Mr. Speaker, a fire truck pulls up to a blazing house on the Long Plain Indian reserve. The crew works feverishly to get the inferno under control. In the middle of a group of onlookers sits a man on a couch and beside the couch is a television set. The fire chief approaches the man and inquires, “Is this all you could get out?” The man looks up and slowly replies, “In a couple more payments, I will own these”.
Most of Canada's on-reserve aboriginal people do not own their houses. For all intents and purposes the chief does. The result is that chiefs regularly receive calls to repair window screens and doorknobs. On-reserve aboriginal Canadians have been made permanent tenants by a flawed system.
This week the Auditor General detailed the massive, visionless failure of the old Liberal approach. The Canadian Alliance says that we need a new approach. We need an approach that gives aboriginal Canadians what we all take for granted, the opportunity to own their own homes.