Madam Speaker, I am once again disappointed. The member for Winnipeg South Centre has not been a regular attendee at the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.
Once again, we are getting this line that the B.C. court's granting of an extension was done in such a way that we should have asked for a longer extension and that all of this debate would be moot. There was no certainty at all that an extension was going to be granted. We had no way to predict that. By asking for the extension, which we did, we thought there was a reasonable probability it might be granted. This backward, rear-view look that suggests that we could have asked for a long-term extension is really quite inventive.
There is another thing that I think is being overlooked. There are 230 first nations across the country that now have adopted a membership code. They are free to determine membership in their communities and we are very pleased when that occurs. We are willing to empower that.
I am trying to characterize this in a different way because it is almost like the opposition parties want to paint us as the ones who want to control all of this. We do not want to control all of this. We want to ensure it works properly. We are dealing with an archaic act and fixing it is not a simple exercise. We need to do it in a series of steps.