Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to respond to the motion by the hon. member for North Island-Powell River.
At the outset I must say I find the motion puzzling. No doubt the hon. member means well, but I do not think he has thought through the consequences of the motion. If adopted, parliamentary democracy in Canada will slow down to a crawl. The hon. member asks us to forgo signing land claim agreements because the people of British Columbia may be going to the polls soon. His motion refers to the last year of the current provincial government mandate.
I wonder how he expects any business to get done in a federal state, let alone one with ten provinces and two territorial governments, and soon to be three. In any given year at least one of these governments may be facing an election. On average two and one-half of them will be facing an election every year.
It would seem the hon. member wants to paralyse the decision making process. The convention is that elections are held every four or five years. How do we know which it will be? Should we begin clamping down on a government's right to sign agreements during the third year or the fourth years of its term?
What about the case of minority governments? The pattern in Canada seems to be that minority governments call an election after two years in office. This is not a constitutional principle. It is not even a convention. It is simply a reality of minority government. If we were apply the hon. member's motion in these situations, we would not sign any agreements with a minority government that had been in office for more than one year.
We can imagine the results. A new minority government is sworn in. The new ministry has a few months to become accustomed to power and to learn something about the ropes. Just as it is hitting stride and beginning to get some things accomplished, other governments in the country say: "Sorry, we can't sign any agreements with you. We have to respect the views of your electorate who may be going to the polls soon. They may want to change something".
Yet I hear over and over again from the members of the Reform Party that government must pay attention to the grassroots. The last speaker from Mission-Coquitlam made much of this point. What is their idea of paying attention to the grassroots? The member for Mission-Coquitlam said that we should read the answers to the questions she put in householder and that is it.
It is sort of like following the opinion polls, setting up hotlines so that people can phone in their views. It is town hall meetings and radio talk shows. I have nothing against any of these practices. I do them myself. I commend any effort to encourage Canadians to express their views. We have to understand one thing: taking an opinion poll or gauging the views of the people who phone in to a hotline or having a show of hands at a town hall meeting is not the same as representing the grassroots. The important word is representing.
This is a representative government. We are all representatives of the people of this country. The way I try to do it, and I suggest most of us do, is we get involved, to learn, to listen. We go to committee meetings, we question witnesses and we study and debate those issues which are of particular concern or about which we have some particular expertise.
When I ran in my riding to represent the people, I told them what I stood for, what the party was going to do and what the issues were with which the government would deal. We were fortunate enough to receive a majority of the votes in this country and represent the majority of the seats. Therefore, the Liberal party in this House is, I submit, the only truly representative body here. That seems to be self-evident. We come from all across the country. We represent every ethnic group in the country, including the aboriginal people. Therefore, we try to represent what the majority of Canadians think and feel about this country.
The grassroots is largely made up of people who do not phone in to hotline shows. They have little inclination to talk to Raife Mair on the radio. They do not go to town hall meetings. They might not have a strong opinion one way or another on a particular issue because they do not know enough about it, that is until they happen to be asked their opinion by a pollster. If the wrong question is asked, the wrong answer will be given.
Certainly most people believe all Canadians should have the same rights. The member for Mission-Coquitlam said that the Department of Indian Affairs has not worked. By today's standards and what we know now, it was an ill-conceived plan. It was a way of integrating another culture and people into ours. We have learned a lot since those days. I would agree very much with my colleague that we should do all we can over time to get rid of the paternalistic attitude of the Indian affairs department.
That does not mean that we can then say that all of us should have the same rights when we are not starting from the same place. If we do not understand that the Indian idea of property is different from ours, that it is culturally different and spiritually different, then we are never going to solve the problem because they will never agree.
Let us hear no more of the self-righteousness of the members of the Reform Party with their claims that they speak for the people. People elected the hon. member from North Island-Powell River on October 25, 1993 just as they elected me. They elected him to represent them. We both speak for the people in our ridings and people will have an opportunity to judge our performance in the next federal election.
The people of British Columbia elected the government of British Columbia and they will have their chance to render their verdict on that government in the coming months. In the meantime, we will continue with the job of governing the country and we have to carry on with the job of negotiating comprehensive claims with the First Nations of British Columbia. They have waited for 200 years to reach these agreements. Most have never had the opportunity to sign an agreement outlining their rights.
This is an historic anomaly in Canada. First Nations in all other provinces and in the territories have treaties, principally because most of the land unsettled is owned by the Queen in right of Canada in other provinces and territories.
The only treaties signed exclusively in British Columbia were concluded before the province joined Confederation in 1871. When the province joined Confederation, all the unclaimed land, except where the Indians had been pushed into reserves, was held by the Queen in right of British Columbia, which is not the same situation across the rest of the country.
This is where the grassroots beyond the aboriginal community can have their say. They are not left out of the process. Neither the Government of Canada nor the Government of British Columbia is interested, hopefully, in negotiating treaties that would ignore the
interests of non-aboriginal British Columbians, any more than it is going to ignore the justifiable interests of the aboriginal people.
We do want to get on with the process. We want to remove the uncertainty. We cannot let the process become derailed because this government or that one nears the end of its mandate.
The negotiation of a comprehensive claim is a long and painstaking process. That is how it should be. That is how it has been. That is how it will be. These are very important negotiations. They define how people will function over the long term. They set the parameters for how aboriginal people and their institutions will relate to the federal and provincial governments.
The simplistic ideas we have heard so far this afternoon from Reform Party members seem to ignore completely that the Indian people are a people. They are protected, as we all are, under the Constitution. They have inalienable rights to self-government and they have inherent rights in this land. Those are the things we have to define.
After waiting for more than a century, the First Nations of British Columbia know the value of patience in making sure that the negotiations are done right. Perhaps a little of that patience would not hurt the members down the line.
At the same time, we should not set up artificial barriers by tying the hands of legislators that must pass the legislation to bring the treaties into effect. I urge the House to vote against this motion.
