Mr. Speaker, I am happy to engage in the debate this evening.
I would like to start by focusing my remarks on the supreme court. I do not doubt for one moment its sincerity. I do not doubt for one moment its character or the integrity of the nine justices who sit on the supreme court, as I do not doubt the integrity and the character of members opposite and of members in other political parties who hold different views than I do on this issue.
I would hope that members opposite would refrain from attacking the character and motives of people in this party every time the Reform Party disagrees with them on a philosophical basis on issues that are so fundamentally important to the future of Canada.
In saying that, I want to focus on the supreme court. Many people and many members in the House look at the Supreme Court of Canada in awe. They somehow see these nine justices as being virtually infallible and that somehow we have to accept anything handed down from the supreme court as being the final word. It is as if these people were anointed or appointed by some higher being, by some deity that is unknown to us.
The fact is that the nine justices on the supreme court were all appointed by partisan prime ministers, either Conservative or Liberal. Over the past 30 or 40 years all the existing justices on the supreme court have received their elevation to the bench in that manner. While I would never want to accuse any of the justices on the supreme court of being partisan, it is important to note that I recognize that they are appointed within a certain milieu, a certain political prevailing philosophy.
For about three decades or more that certain political prevailing philosophy can be characterized in several different ways. We could call it more and more the posture of the politically correct. We could call it progressive enlightened thinking. Or, let me borrow from Thomas Sowell, the great American writer who said in his excellent book The Vision of the Anointed that these people have become enraptured with a certain vision that is predominantly a Liberal left vision. The philosophy of that is so evident in our political, social and academic institutions. It has become progressively more so over the last three or four decades.
We are not saying that these are bad people. We are not saying that their characters are flawed. We are not saying that they ought to be harshly rebuked and criticized for the views they hold. What we do say is that they are fundamentally wrong in their thinking. That is the problem we have with this issue today.
The people who embrace this vision of the anointed, again to borrow from Thomas Sowell, assume their own moral superiority because they are convinced of the rightness of their cause. Therefore, they believe they are somehow morally on a higher plane than anybody else. They believe that anybody who disagrees is not only morally wrong, but is in sin. We can see the evidence of that in the debate in this chamber from time to time.
Also, these people who are ensconced in this vision of the anointed also tend to insulate themselves from the reality of the impacts of their own decisions. They do not want to see the reality of the decisions they make. When they make a decision and feedback comes back to them that somehow something has really gone wrong, they point their fingers at anyone and everyone and any other thing they can possibly dream up rather than seriously examine from an intellectually honest point of view their own positions and decisions to see how they affected the outcomes that they do not really want to see.
I submit that the Supreme Court of Canada is very much caught up in this vision of the anointed. The political institutions of this country, the Liberal Party in particular, are also very much caught up in this vision of the anointed.
What we have is a people who fervently believe that they can right the wrongs of history by ignoring the lessons of history. They do not want to give any regard to history's lessons. They do not want to give regard to basic democratic principles and values. They think they can ignore basic democratic principles and values and that because they are somehow more clever, gifted or more able, they can concoct some kind of new societal arrangement that will be successful while ignoring those principles.
I submit that 10,000 years of human history has proven that cannot be achieved. Without democracy we return to the barbarism that all our ancestors experienced in the past. Regardless of who we are in this House, that is where we came from. We learned that through 10,000 years of recorded human history. We learned from experience. We learned by trial and error and many different kinds of societal arrangements that the best way to arrange our affairs so that we can have peace, harmony, prosperity and human rights is through basic democratic institutions.
The cornerstone or founding principle of democracy is the equality of all people before the law. We cannot have it any other way. We cannot be so smart, egotistical or arrogant as to believe we can somehow rearrange society and give special status and rights to be assigned on whatever basis, blindly ignoring the lessons of history and basic democratic principles and expect that we will have peace and harmony in society.
I submit that the evidence of that is before us today. We have had three or four decades of successive policies emanating from government that have tried to encourage Canadians, aboriginal Canadians in particular, that this somehow can happen and that it somehow can work. Not just in the case of the east coast lobster fishery but right across the country we are seeing more and more evidence that not only does it not work but it is leading to real conflict and disharmony in our society. It is not healthy.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the justices on the supreme court and that they were trying to do the right thing. I question how they could come up with the decision they did when the treaty of 1760 on which they relied to render this decision does not even mention fish.
Clearly what they were trying to do was right the wrongs of history by reading into this treaty things that were not there and trying to create some kind of different societal structure that would in their view be a benefit to the Mi'kmaq people.
As much as there are people in the east coast lobster fishery right now who are being displaced and are hurting financially and will continue to hurt financially until this issue is resolved, the people who will pay the biggest price for this folly before it is all said and done will be the Mi'kmaq people themselves.
