Mike Scott

[Mi'Kmaq Education Act, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak against the motions put forward by the Bloc Quebecois, and the reason that I will be speaking against these motions is because they fundamentally do not change the principle of the bill. It is the principle of the bill which the Reform Party has great difficulty with.

Behind the principle of the bill is the notion that aboriginal or other people require separate, exclusionary education in order to be successful in life. When the federal government brings forward legislation like this, what is the government saying? Is it saying that the Mi'kmaq children cannot obtain a proper education in the public school system? If that is what it is saying, then indeed we are all in trouble because the public school system is the system that provides an education for most Canadian children. If that system is failing in any way, we had better know about it and we had better deal with it right now for the good of the future of our nation.

I know that the public school system certainly has its shortcomings, but if the education system is by and large delivering a product that is acceptable in terms of the success rate of students going through the system, then why indeed look at a separate, exclusionary educational system for Mi'kmaq children?

I submit that the entire philosophical foundation upon which this bill is formulated is wrong. It is divisive and it presupposes that Canadians cannot work together, be educated together and coexist in an environment of peaceful co-operation. It presupposes that we have to divide ourselves and further divide ourselves as Canadians into groups and subgroups in order to get ahead. I submit that is a very wrongheaded and in the long run a very divisive and indeed destructive philosophy.

I am perhaps most disturbed, though, by the aspect of this initiative which I call the potential for a misapplication of scarce public funds. Scarce public funds refers to that great pot of money that the finance minister collects every year from Canadians, the taxpayers' contributions to the federation. The idea is that the federal government has unlimited money to put into education or into anything. Of course we have all come to understand differently over the last few years that government resources are limited and indeed we have found out just how limited because we have been living well beyond our means for so long that it has caught up to us and virtually every Canadian is feeling the pinch. We have very limited resources to be applying toward education.

I will give the House some facts. They come right from the department of Indian affairs, lest anyone think I am making them up. The department gave us a briefing a few short months ago to advise us of what a wonderful job it was doing in managing the affairs of aboriginal people in Canada. Officials of the department talked about this wonderful educational budget they have and the fact that it was being used to provide an education service in aboriginal communities across Canada.

In most non-aboriginal communities the cost of educating one child per year in the elementary and secondary school systems is about $7,000. It varies by province and it varies by region, but in general we can take that number as a fairly safe estimate of what it costs to educate one Canadian child in the regular public school system on an annual basis.

The records of the department of Indian affairs show that it is spending approximately $20,000, which is about three times as much for every aboriginal child in the separate aboriginal school system. I and many would argue that the success rate of this separate educational system is far from sterling. It is very obvious when more aboriginal youth in this country go to jail than to university that something is wrong. It is very obvious when the proportion of aboriginal youth who actually finish grade 12 is far less than it is in the non-aboriginal population that something is really wrong.

I could not for the life of me understand how so much money could be going into a system when the results coming out at the other end were so dismal.

I had the occasion a few years ago to visit a small school on a rural countryside reserve in British Columbia. I want to tell all members what I found there. I was invited by the then chief and one of the counsellors. They were quite proud of this school, and rightly so. It was a beautiful building. It was new and I could understand their sense of pride.

The building was virtually new. I do not know what the cost of it was, but I would venture to guess it was well over $1 million. It was for a group of 11 children. The reason for that is that most of the parents of the children in that community had already voted with their feet and had sent their children to the regular public school system because they felt their children had a much better chance of getting a good education in the regular school system than they did in this special aboriginal only school system.

Let me tell the House what else I found. For these 11 children there were two teachers, full time I presume, and a clerk working behind the desk who greeted visitors and who, I assume, did other clerical duties. So there were three full time, paid staff. On top of that there was a school board comprised of eight school board members, all receiving an annual remuneration for being school board members. There was also a chairman of the board who, I assume, received remuneration for being a school board member as well as chairman.

This was an extremely expensive school and school board set up for the benefit of educating 11 children of various ages. One could imagine how difficult it might have been for the teachers in that environment to focus on the children properly when the range in ages was so great. This is an absolute fact. This exists today in British Columbia.

