Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to the motion. It affects the people in my province of British Columbia, but the fact is that it will affect Canadians from coast to coast. This is the template that will be used to negotiate more than 120 agreements within my province and to negotiate agreements across the country as treaties will be renegotiated as a result of the Nisga'a agreement.
I congratulate the member for Skeena, the member for Wild Rose and other colleagues who have done much to bring the plight of aboriginal people to the forefront.
We have been engaging in a situation that has kept the political foot on the necks of the most impoverished people in the country. Through political manoeuvring for 140 years the Indian Act has kept a political foot on the necks of aboriginal people.
Our common objective is to change the egregious situation which affects aboriginal people from coast to coast on and off reserve. They suffer from the highest rates of suicide, murder, tuberculosis, diabetes, social impoverishment and child abuse in the country. These terrible situations are symptoms of a much larger problem.
The problem is that aboriginal people have been made wards of the government and the country. We have pursued a course of segregation and separation which has kept aboriginal people separate and apart from the rest of society. We are very happy that within the constitution there are requirements to ensure aboriginal people have their culture, language and lives in the traditional ways expressed and entrenched within that document.
We cannot, nor should we, ever go back to the situation that existed years ago when the culture, language and basic rights of these people were trampled upon. However, what we are doing right now through the Nisga'a agreement will not make things better. It will make things worse. For that reason the Reform Party is opposing the Nisga'a deal.
At the end of the day our common objective is to improve the terrible situation which exists on aboriginal reserves. However, how we will do it is where we differ, and I will get into that a bit later.
I have seen people who have been raped, abused, murdered. Children have been abused, shot, knifed. People are impoverished and live in terrible conditions and circumstances which I have not seen since I worked in Africa. These circumstances exist in our country, a country that we believe and are told by the United Nations is the best country in the world. That may be so for a part of our population, but clearly it is not so for aboriginal people.
We want to engage in a process of economic and political emancipation and political integration for aboriginal people. Economic emancipation is not conditional upon political independence. That is what the Nisga'a agreement puts together. It is political independence to a degree because it creates a new level of government. One of the primary proponents of the Nisga'a deal, Mr. Glen Clark, premier of British Columbia, said in the legislature that the Nisga'a deal is going to entrench a third level of government.
We also oppose this because the deal entrenches political and economic power in the hands of a few. It entrenches it in the hands of the leadership of the Nisga'a people. It does not entrench it in the hands of the rank and file people. What we have seen in our country for 140 years, and what we see today and will see tomorrow if the deal goes through, is that the rank and file aboriginal people are excluded from the power and the wealth that has accrued to them.
There are examples of aboriginal reserves that operate very well because they have a very powerful, strong and fair leadership that works for the people. Unfortunately that is not so in many cases across the country. The auditor general has repeatedly mentioned the plight of grassroots aboriginal people, their suffering and the abuses in some cases by aboriginal leaderships. The aboriginal leaderships in too many communities are taking the resources and the wealth that have accrued to them through our system and are not sharing them properly with their people.
If we are going to change and improve the health and welfare of aboriginal people, rather than pursue a Nisga'a deal, let us work with them and give them the tools to take care of themselves. It does not matter whether we are aboriginal or non-aboriginal, we have to be able to contribute to our families, to ourselves and to our society if we are going to have the pride and self-respect necessary to carry on.
If we were wards of the federal government, the provincial government and the aboriginal leaderships and resources were given to us by virtue of who we were without working for them, we would not have the pride and self-respect which is necessary to change the terrible dislocates within these communities. Pride and self-respect come from being able to contribute to ourselves, to our families and to our communities. Rank and file aboriginal people have not had that opportunity.
Rather than pursue the Nisga'a deal that is going to cost the taxpayers more than $500 million and which will drain limited resources to develop a bureaucracy within provincial governments and within an aboriginal structure, would it not make more sense to use that money for health care for these people and to give these people skills training to become productive employable members in their society?
We are not just talking about the people on reserve. We cannot forget the large numbers of aboriginal people who flocked to the city to look for hope. They fled the reserves where they had no hope yet in the cities and without the skills and tools to survive they find themselves in the same situation they were in or worse.
I have pleaded with the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development to please look into the situation occurring on the reserves today. Please act on behalf of these people. Do not ignore their pleas for help. Do not continually tell the grassroots aboriginal people to go to the police or their leadership, who in many cases are strangling their own people. She must help them.
Over $7 billion is poured into aboriginal affairs, yet what do these people have to show for it? In many cases their situation now is more pitiful than it was five, ten or twenty years ago. Money is not the cure. Political independence is not the cure. The Nisga'a deal is not the cure. It is in ensuring that aboriginal people have the power and the responsibility to take care of themselves and their families in their communities. Therein lies the opportunity, the hope and the chance for them to end a situation that is an embarrassment for everybody in the House, but more important is a terrible tragedy and a pain for the people who endure it.
The Nisga'a deal fails on many counts, as my hon. colleague from Skeena and others have mentioned. It fails to provide for the people. It fails to ensure that the people have the power. It fails to ensure that we have a workable situation for both aboriginals and non-aboriginals.
At the end of the day, we must work together to build a stronger society. Separated we will sink; together we will survive and do well. The Nisga'a deal unfortunately segregates aboriginals and non-aboriginals. It moves them apart. It will only further the prejudice aboriginal people endure. That is not good and it needs to change.
We hope that the government looks at this deal again. We hope it does not pass the Nisga'a deal. We hope it invests in aboriginal people. We hope it listens to the grassroots aboriginal people and not necessarily to their leadership. We hope it puts the obligation, responsibility and accountability on the leadership to make sure the resources for the people are going to be used for the betterment of them and not merely put into a huge sinkhole that is not going to benefit the aboriginal people at all.