Mr. Speaker, the Indian affairs minister quoted from the charter of rights and freedoms. I would like to quote to her a constitutional expert named Pierre Elliott Trudeau on the same subject. He said: “Our government passed a law recognizing self-government rights in native peoples and it is from that that much has followed. We made the point very specifically at that time that the self-government within a territory must not be exclusively based on one ethnic or linguistic group”.
Why is this government departing from that fundamental principle which at one time it supported?