Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today to Bill C-11 and the amendments that have been brought forward by members of the official opposition.
By way of preamble to what I have to say and for the benefit of those who may be listening in the gallery or perhaps on television to the debate in the House of Commons, I would like to state where I as a person am in this whole thing.
Over the last 25 years my wife and I have been foster parents. We have actually been foster parents for 32 years but 25 years ago we brought into our house a native child. He is almost 25 years old now and he is on his own. He is working his way through a degree at a college and is a very fine young man. He is part of the first nations community on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
After that we fostered a number of other children, among them a number of native children. We now have three native children in our family. One is a 19 year old daughter who is part of the Blood Tribe from southern Alberta and another is a 17 year old daughter who is part of the Siksika nation from around Gleichen in Alberta.
Because of our involvement with first nations children, we were drawn into involvement with the wider aboriginal community in Canada and have continued over the years to keep very current on what was happening with our aboriginal brothers and sisters across the country.
At the present time, after 32 years of fostering, we have a three year old native child who has been in our home since she was six months old.
I am also the member of Parliament for Nanaimo—Cowichan. Because of that role, I have sometimes struggled with the native and non-native communities as they try to come to agreement over the treaty process that is in place in British Columbia. We have the Snuneymuxw First Nation in my riding that is attempting to hammer out an urban agreement with surrounding neighbours in the Nanaimo area.
For a year and a half I was the senior critic for Indian affairs for my party and in that role I touched base with a lot of native people across Canada. Before that, I had been part of accountability groups that had sprung up across the country where native people were coming with their concerns about what was happening on reserve. I do not come to this in a vacuum. I come to it with a lot of heartfelt tugs because of my native children and I come to it with some pretty practical observations of what I have seen happen on reserves and with our native population across Canada.
Then we come to a treaty like this, the third major treaty that will be struck in British Columbia since the 1870s when we only had the Douglas treaties on Vancouver Island. How do we balance the need to free up our aboriginal people to manage their own concerns in a way that brings economic prosperity and stability to them and which helps to bring them into the mainstream of Canadian life in some kind of equality? I am not talking about assimilation. That is something that will or will not take place depending upon people's individual choices.
However, how do we get over the hurdles that are in our native communities where in some native communities in my riding there is 80% to 85% unemployment? When I walk down the street of one of the major shopping areas in my riding I see many native children, teenagers, young adults simply lounging around on the streets with an aimless look in their eyes because they have no hope for the future. They have been hit by some of the social problems that invade native communities and non-native communities as well. I think of alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome which, incidentally, is troubling two of our children. We know the effects of that and what parents go through. We know the pain that it brings to people's lives.
How do we get rid of those problems for our native people, let alone the non-native population? We have to do something. We have to move forward with our native brothers and sisters so they can start taking control of their own destiny and not have it in the hands of government all the time.
I come to an agreement like this and I am torn. I see within the agreement steps that can be taken to move aboriginal people forward in terms of economic prosperity, where they can take charge of the economy and create jobs for their people to get them out of this cycle of social welfare dependency. Yes, that is what we need to see take place on reserves. We need to see that take place for urban aboriginals who often are a forgotten people within the whole context of the native situation in Canada.
At the same time, in this particular agreement, we do have some problems, and they are not just problems for the Westbank or for the city of Kelowna. They are problems for the whole of Canada as we move forward with trying to bring a resolution to the treaty process and to bring prosperity to aboriginal communities.
Therefore we have proposed some amendments to the bill today that would, for instance, remove references to inherent right of self-government, which I know we talk a lot about but which has never been settled as to what it means. We do not really know what that means.
In all its years of negotiating with native people, the government has never been able to come up with a real definition that would help move this across the country so we would not have this kind of uncertainty at the end of the treaty process.
It does bring uncertainty. It is bringing uncertainty into the Snuneymuxw agreement that is being hammered out in the Nanaimo area where it is just natural that non-native people wonder what will happen to lands that may be available under fee simple purchase in the centre of Nanaimo or the centre of Gabriola Island. Unless these things are very carefully hammered out and there are good applications of both law and justice in this process, we will have lingering festering problems after treaties are struck for a long time.
There is a need for certainty, transparency and for clarification around some of these issues so that we can truly go forward together.
I do not think we should be rushing into things that would cause us more problems in the future than they have in the past. If, at this point in our history, we are here debating this simply because there is an election coming and it has to be rushed through to be put up on the Liberals' trophy wall some place as another accomplishment, then that is wrong.
I want this treaty to go forward. I want native people to have economic prosperity but I want all of us as Canadians to have equality and justice before the law and before each other.