Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure indeed to rise in support of the motion put forward by my friend and colleague from Churchill River.
I want in the beginning simply to indicate as he has speaking at a previous time that what we are talking about here is not changing the borders and boundaries of provinces and having some new definition here that would create a whole rearrangement in the way government is done, at least in terms of borders and territories. What my colleague has said is that the circumpolar world uses the 55th parallel as its definition.
If we look at it on a map from the top of the world, so to speak, from the Arctic looking down, we see that that parallel would take in entire countries such as Finland, Sweden and vast swaths of Russia, but in Canada the way it works now is that the border is set at the border of the Northwest Territories. When these people get together to talk about common issues and concerns, and certainly there are common issues and concerns no matter what country they happen to fall into, in Canadian terms there are vast and large reaches of what we consider to be the north which are not included.
What my colleague I think is saying is that we are not talking about changing political borders. We are talking about changing borders perhaps in the way that we think and perceive. I will give a few examples of this based on my own experience growing up in the southern area of the province of Saskatchewan, whereas my colleague grew up in the northern area. There are vast differences in history, in geography and many other aspects.
I will describe the river systems in Saskatchewan. The South and North Saskatchewan Rivers which arise in the Rockies and go on through Saskatchewan up into Manitoba and empty into Hudson Bay drain an area which is very different than the northern area. In fact the 55th parallel falls between the Saskatchewan River systems and the Churchill River to the north, not to mention the Peace-Athabasca system which runs out of Lake Athabasca one way and ends up on the coast and the Mackenzie River system ends up going straight north.
There have been in history, the fur trade for example, very keen and perceived differences between these areas, the area drained by the Saskatchewan River system and the areas drained further north.
To use one example, I have read significantly fur trade literature. A great writer and map maker named David Thompson spent many years first in the area of what is called the Saskatchewan River system and later on in further points north. In very descriptive writing he talks about the significant differences between the Cree and the Chipewyan people which he described extremely eloquently, not to mention the Dene and Inuit people.
There are differences among those people but they pale in comparison to the differences historically in many other ways between those people and the Europeans who came to settle the more southerly areas of our province.
I do know from the time I have spent in my own home province of Saskatchewan as a resident and a journalist that there have been attempts and recognitions by our provincial government, a belated one I might add, but in the early 1970s there was a recognition that the way in which southern Saskatchewan was governed was not working to the benefit of what we consider to be northern Saskatchewan and again the line would come pretty close to the 55th parallel as described by my colleague from Churchill River.
The government of the day, the government of Premier Allan Blakeney, observed that things were not working in the north and that there had to be some new efforts made. The department of northern Saskatchewan was created. There were attempts to have new ways of governing take place.
These attempts were not entirely successful but they were indeed a recognition between the vast differences between what we consider to be the south and the north.
I might add that one of the considerations given was that there should be some form of revenue sharing for resources extracted from the north because, as we know, unfortunately we have tended to extract resources in northern areas inhabited by aboriginal peoples and take the benefits and the riches south. That is common not only in the province in which I was raised, but also in the other provinces.
What my colleague, the member for Churchill River, is saying is that we must recognize that the situation I am describing in Saskatchewan historically is one which could be said to have existed in all of the provinces and that Canada's way of dealing with the people in northern territories has been similar. We exploit the resource but the people who live there are often disadvantaged by the ways in which we exploit the resource that has an environmental component and also by the loss of wealth to the region which they inhabit.
It is that kind of stepping out of the box that my colleague and friend from Churchill River is asking us to do. He is saying that the international community has identified the 55th parallel as its recognized boundary for circumpolar participation. He is not saying that we should change the boundaries of our country in any political way.
There are eight member states in the Arctic Council. They are Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States, because of the state of Alaska. These people do get together and they have many important things in common to discuss. I believe that is why this motion is important. It is to extend membership or at least the possibility of representation to people living further south.
My friend and colleague, the member for Churchill River, has talked about the fact that people in these northern areas are environmentally disadvantaged, if I may put it that way, from pollution which they did not create but with which they have to live. I remember reading not long ago in a newspaper front page story about an aboriginal woman in Churchill whose son had developed what we would call sunburn. That has to do with the thinning of the ozone layer, particularly in northern Canada. We have heard recently, and this is a cause for great concern, that the ozone hole there is depleted by about 60%. The woman's young child had developed a rash on the back of his neck and she, in her language, did not have a word to describe sunburn. That is the kind of thing that is happening to people in the north.
My colleague from Churchill River is not saying that somehow we should split that part of the country off from the other in any politically identifiable boundary sense. He is saying that these people also have a concern. They also share in the fate which may befall them, much to their chagrin, if things keep going along the way they are environmentally. He is saying that people in a place like Churchill have much more in common with people further north than they might have with people in Winnipeg or Saskatoon or Thunder Bay and they have a common way of looking at the world and some common problems that we do not quite share.
He is asking, at the very least, when these international conferences occur which do look at the world from a certain point of view that is very valid and very grounded in the life they have lived for thousands and thousands of years, that the people in northern Canada, the part of Canada between the 55th and 60th parallel, be given the opportunity to participate and extend this world view and explain it to the rest of us so that we might begin to look at that part of the world a little differently.
He is certainly talking about governments. He has talked about how the Canadian government has taken a very colonial mentality toward those areas. He is saying that we have to change. This motion is only a motion, it is not a bill. The world will not change overnight if we pass it, which I certainly hope we do. I recommend to other members that they support it.
He is simply saying let these people participate in this organization and some other organizations which have a similar intent. He feels that there will be an advantage if this occurs. I certainly agree with him.
I would urge members not to be too picky in saying what dastardly things would result from this, because no dastardly things would result, other than perhaps a change of mindset, and that would not be so dastardly at all.