If we find this in one circumstance and we look at the department of Indian affairs' own numbers and see that it is spending three times as much on aboriginal children's education as the regular public school system is spending, the results speak for themselves in terms of the attainment of those students. Something is horribly wrong with the picture.

I would submit and the Reform Party would submit that we are not going to address the problem by measures such as those which are in the bill before us. For that very reason we cannot support the philosophical underpinnings of this bill or the cost of it. The fact is that the whole concept of aboriginal only, exclusionary education has not succeeded in delivering a product. For all these reasons we cannot support this bill and we cannot support the amendments because they do not change the principle of the bill. I am thankful for the opportunity to present my views on this bill and I look forward to hearing what other members have to say.

[British Columbia, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the minister ignores the facts.

Seven years and they have not produced one agreement in British Columbia. At that rate it will take decades, even centuries, to resolve all of them.

In the meantime land claims past, present and future are all affected by the Delgamuukw decision: logging in New Brunswick, land claims in Ontario, mining in Labrador, ranching in Alberta, forestry in British Columbia and power plants in Quebec.

Why does the minister not legislate a workable and fair definition of the term aboriginal title?

[British Columbia, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, six months and the best the minister can say is that we are to continue to follow a failed policy that has produced no results whatsoever.

British Columbia jobs are in jeopardy because of the government's inaction following the Delgamuukw decision. The province is in recession and agriculture, forestry and mining investment are in decline. The citizens of B.C. need and want jobs now and not another study.

What will the minister of Indian affairs do to guarantee B.C. companies that their investments are secure?

[Nunavut Act, June 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, as I said in my intervention, Nunavut has a population of approximately 25,000 people. The riding I represent has approximately three and a half times that population. If a plebiscite were held in my riding that asked the people if they would like $900 million of federal government assistance to create a new territory, I would venture to say they would probably vote for it. What about the people who have to pay the bill? That is the crux of the issue.

Going to the grassroots in terms of aboriginal people we are talking about going to people in reserve communities and asking how we can introduce democratic and fiscal accountability into these communities. Lord knows we are certainly hearing from enough grassroots people telling us that it does not exist right now. That is the crux of the issue when it comes to plebiscites or talking with the grassroots.

The member cannot suggest in any kind of rational way that because she has the endorsement of 25,000 people who live in Nunavut she has the right to reach into the wallets of taxpayers of Halifax, Vancouver, Toronto and Prince George to take $300 million to pay for it. That does not add up. I go back to the hon. member with that by saying it is a non-starter. She cannot do that.

[Nunavut Act, June 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question. The member is being honest in his question. He honestly believes in what he is putting forward, which is unlike the Liberals. They do not honestly believe most of what they say. We know that. They come in the House with these canned speeches and read them off. Half the time they do not even know what they are saying.

This member asks an honest question and I will try to give him an honest answer. He talks about the fact that there are different regions in the country with different representation right now. I think we would all agree, perhaps everybody except the Prime Minister and a handful of his closest friends over there, that the Senate has no legitimacy whatsoever right now, none whatsoever.

It is nothing more than patronage heaven for good little Liberals who have done what the prime minister wanted them to do over a long period of time. It is like going to heaven for them. It is exactly like going to heaven. That is the only way I can describe it. It has no legitimacy whatsoever.

However it is precisely because of the regional concerns of Atlantic Canada, for example Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island. It is precisely because of the concerns of provinces like British Columbia and Alberta that do not want to be overridden. If we could imagine a triple-E Senate being in place at the time the Liberal government implemented the national energy program in the late seventies, it probably would not have gone forward. We do not know because we do not have the benefit of seeing history repeat itself with changed circumstances. The reality is that if there were a triple-E Senate in place when that policy of the Liberals was put in place, it is very likely it would not have gone anywhere.

This is the type of example I can offer of why we should not abolish the Senate. Abolishing the Senate has an appeal to it. I agree we should get rid of it. We are not supposed to talk about the other place, but it represents the most despicable part of Canadian policies and nothing more. It could be much more. How will it get there? It will be when Canadians decide it is time.

