Mr. Speaker, as you know, I have for some time had an interest in charities and the transparency and accountability of non-profit organizations.
Some years ago, I did an examination of the T3010 tax returns of all kinds of charities to see how vigilant Revenue Canada was in examining these returns. These returns require charities to identify the revenues, how much they are paying individuals, how much in donations and so forth. They are quite elaborate.
I got returns from all kinds of charities: ethnic groups, churches, service organizations and, I should say, aboriginal friendship societies. In surveying these returns, I did find mistakes and errors. I compared these returns with the financial reports of the charities themselves and found all kinds of inconsistencies.
With the aboriginal friendship groups, what I found is that these T-3010 returns to Revenue Canada were completely blank. They were sent in and properly addressed to Revenue Canada, but there was not a single line filled out. Obviously this had been going on for some time and I had to ask myself the question: is the fact that these official returns to Revenue Canada, the fact that they are blank and not checked, is it because they are being sent in by aboriginals and are they blank because the aboriginals know when they send them in that they will not be checked?
It raises a very serious question about whether Revenue Canada, on the one side, and the aboriginals who are responsible for sending these returns in for these friendship societies, on the other, whether they had both decided that because we were dealing with aboriginals, a less high standard of accountability was expected of them. In fact it was ludicrous because, as I say, these returns were completely blank so no accountability was required at all.
Later I became a member of the aboriginal affairs committee and I spent several years as a committee member hearing of the problems on the various reserves around the country. Then it became very apparent that in regard to many of the reserves that were in trouble, the trouble revolved around the fact that government money was going into these reserves and was not being spent on the programs. It also became very clear that for years earlier, decades earlier, governments had not expected or required of aboriginal groups to meet the same standards of transparency and accountability in their financial management as they would require of just about any other group.
This was a clear example in my mind of the kind of evil paternalism—and I really mean that—it is an evil paternalism that sets people aside by race and lowers the expectations of them. I see no distinction between what has happened to our aboriginal communities because we as a parliament have required less of them than what has happened with the residential schools.
We have before us a motion which I believe is going to be matched by legislation from the Indian and northern affairs minister that is long, long overdue. On all sides of the House we should support the legislation because at last we are saying to our aboriginal brothers, shall we say, “You are just like us. You are one of us”. But, Mr. Speaker, what we have been doing for so long is we have been willing to give them self-government. We have been willing to give them the benefit of control over large tracts of land, but we have not given them the same responsibility that we expect of everyone else. This has to end.
I would say that this motion which simply requires of aboriginal communities to meet the same standards of financial transparency, to submit to audit, that we would expect of any municipality, that we would expect of any corporation, of any charity—what we certainly should expect of a charity—we should expect of aboriginal groups.
I really do believe that this is one time in which we are very much all on the same wavelength in the House. I do not know whether the motion will be supported unanimously, but, Mr. Speaker, you can be darn certain that I will be voting for it.