Mr. Speaker, I have looked at the Migratory Birds Convention Act and the amendments thereto, and I have boiled it down to three main messages that I would like to deliver tonight.
The first is, basically, that this take note debate tonight and the lack of a ratification process in Canada points out the inadequacies of our Canadian parliamentary practices and our system very clearly. Here we have a bilateral agreement with the United States and essentially this agreement comes into play when the U.S. ratifies it through its senate and then through presidential signature. In our case we do not have any checks or balances.
The second major message is that there is another bilateral treaty on migratory birds in North America. It is not the one between Canada and the U.S., it is the one between the U.S. and Mexico. That migratory birds convention treaty will have some ramifications on the Canada-U.S. treaty. I think we ought to recognize that and talk about it a bit.
The third message that I have is that the language which Canada has chosen to use in dealing with a very important amendment to the migratory birds convention, which is a schedule to the Migratory Birds Convention Act, that deals with aboriginal issues uses open ended language that will lead to open ended issues. It requires better clarity and better language in order to avoid creating the problems that will derive because, once again, Canada chooses to use a waffle in the language. It is very apparent when we read the U.S. legislation that enables the amendment that applies to indigenous peoples' issues in Alaska that they have done everything they can to narrowly define their terminology, and we have done everything we can to do just the opposite. Those are my three main messages.
The migratory birds convention was ratified by the U.S. and Canada in 1916. The parliamentary secretary described quite well why that came about. There were many vanishing species of birds as a consequence of things that were happening at the time. It is a pioneering document. It was an important international treaty. The main thing it did was to control the hunting of migratory birds, primarily by prohibiting hunting during closed seasons.
The other treaty I referred to between Mexico and the U.S. came along 20 years later, in 1936. The Canada-U.S. model was there to act as a prototype.
Since the inception of the migratory birds convention there have been problems in the U.S. and Canada where the act or the convention has not corresponded with the traditional hunting of birds by aboriginal or indigenous peoples and aboriginal people have been charged under the Migratory Birds Convention Act. This has been an ongoing conflict.
We would be the first ones to agree that amending the migratory birds convention, because it is an international treaty, is politically and procedurally difficult. Therefore, there have been no amendments to date.
Since at least the 1975 James Bay and northern Quebec agreement the federal government has been promising the aboriginal peoples that there would be amendments. In 1990 the Canadian Wildlife Service began meetings with governments, non-governmental organizations and aboriginal people. Finally, in December of 1995 this led to the U.S. and Canada signing a protocol to amend the migratory birds convention to allow traditional hunting by aboriginal people.
In 1997 the U.S. senate gave its advice and consent. That is what the U.S. senate is for. It is the elected senate. The President of the United States finally signed the protocol to allow its implementation in late 1999.
On the Canadian side we had the Minister of Canadian Heritage. I am not sure in what capacity she signed that document in 1995.