We are coming to that point right now. Canadians are coming to the conclusion that we need fundamental changes to our democratic institutions. It is no accident that Reform sent 60 MPs here after the 1997 election. It is not just because people like the name. It is because they like the principles upon which the party is founded. One of the four pillars is democratic institutions being reformed.

I suggest to the member that if the NDP, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party are not on that wavelength, if they will not tell Canadians that they are in the House of Commons to fight for democratic reform, at some point sooner of later, and I believe it is will be sooner, Canadians will give political parties that espouse changes the authority to make them in a general election. That is coming.

The member asks how. I ask him to stay tuned and he will see it happen.

[Nunavut Act, June 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, following up on the intervention of my hon. colleague and friend from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, I was not going to talk a lot about Senate reform, because I know that we have covered that off very well already. But in response to the questions that my hon. friend from the New Democratic Party asked, I would say that scrapping the Senate is the easy way out.

The reason that polls show Canadians are in favour of abolishing the Senate is that they feel so frustrated and so angry over a Prime Minister who is only too willing to use the Senate for his own political partisan purposes, much as we had previously with other prime ministers, including the one immediately preceding this one. Canadians are really sick to death of this. I can understand that frustration. I can understand why the polls would indicate that they would just as soon see it abolished as have the ridiculous situation that we have right now which has no legitimacy whatsoever.

I would argue with my hon. friend and I would take this to Canadians and engage in a national debate that if we abolish the Senate, we lose any opportunity in the future for having the Senate provide a sense of regional balance and fairness within this great country of ours where we have a democracy which reflects representation by population. This is an opportunity to have representation by region as a control mechanism or as an overriding safety feature to ensure that the interests of the regions are not overridden by the provinces with large populations, particularly those in central Canada.

It is very important that we engage Canadians in this debate. Yes, at the end of the day we will follow the wishes of the country, but if it were laid out for them and if it were done properly, I am convinced that Canadians would support it.

I thought that was really worth dealing with prior to getting into the substance of my remarks.

A member of the Progressive Conservative Party made a remark during the course of debate. I know it was not on camera and it was not on the microphone, but he was quite right, and the member is still sitting here. He said that this bill and the whole creation of Nunavut is not about creating a new territory, it is about creating a new province. The member understands that well. I certainly understand it well. And there are certainly some legal and constitutional experts out there across the land who understand it.

That is one of the main concerns and one of the main objections I have to this bill and to the bills that preceded it which gave rise to the territory of Nunavut. In effect it does create a new province in everything but name.

Mr. Speaker, you would know I am sure that it is not proper, it is not right and it is not legal for the federal government to create a new province or for this country to see a new province created without provincial consent. That is right in the constitution. A new province has been created in everything but name, and it has been done in a very underhanded and deceitful manner.

The original bill which gave rise to the creation of Nunavut back in the early 1990s was passed through the House. Did it take a week? Did it take three days? No. It passed first reading, second reading, report stage, and third reading in one day. Only one lone dissenting voice voted against this bill and that was Reform's member for Beaver River. Other than that, it went through the House as fast as any bill has ever gone through the House from beginning to end.

Let us consider for a moment what this bill does. I am sure my hon. friend from the Progressive Conservative Party would be interested. I hope he is listening.

This bill creates a new province or pseudo province as it does not use the term province. It does so at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer to the tune of $300 million. That is the cost of implementation, or at least that is the budgeted or projected cost. By the time the Liberal government gets done with it who knows what it is really going to cost because as we all know that is the way things work around here.

There was a tax program that was going to be the program to end all programs. Mr. Speaker, I am sure you were in the House when the former Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Mr. Tobin, introduced it. It was a program to end all programs for the east coast, $1.9 billion. This is it, it will never happen again. Where are we now? We are looking at TAGS two. Just a little aside to remind everybody that the government continues to budget money for programs and then down the road it goes way over the cost. It is likely to happen here as well.

There is $300 million to implement Nunavut. It is a fairly large area but how many people are we talking about, half a million people, or 200,000 people? No, we are talking about a population of 25,000, including children, people below the age of majority. There are hundreds of communities across this land and hundreds of communities in Ontario that have more population than what Nunavut is going to have once it is created.