I will say it again for anybody in the House who cares to listen. The people who will pay the biggest price before it is all said and done will be the Mi'kmaq people themselves.
Unless the government can demonstrate leadership on this and can break with its failed vision of the past and embrace the genuine basic principles of democracy and encourage our aboriginal brothers and sisters to do the same, we will be in real trouble. We can see it coming everywhere. I take absolutely no pleasure in saying this but it is coming. It can be seen everywhere: the Musqueam in Vancouver, the east coast lobster fishery, in Manitoba and in Northern B.C.
It is coming because we have had this political rhetoric in Canada that has encouraged aboriginal people to go down this path. Think about that for a minute. Talk about encouraging aboriginal people in the wrong direction. I would wager that the sons and daughters of members in this place are not trying to forge a future for themselves in a fishery somewhere. The resource industries in Canada are mature to say the least and some of them are over mature as my colleague from Delta pointed out. Some of these are declining industries.
The future economy in Canada and in the world is in high technology, in transportation and in the global economy. It is not in fish. The people who are in the fishery right now are there because they have a historical attachment to it. They have a history with it and are earning a living right now. I would wager that if we were to ask virtually any of those individuals, were they 18 or 19 and had to make the decision all over again, they would not be going into a fishery. They would be going into something else where they could see a much more sustainable and prosperous future for themselves and their families.
What we are telling all other Canadians is that they should get into the information age and the technological age and think about the future in terms of global trade and global economies. We then turn to the aboriginal people and tell them to think of the future in terms of the fishery and logging, in terms of resource extraction and those industries that are already mature in Canada.
It is only within democratic institutions that the value and worth of the ordinary individual is found. When we get into assigning rights and status on the basis of anything other than individual equality, we end up going backward in time. We end up building walls rather than bridges and we end up creating real conflict in society over time.
The supreme court and the democratic institutions of the country genuinely believe they can achieve what human beings have never been able to achieve in the past 10,000 years. The evidence that they cannot is before us today.
The Marshall decision from the supreme court should be a real wake-up call for everyone who is considering what the Nisga'a agreement means. The treaty I am talking about in this instance is a very thin document. The Nisga'a treaty is 200 pages long with 400 pages of appendices and 50 or so agreements that have yet to be negotiated and do not even fall within the agreement as it exists today. Each one of those conditions is subject to a supreme court decision at some point in the future. Consider what that might mean for our country.
The people who have negotiated these treaties have no idea. When we suggested in the spring that they submit that treaty to the supreme court for a reference so we could find out what the supreme court's view would be on the application of the charter of rights and freedoms and what the supreme court's view would be with respect to the constitutionality of that agreement, those people were so arrogant and so sure of themselves, again assuming their own moral superiority, that they looked at us, tried to mischaracterize what we were saying and ignored the warnings we were trying to give them.
We have been trying to give these warnings for six years in this place. We have been trying for six years to say, “hold on, we think you'd better think this through again. You'd better take another look at it”. It is not because we question their character, not because we question their motives, not because we think they are bad people, because we do not, but because we know they are fundamentally wrong.
I would argue that the empirical evidence supports us. The empirical evidence supports exactly what the Reform Party of Canada has been saying since its inception. When we break away from the equality of all Canadians, when we start assigning special status or special rights or special access to resources, when we start assigning different rights to people on any basis, we have a recipe for disaster. We have a recipe for disaster on the east coast of Canada right now.
I do not know what the answer is but I do know how we got here. I know the government needs to take leadership. It needs to demonstrate that it has the ability to lead and to govern for peace, order and good government which it fails to do. It routinely allows decisions to be made by the supreme court so it can duck the responsibility and the potential follow up for making those decisions itself. That is why we are in the predicament we are in today.
I submit that there are people in the federal government and the justice department who are constitutional and legal experts. There has to be ways of dealing with this issue that will be fair, affordable and lead to a resolve of the issue.
The very first responsibility of this government or any federal government has to be to reach out to those aboriginal people who are caught betwixt and between and tell them that their existence with special status has never been of any benefit to them at all. We need to rethink the relationship between the aboriginal people and the Government of Canada and the rest of Canada. Obviously the existing relationship has not worked to the benefit of aboriginal people and has not worked to the benefit of Canada.
It is time that we broke from the failed thinking and failed policies of the past and came up with some new ideas, some new visions and some new ways to move forward. If we do not do that, I fear that we are in for more conflict, more unrest and more of these kinds of events that have been occurring on the east coast of Canada. I do believe that there is a potential for that if this government does not demonstrate that it has the ability to lead and the ability to change its thinking on these fundamental issues.
