Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be debating this issue today. Coming from British Columbia I know full well the extent of the problems that many people perceive in aboriginal land claims, in particular the Nisga'a agreement because of the precedence it will set for all of us.
My riding in particular has several small aboriginal bands, and there are land claims involved. It is not as big an issue as it is in some areas, but more and more people in my community, which is a good mix of rural and urban, are concerned about their private property and how it will be affected by aboriginal land claims, in particular the Nisga'a agreement. Many of the things my colleagues have said are very serious considerations that people in my community are wrestling with. For anybody in the House to think this is some kind of political debate to score points is very incorrect. Some of us happen to be closer to the problem than many realize.
Since I am not directly in the Nisga'a area, I am on the lower mainland of B.C., I choose to speak to this from a fiscal point of view. Being an accountant, I suppose I would revert to that in this case. I have always been interested in the consequences of the fiscal assumptions that have been made in many land claims, not just the Nisga'a. However, the Nisga'a concerns me greatly because of the enormous number of dollars and cents that are bantered around by provincial and federal governments. What scares me more than anything is that I do not think anybody really knows the exact parameters of the agreement.
How do we possibly settle an agreement with anybody in this day and age when the exact parameters of that agreement are not known financially, in particular since we are talking hundreds of millions of dollars; not $10,000 or $20,000, but hundreds of millions of dollars?
I want to talk from my perspective of the political problems in British Columbia, where we have the most unpopular NDP government in North America at the moment. It is a government which was elected by 38% of the people, much like the Liberals over there. It does not really represent the majority of the citizens in its area, whether it is the Liberals from the federal point of view or the NDP from a provincial point of view. If that is the case, the way through that to make sure that a government has a mandate from all of the people, because it has such a minority—