Can you get any more ridiculous than that. Can you get any more ridiculous than to spend $300 million creating a territory that is going to have a population of 25,000? It is going to create a legislature. It is going to have all the trappings of a territorial government. It is going to have its own environment building, its own fisheries department and its own department of Indian affairs. All those buildings are going to be somewhere, probably in Yellowknife. Who knows where it is going to be, but for sure it is going to have all trappings of this federal government somewhere in the new territory of Nunavut. The long suffering Canadian taxpayer is going to enjoy the right to pay for this politically correct nonsense in perpetuity because in perpetuity it will last.

The amount of $300 million for 25,000 people would be a real knee slapper if it were not so serious, if it was not creating a new province through the back door in such a deceitful manner. It is such an affront to the Canadian taxpayers who are going to be asked to put out hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars over time to pay for this.

It has to be assumed that these are somewhat intelligent people in the government, but why would they create this territory at such a huge expense? Why have they done it?

The only conclusion I can come to is it is nothing more than a bandage, a poorly considered politically correct response to the massive failure of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. That is really what this is.

That department has had a demonstrated track record of failure for over three decades. Year over year there are increases in unemployment. Year over year there are increases in dependency. There are increasing rates of social pathologies on reserves across this country where the infant mortality rate is double the national rate, where suicide is seven to eight times higher than it is in non-aboriginal communities, where more aboriginal youth go to jail than go to university.

The government in its politically correct scramble to try to find a way of obfuscating and hiding its own failure is creating Nunavut as a politically correct response. It says this is the way of the future for people in the Northwest Territories.

What we are seeing here is a bureaucracy that is in the process of swallowing itself whole. Frankly, I think the Canadian public, largely as a result of work that the official opposition has done over the last few months but even before that, has common sense and is slowly coming to the conclusion that the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development is a fraud of enormous size.

I think Canadians are understanding that more than $6.2 billion goes into the top end of this department yet few benefits trickle out the bottom end to grassroots people living on reserves.

I think the Canadian public is beginning to understand that the department of Indian affairs is not much interested in accountability within its own organization as the auditor general has continued to point out year in and year out for decades. This department has no interest in the truth. It is a department which has no interest in looking at the real problems of aboriginal people and trying to find constructive ways of dealing with those problems.

It is the simple things. We live in a country that recognizes, albeit with a whole long list of Liberal governments in a very muted way, private property rights. Our Liberal forebear Mr. Trudeau did not have the courage to put it in the constitution. It is not in the charter of rights and freedoms although everything else is in there. No private property rights are in there.

We do have as a foundation to our economy the notion of private property rights. Way, way back when Mr. Diefenbaker was prime minister it was put into law. We do follow that in most areas of the country.

There is not the right to private property on reserves. That is a huge impediment for aboriginal people. They cannot mortgage their property. They do not own their property. They do not own their own house.

If a family breaks up, there is no process like there is in non-aboriginal society for courts to determine who is going to have custody of the family home and so on. That does not happen in aboriginal communities.

A person cannot open a grocery store or a corner store. They cannot open a gas station on an aboriginal reserve and arrange the capital at a bank because they will be laughed at. The bank will not lend them money against a piece of property that they do not own. It is ridiculous.

In response to the historical and contemporary failure of the department of Indian affairs, the government comes up with these kinds of absolutely ridiculous ideas regarding how to deal with the problem.

We are parliamentarians. We are supposed to be able to come here on behalf of the constituencies we represent and we are supposed to have access to information.

I have a simple question. How much money has the federal government spent in the Northwest Territories over the last decade? I would like to know the answer to that.

I would like to know how the federal government would defend that expenditure against the population in the Northwest Territories. I would like to see that expenditure per person applied to all of Canada in a theoretical sense to see what kind of expenditure the federal government would be engaged in if it expended money on the same basis for all Canadians. I am sure it would be a sum all the countries in the world could not afford, let alone poor little Canada with a population of 30 million.

The whole idea is crazy beyond any words I could use. It is just ridiculous to spend $300 million to create a territory with a territorial government, its own legislature and its own non-elected senator for a population of 25,000 people.

