Madam Speaker, listen to them over there. It is unbelievable.
That is what the agreement does. Members opposite do not understand the effects of their own legislation and that is what bothers me the most.
When we go back to the Constitution, the notion of aboriginal rights were thrown in without definition. Nobody knew what it meant. Nobody took the time to define it. It was thrown in and we have been debating it ever since. It has been expensive. We have had court case after court case and then we get nonsense like the bill that is before us today, which is opening the doors to nothing but lawsuits and ongoing negotiations that will never end.
When will the members in this place wake up? To suggest that this place changes with every election and somehow there is no continuity is beyond the pale. The issue is that these notions should have been carefully defined by the House so that parliaments that follow would have an idea of what was meant by terms like “inherent right”. That is the issue. That is our job and we are not doing it.
Our job is to ensure that there is clear definition. Our job is to ensure that the definitions are clear so that if there is a problem and the matter ends up in the Supreme Court of Canada, the Supreme Court knows what Parliament's intention was.
The debate we have had on the bill, this non-debate, this debate that gets thrown out at the last minute so that it is impossible for members to adequately prepare is the problem. Members opposite do not want to discuss the issue. They do not want clear definition. They do not want the people of Canada to be heard on these matters. They are simply not concerned with the effects of their actions.
We could look at the estimates over time and the money that was spent time after time in negotiating these agreements. How does it improve the life of native people in this country? We should think back to Davis Inlet. There was $152 million spent to move the poor people of Davis Inlet from one location to another. The government said that would fix the problems of drug and alcohol abuse, of sexual abuse and all the ills of the community. The government said it would fix it by moving those folks from community A to community B.
Has it fixed anything? Not a thing. The problems go on, and why? Because every morning when those kids wake up in Davis Inlet, nothing has changed. Whether they wake up in the old community or whether they wake up in the new one, it does not matter. The kids look out their windows at the street and they see the broken down snowmobile, the pick-up truck that is not running, or the stray dog. The vista does not change from day to day. It is all the same.
Nothing ever changes. They cannot better themselves because there are no economic opportunities there. There is nothing to make their lives better. Then the young people turn on the TV and they get pictures coming in from Los Angeles, from Toronto, from London, and they ask, “How can those people live like that? Why not us?”
The government spent $152 million to move them from one community to another to improve nothing, to provide no economic opportunities and to provide no hope for those individuals to improve their lives. The money was spent and the government members feel good. They spent money but they got nowhere. They fixed nothing. That is going to happen here. Nothing is going to be fixed.