Mr. Speaker, this is not unlike the Conservative Party's approach to the Gomery inquiry. Every day there is a new bit of information, so those members jump on it.
The Conservatives are not really interested, but we are in this for the long haul. They cannot pull out statistics from one year or another. We all know that it takes time to validate these claims.
I am absolutely amazed that the members of the Conservative Party would suggest that all people need to do is fill in a claim form and send it to Ottawa, where it will just be validated and a cheque will be sent to them. This is the same party that stands up in the House day in and day out looking for accountability and good financial management systems, but on the other hand it says to just send in a claim form.
The problem we have is that a lot of these cases go back many years, so some of the people who allegedly committed these terrible things are not around. The Assembly of First Nations has proposed that we forget all that and just say that the fact a person was at a residential school qualifies the person, period, and we would just pay the person a lump sum. I must say that the government is looking into it, but the problem might be that it is just so exorbitantly expensive. I do not know. The government is working with the Assembly of First Nations on it.
There is another problem I raised at committee, which the others did not really deal with. We know there are many members of the first nations who went to residential schools and had a very positive experience. What are we going to do? Are we going to cut them a cheque as well? Admittedly there might not be tons of these people around, but there are some who speak quite highly of their experience at residential schools.
Rather than doing what the Conservative Party always does, which is just pick out a statistic here and there, I say to stay in this for the long haul, be concerned about the first nations people and listen to the Assembly of First Nations.