It is one more opportunity for a partisan prime minister to reward his Liberal friends as he is wont to do and as we have seen recently with the appointment of the Liberal senator in British Columbia who just happens to be a long time crony, former business associate and a good Liberal recognized by everyone in British Columbia. It is another opportunity for the Prime Minister to do the same thing in Nunavut.

We in the Reform Party would like to see a little more sense and a more rational approach to the expenditures of federal funds, of taxpayers' money. We would like to see more careful husbandry of scarce resources.

The government says it cannot find the money to compensate hepatitis C victims. Yet it finds money to award contracts in the amount of $2.8 billion to its friends in Bombardier. This is the kind of nonsense that drives Canadians to distraction and has driven the Reform Party into being. In the last election we sent 60 members to this place.

I tell those people across the way as I told them in the last parliament that they should look out. Their day is coming. Canadians have had enough of this nonsense. The $300 million for 25,000 people because it is politically correct and it is such a do good, feel good kind of thing are coming from Canadian taxpayers. They are paying attention. They are catching on and the Liberals' days are numbered.

[Parks Canada Act, June 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my hon. friend, since we seem to have a lot of wildlife in the House and certainly an endangered species on the other side, some of which are green, and there is certainly a lot of old growth, if maybe this could not be the next park. We already have official bilingualism in the House. Maybe we could confine it here, rather than have it spread to the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and other places where there is absolutely no sense in having it.

[Parks Canada Act, June 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I tell my hon. friend that it is worse than he thought. The reason is that I am convinced the bureaucracy of Parks Canada is staffed and populated with radical environmentalists.

These people in essence are anti-human. That is why they do not want human beings in these parks. They care more about bugs and slugs than they do about people. That is the reality of it. David Suzuki, a leading light in the environmental movement, posited a few months ago that in order for the world to survive there had to be a mass die off of human beings. We invited him to lead the way but so far he has not taken the challenge.

That is the kind of attitude that pervades the bureaucracy at Parks Canada. It is the kind of attitude that pervades the environmental movement. These are largely far left political operatives who have lost the battle on the main front because communism as we know it is pretty much dead all over the world. They are trying to come through the back door and the environmental movement is a very effective way for them to do that. That is the reality of it.

[Parks Canada Act, June 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I truly appreciate the opportunity to speak in the House today on this bill. I may be coming at this from a slightly different perspective than even some of my Reform colleagues, certainly a different perspective from many members of this House, but I come at it from this point of view for a very good reason.

I live in northwest British Columbia. The riding I represent, as members know, is Skeena. As they are probably aware, there has been a significant amount of debate in British Columbia over the whole issue of the creation of parks and so on, to the extent where many people, particularly in rural British Columbia, and I would imagine that it is similar in other rural parts of Canada, are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the whole notion of parks.

I imagine that I am not unlike most Canadians. I grew up with a great sense of pride in Canada's national parks system. We took the care and the foresight to preserve parts of our country in perpetuity. There was only going to be human activity in the sense of viewing the wildlife, camping and so on. There was to be no other human activity in those areas.

When I talk about human activity, I am of course referring to mining and industrial activity. I am referring to towns being created and so on.

The experience in British Columbia has been more and more negative. Let me explain.

The provincial government in British Columbia is committed to turning 12% of the province into parkland. Mr. Speaker, I know you are not from British Columbia, but I also know you have probably had the occasion to fly over the province. On a clear day it is readily available for anybody to see that most of the province is a park by virtue of the fact that our geography makes it impossible for anything to happen on about 40% of the land base in that province. It is glaciers. It is mountain tops. It is inaccessible areas that are rugged and difficult for human beings to access. For all intents and purposes it will be left alone for all times. That is almost half the province.

In its infinite wisdom the NDP government in British Columbia is intent on turning 12% of British Columbia into parkland. Is it talking about glaciers? Is it talking about mountain tops? Is it talking about areas which are already inaccessible? No. To some degree it is talking about the areas that will never be used by human beings anyway, but for the most part it is talking about the valley bottoms, the forest land and the land base that is productive or potentially productive. I have a great deal of difficulty with that.

