Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the chance to rise and speak to Bill C-6 and state for the record where my party stands on this legislation.
The reason Bill C-6 has even been introduced is because the government quite rightly recognizes that it has failed completely and utterly to deal with the issue of native land claims.
A number of members have pointed out that the government has only been able to deal with 230 land claims in the last 30 years and there are still something like 500 that are pending today. According to first nations spokespeople there are supposed to be around a total of 1,000 that will be ultimately brought forward. This is an admission of failure first of all because the government has not been able to deal with this issue.
What the government is doing now is what I would call a bait and switch. What it is trying to do is to convince the public and natives that if we put together a big bureaucracy in the form of a new agency, then we would be able to deal with these problems.
I would argue that this would actually make things worse which necessitates to some degree the reason for us to even consider the amendment that one member has brought forward. We want to see these land claims dealt with as quickly as possible. We want to see the government make it a priority. We want all sides to be treated fairly.
There are billions of dollars in liabilities at stake. Whenever the government brings down its books and we go into the section that has unfunded liabilities we see $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion and $40 billion in there. A lot of that has to do with land claims that have yet to be settled. We are talking about an astronomical amount of money.
We want proper scrutiny to ensure that when these land claims are settled that not only natives would be treated fairly, and they should be treated fairly and there should be respect shown for their claims, but that taxpayers must be treated fairly as well. There is a tremendous amount of money at stake here.
What I worry about, and I think many colleagues on this side of the House worry about, is that if we were to establish this independent claims commission then we would lose the ability to hold these people to account.
We have seen what happens whenever that occurs with the government. Let us look at some of these independent agencies that have gone wild. Maybe the best and most recent example is the firearms registry where we decided to let the bureaucracy run the registry. It ran up a bill of $1 billion. It was 50,000% over budget and it withheld all kinds of information from Parliament.
Let us look at the pest management regulatory agency. That should be the poster child for government agencies that do not run well. It is one that the Auditor General is constantly bringing before Parliament as an example of something that does not work well. The government still cannot get it right.
We are concerned when the government hives this sort of responsibility off and expects that all of a sudden we should forget about it and not worry about it any more, and that it will get better because it is now an agency. I do not buy that. It exacerbates the problem because now it is easier for the government to hide its failures.
I would much rather see the government step up to the plate and address the problems that it is running into now under the full light of parliamentary scrutiny instead of hiding it in some agency somewhere.
That is why we need to address the issue of the amendment that the member has brought forward. The amendment would force the government to bring any reports on how effectively the agency is running to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, Northern Development and Natural Resources. That is a pretty reasonable amendment and I do not understand why the government is so opposed to it. It would bring some scrutiny to this agency. Lord knows after all that has gone on in this place in the last number of months we need that kind of oversight.
I want to make a point about bureaucracies in general. Many people think that people on the public service side of things are in their job simply because they care more about the public and they are not self-interested at all. Whereas the self-interest of people who are in business is that they only care about profits.
That is completely wrong. People on both sides of these things, to some degree, are motivated by self-interest and to some degree they are motivated by what is good for the public. That is why we see people who are in business donating to charities, getting involved as volunteers and doing all kinds of things.
We see the same thing, frankly, when it comes to the public service. We see people who are there to help the public, but they are also to some degree motivated by what is good for them. That is why I get very concerned when we start hiving all kinds of things off to independent commissions and agencies away from parliamentary scrutiny.
There was an economist who won a Nobel price for economics based on something called the public choice theory. He asserted that if we give money to people in the public service they will act with it in the exact same way as people in the private sector. They will start to use the bureaucracy to benefit them.
The government should be wary of these sorts of things because if it is not, what tends to happen is that these people who start out with good intentions start to find ways to perpetuate their jobs.
Here is a situation where we would be asking the independent claims commission to wrap up all the land claims, but I think the tendency would be to prolong how long it would take to deal with these land claims because it would guarantee jobs. The tendency would be to build a bureaucracy bigger because it would guarantee more security and a bigger salary. We see it over and over again. We really do not need any degree in economics to understand that. All we have to do is consult our common sense and our own experience. We have seen it a hundred times, certainly parliamentarians have, when we deal with different agencies, independent commissions and that kind of thing when we are dealing with the government. That is why I become very nervous.
I am worried that as this commission is formed that there would be all kinds of examples of foot dragging when it comes to dealing with some of these problems. There would be examples of bloated expense accounts and people building empires. We would see one more agency that the government would lose control of and that would start to act in all kinds of ways that would be completely antithetical to what the government was trying to achieve. I caution the government on that.
I will wrap up by urging the House to adopt the amendment that has been proposed. The amendment says that the report on how this commission is functioning should go back to the standing committee every three to five years, whenever that report is released, so it could make judgments and provide some parliamentary scrutiny of this new agency, which I think people rightly have a concern about.
I will leave it at that and urge members across the way to think hard about what I have said as they prepare their votes.