Mr. Speaker, that is a very interesting question about whether the Indian Act should stay or not. I will give two answers to it.
First, last week we had an interesting speaker in the parliamentary restaurant, a professor from the University of Ottawa, and I asked her specifically about the Indian Act. She said that there were a lot of bad things in it but that there also were a lot of dependencies, that it was a government department that actually came through with certain items for first nations and that it was their contact in government. She had sort of a mixed view. The point is that it would be a very complex task but it should be looked at.
The second answer relates to the land claims that we have had in Yukon. Once one has been through a modern treaty, a land claim and a self-government agreement, the Indian Act no longer applies. My personal opinion is that the evidence of that is like night and day as to the results of the success stories. I used to go around to these first nations bands and find a cabin, may or may not find a shack and may or may not find a band administrator and that was about it.
Now that those bands have self-government agreements and land claims, they have modernized buildings, a modernized bureaucracy and they are delivering their own programs. All governments are receiving less complaints about the programs because they are being delivered right there in their villages. Many of their people are no longer unemployed because they are the bureaucrats delivering the programs to their own people.
It is a long road but it is like night and day and a great success story, which is the reason I say we should get on with comprehensive claims with all the first nations that would like to do it.