Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the motion.
Unfortunately the motion has been amended because the government does not want to deal with this issue in the House. The Liberals have done everything they could to try to stop the motion from getting here. An amendment has now been introduced to send this back to committee so the government will never have to deal with it again. Once it gets back to committee, the Liberal members on the committee will fight tooth and nail to ensure that we never talk about this issue again. The Liberals did not want to talk about it in the first place. They pulled out every stop they could think of to try to stop it from ever being discussed.
I can imagine the reaction of Liberal members of the committee if the amendment recommending to hear further witnesses passes. I can just imagine the reaction of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, who was infuriated that we had one extra day of witnesses. I am sure she would be thrilled to hear that her colleagues are pushing for more witnesses at committee so they do not have to deal with it here in the House.
The motion is to concur in a report which came forward from the aboriginal affairs and northern development committee. We held three days of hearings on this issue.
This issue is incredibly important in my constituency. I represent the riding of Desnethé--Missinippi--Churchill which is in northern Saskatchewan. It is a huge area, approximately 58% of the province. My riding has 108 reserves, the most of any riding in the country. I probably represent if not the most, then close to the most, aboriginal people of any member of Parliament.
Many of my constituents attended residential schools. Many of them contacted me throughout the course of our committee hearings. They contacted me not to say we should send this back to committee for further hearings. They contacted me to thank the Conservative Party, the Bloc and the NDP for their support in bringing this to the House and for their support of the original motion in committee. Those people are very thankful that somebody is paying attention to the issue. They are very thankful that somebody is pointing out the disgrace of this program.
There are two major themes which are problematic with the ADR. They centre around the lack of efficiency, both financial and administrative, and the government's claims that this is a humane and holistic program. All the evidence that we saw in committee and all the evidence I have seen in my riding would prove otherwise.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Emergency Preparedness talked about some people having positive experiences at residential schools. To be very blunt, I have not heard that from one single person in my constituency. There may be some, but I have not seen any evidence of people having had positive experiences at residential schools.
Let us look at the whole concept of residential schools for aboriginals. The government literally grabbed young children from their families, incarcerated them in a school from the time they were five years old until they were 17 or 18 years of age. Not only that, but the parents lost legal guardianship over their own children. Legal guardianship passed to the Government of Canada. These children became wards of the state despite the fact they had loving families who were more than willing to raise them in their own homes. This was an abysmal program and the ADR is doing nothing to rectify it.
From an efficiency point of view, at least $275 million has been spent on the alternative dispute resolution program. Less than $1 million of that $275 million have actually gone to compensating victims, which is about .35% that has gone to administration and overhead. This program makes the gun registry look like a paragon of efficiency.
Approximately 87,000 or so of the individuals who attended residential schools are still with us. Of those 87,000, less than 1,200 individuals, or 1.5%, have actually applied to go through the ADR and, of the 1,200 who have actually applied, less than 100 have actually been settled. The program has been running now for over a year and a half. At this rate it could literally be hundreds of years before these claims are all resolved, which obviously will not happen because the survivors of residential schools are passing away at a very rapid rate. By some estimates, 50 survivors a week are passing away without ever having been compensated and, quite frankly, without having any rectification or apology for what happened to them.
Let us look at this application process. The application itself is a form that is very thick. It is 60-plus pages long. The guide is even longer than the form. I have three university degrees, including a law degree, and after going through the form I would have needed somebody to help me fill it out. I cannot imagine how somebody from a northern reserve with little formal education and English as a second language, if spoken at all, could fill these things out. The process itself is so daunting for people. I think that is reflected in the fact that only 1,200 people have actually filled these out.
I will go back to the forms for a second because I want to make one point. The government has actually had to hire government employees, or what we call Orwellian form fillers, to help people fill out these forms. We have heard horror stories about these form fillers not actually putting forward what these individuals have suffered.
We also have a system where the government has actually hired private investigators to look into the claims of individuals who have brought forward complaints through this incredibly complex process. The government is spending $5 million more, not to compensate these people but to investigate whether what they are saying is actually true and to try to track down the individuals in question who it claims may not have actually been involved in these things, most of whom have been dead for decades.
The priorities of the government and the priorities involved in this program are so skewed that it can only be rectified by scrapping this program and coming up with something that will actually work. We have put forward something that will actually work. We put forward eight points, which were supported in committee by all three opposition parties, and obviously fought tooth and nail by the government, the centrepiece of which is to get rid of the ADR process and put in place a court supervised process with negotiations to have court approved and enforced settlement compensation for survivors of residential schools.
I think that is the direction in which we have to go. The direction in which the government is going is leading us and the survivors nowhere.