For example, we are so wealthy as a province that we can afford to leave $10 billion worth of copper cobalt in the ground in Tulsequah to preserve it as a world heritage site, whatever that means, for all times and to forgo the economic prosperity and wealth creation that would have resulted from that mine development.

It is estimated by the business community in British Columbia that it would have resulted in about 2,000 full time, high paying jobs. We are talking about $25 an hour jobs on the ground at the mine site and with the standard multiplier effect probably another 4,000 jobs in the province in businesses and industries to support the mining industry. Those are gone.

CBC and CTV cannot go around with television cameras and their microphones to interview people who lost their jobs because nobody lost their jobs. It was not like Cassiar, a mining town that closed down in my riding. It had been there for a long time and the pain and suffering caused by this ridiculous decision could actually be seen. No. Those people cannot be interviewed because we do not know who they would have been, but we know for sure that those jobs would have been there. They are lost for all time.

I have another example to give, Moresby Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Back in the mid-eighties there was a lot of controversy concerning logging on South Moresby. We had the likes of the Sierra Foundation, the Earth First people, every environmental organization possible, along with significant parts of the aboriginal population decrying logging on South Moresby.

David Suzuki made a film about logging on South Moresby in which he showed his concern that the black bears may actually be forced off Lyell Island. Then it was pointed out to him that black bears did not live on Lyell Island and he had a difficult time explaining how he could have taken film footage and pawned it off on Canadians as representative of Lyell Island when in fact it was not the case. It was a blatant lie.

That is the kind of thing the environmental movement engages in all the time. It engages in lies and mistruths, scaremongering tactics, trying to convince Canadians that the sky is falling. It has been largely successful, particularly in large metropolitan areas of the country.

In any even the environmental movement persuaded both the provincial and federal governments to suspend all logging on South Moresby and to create a new national park. Is this going to be a wonderful thing? Is this going to be great? I hope there are people in Sandspit today watching this debate on television because I know how important the issue is for them.

This small but vibrant logging community that had existed for several decades was all but obliterated by this decision. The politicians of the day said that the economic focus for Sandspit and South Moresby would change from logging into tourism. What a joke. What a laugh.

We can go to Sandspit and ask the people there how much tourism they get. Parks Canada employees have built themselves a little fiefdom there at taxpayers' expense. They have a beautiful lodge. It is the only structure that is allowed within the park because it belongs to Parks Canada. Parks Canada employees are on what I liken to a year round vacation at taxpayers' expense. The only thing they do is limit the people that go into this so-called park.

They have made it difficult for anybody to access the park. They have a waiting list. They only allow 2,000 people a year or thereabouts into the park. One has to phone ahead to make a reservation a year in advance as if going to some high class hotel. I can see the parallel. One has to be a very wealthy person to afford the terms and conditions that Parks Canada has placed on anybody going into that park.

That is why I have a difficult time listening to the government talking about bringing in legislation to create new parks. I like the idea of conserving parts of our land basin for future generations and leaving it untouched. However I do not like the idea of creating little fiefdoms for Parks Canada bureaucrats to go around telling Canadians what they can and cannot do and to have my taxpayer's dollars and the hard earned taxpayers' dollars of other Canadians spent on building grand lodges, flying around on float planes and doing all the things most of us can only dream of doing. We would like to be able to enjoy the wilderness like Parks Canada people can.

That is why I have a difficult time supporting the legislation. That is why the people in my riding, the people in my province, have a difficult time with the whole notion of parks. It is not because we do not want to see a part of our heritage preserved and protected for our children and their children, for future generations. It is just that we are becoming increasingly sceptical and doubtful that it will happen under the guise of Parks Canada.

We see it as another giant boondoggle of the federal government consuming huge amounts of federal taxpayers' money and delivering no tangible benefits to the people of Canada and, more important, to the people in the residual communities where they are so much affected by Parks Canada dictates of the day.

I am looking forward to any questions members on the other side may have.

[Aboriginal Affairs, June 1st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it has been six months since the Delgamuukw decision was handed down by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Ownership of every square inch of British Columbia is in doubt. Industry is saying not one more nickel of investment until this is settled.

My question is for the minister of Indian affairs. Other than striking a committee to look at this matter, what is the minister doing about it?