Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to the motion of my fellow colleague, the member for Timmins—James Bay.
I would like to commend Cindy Blackstock for her work on this issue. Her and I have had conversations over the years. We do not necessarily always agree on the method of getting to where we want to go, but I can say definitively that we both share the same ideas of where children in our Canadian society need to be. Once again, I commend her for her work on this and look forward to continuing to work with her to bring forward the change she is advocating for and doing a tremendous job on as well.
I would also like to thank the member for Timmins—James Bay for his tireless work on this issue. I sit on the northern and aboriginal affairs committee with him. The wealth of knowledge he brings to the table is incredible. His passion is unparalleled. While we do not necessarily always agree on the method of getting to the goal we both share, we do work hard together to ensure we do make progress on these issues.
The actions in his motion were brought to us by the Human Rights Tribunal. In the motion, the first thing he says is that we need to immediately start investing the $155 million in the delivery of child welfare, as identified by Cindy Blackstock.
Interestingly, in the government's first 100 days, it committed to spending $4.3 billion outside Canada. However, we could have taken some of that $4.3 billion and spent it here.
As my colleague before me stated, typically, we are not in the business of saving money. The government should spend money on things. In this case, we could have moved that money away from, perhaps, vanity projects outside the country to projects inside the country, on the people for whom it could make the greatest difference.
Typically, aboriginal children who are dealing with the health care system as it is, in all its patchwork across the country, are some of the low-hanging fruit. We would get good value for our dollars spent in this area. We could make a significant change.
It is interesting to see the government spend billions of dollars outside of the country when we have significant problems at home.
The government said that it was making historic investments. The term “historic investments” is somewhat a hazy term. When I hear that, I think it is making unprecedented investments or investments that are larger than ever before. However, perhaps what the Liberals meant by “historic” was that they were making investments similar to Paul Martin or Jean Chrétien. It is part of a game the government likes to play. It uses euphemisms that people think mean one thing, but then the government says that it did not mean it, that it means something else.
It did the same thing with respect to Canada Post. The government said that it had put a moratorium on community mailboxes. People took that to mean they would get their door-to-door delivery reinstated. When people asked about the door-to-door delivery coming back, the government said that it would not be coming back, that it meant that no further community mailboxes would be built.
That is another part of the game that is being played here. The government says it is making historic investments, and we all thought it was going to make larger investments than ever before. I will mention a specific project. The water project, for example, involved bringing potable water to all first nations homes. Our previous government had committed $400 million for that project in our last budget. In budget 2016, the Liberals only committed $360 million. The investments are historic in the fact that they are going backward. I am not quite sure how that makes any sense.
I would like to think that we made progress. Being the government is hard work. Everybody wants everything immediately. As my colleague said, we can be proud of our record. We did not fix the entire system, but it has been broken for 100 years, and we did make progress. Incrementally, we fixed a number of things.
My colleague who spoke before me mentioned how we brought human rights to first nations, how we brought matrimonial property rights to first nations, how we worked on the water situation, how we began the hard work of overhauling the education system on reserves, and how we worked on the issue of mental health. We made some progress on all of these issues. Yes, it did not happen as fast as we would have liked. We definitely would like to see things progress much further, so that the line between our indigenous people and the rest of Canada, if I may put it that way, would disappear, and we would all be Canadians. Our government made progress on a lot of those things.
The Liberals, on the other hand, make more promises for consultation. It is nice that they say all the right words, but I have not seen any indication that we are making any progress. In some respects we have gone backward a bit by the fact that the minister has said she is not going to enforce the accounting transparency law that we put on the books. That has its own issues, as well, in that we undermine the whole rule of law in Canada when we say we have this law on the books and are not going to enforce it. If the Liberals do not like a certain law then they should repeal it, but we undermine the law when we do that.
One thing that is important for me is education. A lot of the issues we deal with can be helped along this road of progress if we can fix the education system on reserves. One of the ideas that has been brought to my attention is to perhaps go to some sort of voucher system, which would allow parents the choice to lead their children's education. This would take away some of the bureaucratic sluggishness that comes with the current system that we deal with, which is very much a top-down approach. Some sort of voucher system would allow parents to choose which stream of education they would like their children to go into. I was in Clyde River in Nunavut recently. There is a very nice school there that is doing amazing work, but it is having trouble getting all its students in there.
I will be supporting the motion, and I look forward to seeing what the government will do on it. All of us are seized with this issue. This is the children of our nation we are talking about and their health care. I will continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with my colleague from Timmins—James Bay. We have our differences, but we do stand together on our goals for the outcome.