moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for honouring our request to have this very important debate tonight to address the government's lacklustre response to the crisis that is taking place in Mi'kmaq territory.
As parliamentarians we must take immediate action to keep Mi'kmaq fishers and their communities safe from the ongoing threats and acts of violence that are happening there. We must ensure the federal government is taking immediate action to provide justice for the Mi'kmaq victims of violence.
We need to make sure that they can adequately and properly exercise their inherent, treaty-protected, constitutionally protected right to safely go out, fish and earn a moderate living. Lastly, we must make sure the government is at the table, providing enough resources to accommodate their right to fish for a moderate living, as they should have 21 years ago. Given the urgency for a peaceful and equitable resolution to this crisis, I believe it is important that we have this emergency debate in Parliament today.
I want to talk about why it is so important. The Mi'kmaq fishers have established a fishery beyond millennia in Nova Scotia. As we know, their treaty rights in the 1752 treaties of peace and friendship were confirmed again by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Marshall case of 1999. The federal government has had over 21 years to accommodate and negotiate the definition of a “moderate livelihood” with the Mi'kmaq people, a definition that was confirmed but not defined in the Marshall decision.
It was not the first or only time the highest court in the land reaffirmed the constitutional rights of aboriginal people to catch and sell fish in their territories. Whether it be the Marshall decision, the Sparrow decision, the Gladstone decision or the Ahousaht et al. decision, these are all rulings by the court reaffirming indigenous rights that were followed by years of utter disregard by the federal government of the day.
We talk about the treaty rights of the Mi'kmaq and their implementation. They are out there right now fishing to feed their families, to earn a moderate living with less than 1% of the traps and the crab pots out in St. Marys Bay. We know that the response has been acts of domestic terrorism and intimidation against the Mi'kmaq fishers, who are just exercising their inherent treaty right to fish.
In spite of domestic acts of terrorism, which included burning down a Mi'kmaq lobster fishery compound, there has been little response or action by the RCMP to protect Mi'kmaq fishers and their communities from further domestic terrorism. We have seen the assaults on Chief Sack. We have seen elders being abused.
It is horrific for us as Canadians to watch what is happening. We have been waiting for the federal government to uphold the rule of law with appropriate actions to protect this constitutionally protected, inherent treaty right of the Mi'kmaq people to fish, but instead—