Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that the Liberal government is taking such an important and fundamental issue so lightly. It has done what my mother would call a real shoddy job.
I will now quote someone who knows a thing or two about this, Perry Bellegarde, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, who said: “I will say, however, that intended efforts to fix the Indian Act are basically doomed to fail. The essence of the Indian Act is a colonial mindset that can only be tossed aside. It is time to embrace and implement the minimum standards of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples because each First Nation is entitled to discuss with the Crown their vision of transition to move beyond the Indian Act.”
Instead of using some kind of patchwork or band-aid solution, should the Liberal government not meet our international obligations and create a statute based on human rights, rather than a completely outdated and antiquated concept like race?