Mr. Speaker, on this side we believe we have an obligation to fulfill the statements in our constitution. The constitution protects treaty rights as they have been negotiated for first nations in the past and it protects the treaty rights that will be negotiated with first nations or groups of first nations into the future.
We have been to the courts on a number of occasions. They have said to us “Would you please take the responsibility and negotiate. You can keep coming back to us and we will tell you, yes, there are aboriginal rights in Canada, but it is only you that can sit at the table with first nations and exhaustively set those rights out, put them in a treaty and move on”.
That is exactly what we are doing. There is no constitutional issue here. What there is is an obligation on the part of Canada to fulfill the protection and identification of aboriginal rights as set out in section 35 of the constitution.