt is owed to natives for land unfairly taken from them, it is a debt owed by all Canadians and not just by a handful of Saskatchewan farmers. Why does this government find that so hard to understand?