Mr. Speaker, we are a nation that is governed by the Constitution Act. Under that act all of the rights of Canadian citizens, wherever they live, whether they are aboriginal Canadians or non-aboriginal Canadians, are advanced and protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our future together as a nation must be built upon the universal application of that framework; otherwise we will have a country in which citizens have disparate rights, different kinds of rights, different rights one from the other, which will not result in a universal protection of those rights which are fundamental to Canadian society and set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
All aboriginal rights are also recognized under section 35 of the Constitution. It is our position that those rights must be conferred within the four square corners of the Constitution Act and the charter and that this will result in full protection of equality rights, such as women's rights, for both aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians.
With respect to the operation of our federal-provincial system of government, the concept upon which this self-government agreement is based is one of concurrency. There is nothing inherently wrong with concurrent legislative authority in the hands of the Government of Canada and the Tlicho First Nation. There is no problem with that.
The difficulty is that any federal state will only operate in an efficient way if there is a manner in which conflicts can be resolved. It is fine to have concurrent jurisdictions, but if one is going to have concurrent jurisdictions, one has to have clear rules of paramountcy. One of the points I am making today about this agreement is that it lacks that. It has several different definitions of paramountcy. It is very difficult to look at this agreement and to understand whose laws are going to be paramount.
In the case of a situation involving women's rights, for example, which law will govern? If there is an inconsistency between a Tlicho law relating to the rights of a woman in a Tlicho community and what the interpretation of the charter says relative to the rights of women, or what a federal statute says relative to the rights of women, what governs?
What in heaven's name is the solution? The solution has to be to have clear authority dealing with how to resolve the paramountcy. That is what is missing, among other things, from this agreement.