Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. secretary of state, for whom I have a great deal of respect, for her heartfelt position on this and many other issues.
In her remarks she criticized the principle which guides the position of the Canadian Alliance with respect to the relationship between the Dominion of Canada and aboriginal peoples. She suggested that equality is not an appropriate principle for those relationships.
The principle of equality, which my party articulates in a classical small l liberal sense, is predicated on the ancient Liberal principle that ethnicity and race ought not to be a factor in a relationship between the state and the individual. This was a principle very strongly articulated by none other than the late right hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and of course manifested in his 1971 white paper on Indian affairs, where he proposed a paradigm similar to the one articulated by the Canadian Alliance.
Could the minister reflect as to whether she thinks that Prime Minister Trudeau was wrong for advocating the same position? She says that the Alliance simply wants to take rights away from aboriginal people when in fact what we want to do is for instance grant individual aboriginals property rights which in many cases they do not currently have.
Rather than a kind of confrontational approach, would she consider that there is some merit, certainly Pierre Trudeau saw it, in the kind of approach that we are advocating and perhaps a more constructive dialogue would be a better way to go forward?