Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the chance to enter into this discussion today. It is going to be one of those moments in the House of Commons where, at the conclusion of the debate, it sounds as if every party will vote in favour of the motion brought forward by the member for the New Democratic Party.
However, I do not think we should paper over some of the differences and tensions which exist in the House. At the same time, I do not think we should underestimate the degree to which it is, from time to time, possible in our country for us to move beyond partisanship to a greater understanding of the issues that are at stake in this debate.
On many other occasions in the House and outside, I have said that the issue of the reconciliation of the relationship between the first nations, the Métis and Inuit people of Canada and the rest of us is the largest piece of unfinished business in the country. I say this having spent some considerable time as both a federal and provincial politician and political leader and also in my time in private life.
There are many reasons for this. Members opposite may be surprised to hear me say this. It is an issue that genuinely goes beyond partisanship, because if someone were to say if we looked at the record of other governments in the past and say that they were either blameless or perfect and that all the fault lied in one government, then that, frankly, would be a ludicrous comment. It would be an inaccurate comment. The fact is that both federally and provincially, as Canadian governments, we all have our share of responsibility for a relationship that has simply not been established in a way that would make us an even better country than we are. At the same time, we surely are allowed to comment on the fact that certain decisions have been made by one government or another which have set us back.
One thing the minister did not comment on in his remarks and one thing he did not say when he talked about the legacy of issues that was left to the new government to assume responsibility for is this. One of the very first decisions the Government of Canada made in 2006 was this. I refer to it as the Government of Canada because I am not allowed to use the colloquial term, which the government itself insists it uses in all of its press releases, because I would break the rules of the House. The Conservative government tore up an agreement that had been reached between the Government of Canada, the previous Martin government, and all of the provinces and the first nations' leadership of the country. It is not an act of partisanship on my part to say that the Conservative government was worse than being simply dishonourable. It was also a mistake because a year and a half of consultation had gone into those discussions, those improvements in education, housing, to the political priority that was to be given to moving forward on a government-to-government basis with the leadership of the first nations. All of that was scrapped. All of that was put aside and the new government said that it knew better, that it would spend less, that it would, in effect, do less, that it would invest less and that was the way it would be.
When we look at the housing budgets, the education budgets, the clean water budgets, the self-government budgets and the treaty making budgets, they were all reduced in comparison with the commitments that were made and budgeted in the Kelowna accord. They were not simply a declaration made by the Government of Canada. They were an understanding reached with the provinces and the first nations as well.
Therefore, I feel an obligation to at least put on the record the fact that there was a government that said we have to change things and that made changing things a priority. It is regrettable that the government that succeeded the Liberal government decided not to proceed on that basis but, in effect, to start all over again. One might say every government has the right to say it will do it its own way, that it has a better answer.
Let us not forget that it was the Reform Party that kept the House in knots for days and days because it opposed the Nisga'a treaty, as it did not accept the principle of self-government. It did not accept the principle of government-to-government negotiation and did not accept the arrangements that had been arrived at.
It is very difficult for us simply to say let us turn the page and pretend that did not happen. Wherever there is a lingering after-effect of the Reform Party agenda regarding this question, the question of the relationship between aboriginal people and the governments of Canada, it is not a positive after-effect, because it is one that does not accept the whole principle that there is a treaty relationship with the Crown that extends way past Confederation, deep into our history.
Even today, the Supreme Court of Canada and our provincial courts of appeal are having to make decisions on what does a duty to consult mean? How do we interpret the treaty rights? How do we give them life?
Admittedly, we began to make progress in every province by recognizing the nature of historic rights. The member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, who just spoke, played an important role in the discussions between the James Bay nations and communities and the Government of Quebec at a historic time. One would think that it would have been difficult to find solutions in the 1970s, but on the contrary, they did it.
Progress was made. When the Constitution was repatriated, I remember the moment when the government had to accept the fact that treaties were to be honoured by our Constitution and that the government had to be clear on the issue. That was a historic moment.
At this time, with the decision of the majority government and the support of the New Democratic Party in the House of Commons, we have embarked on a discussion that recognizes the constitutional reality and the need to respect the rights enshrined therein. The age of paternalism or colonialism, with all its problems, is finally drawing to a close. To be frank, institutional racism and a sense of marginalization were at the very core of the problems and made our situation a difficult one. Constitutional discussions were held. After the failure of the Meech Lake accord, further talks were held in Charlottetown, in which I was directly involved.
I well remember the Charlottetown discussions because I was very directly involved. The discussions came from a conclusion that was reached by the leadership of the country collectively, not New Democrat, Liberal, or Conservative, not provincial or federal, but a determination that if we are to make progress in this area it has to include everyone. If we are to have a constitutional discussion, it cannot just include the provinces; it also has to include the first nations, the Métis, non-status Indians and the Inuit people.
That made the discussion complicated. It meant that instead of having 9 or 10 around the table we had up to 17 people. It meant that the discussions took time. It meant that we had long discussions in the corridor and outside the corridor. We had resistance and finally we had acceptance. Then when we went to a vote we had rejection.
What is interesting is that despite the rejection and the referendum in Charlottetown, it has been court decisions that have shown the way and said yes, there are implications of treaty rights, there is a meaning and a substance to treaty rights and a meaning and a substance to self-government, which take us beyond where we have been.
We could all recite the statistics, the 35% graduation rates from secondary school on reserve, and 80% in the provinces where they are located. The government has now said that it has an 8% target that takes it up to 43%, which means that it would take 25 years to get to the same graduation rate as the rest of the country. We cannot wait 25 years to have genuine equality and funding for schools. However, it is not just a funding issue; it is also about the outcomes and how we are taking the steps. That is why I attach importance to the minister's statement that the government will come forward with a proposal with respect to first nations education. I just want to make sure that we all have an opportunity to discuss it and that it is not something that is just suddenly created by the Government of Canada. I know there has been a long consultation process, but it sometimes takes time to get these things right. We want to get them right. We want to contribute and be useful partners in making sure we have the governance structures that make sense. However, above all, we want the governance structures to be acceptable to the aboriginal people themselves.
The statistics are amazing. They really date back and come forward from the far-seeing royal commission, which came to force in 1992-1993. There is no greater mistake in public policy than the fact that governments put that report on a shelf—and I say that as a Liberal. We should not have put that report on a shelf because it had some important things to say. First of all, it documented for Canadians the history of discrimination. It also documented something else for Canadians, the demographic revolution taking place in aboriginal communities in cities and on reserve. For example, 50% of the aboriginal population is under the age of 25. We will have 400,000 new aboriginal entrants into the labour market over the next 10 years. Are we ready? Are we training? Are we providing the education? Are we dealing with the challenges? I do not think we are.
That is not to lay all of the blame at the foot of the minister or to say that the Prime Minister is single-handedly to blame; it is to say that it will take extraordinary acts of leadership to deal with the extent of the challenge and the opportunity. We should not see this as a problem. We should not see it as a problem that in Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton or Calgary we will see the aboriginal population grow exponentially over the next 20 years. It is a challenge. It is a challenge because we have not created the institutional structures and realized what we have to do.
The reason self-government is important and why I hope that self-government will be part of the governance structure for education, just as it needs to be part of the governance structure for health care and everything that goes on, is that the patterns of paternalism and a bureaucratic structure imposed on aboriginal peoples across our land mass, the second largest on the globe, is unsustainable. It is not workable. It wastes money. It creates expenditures that cannot be justified. It also creates inequalities in funding, which are not acceptable.
I would conclude by saying that we will obviously be in support of this resolution. We want to see the government's rhetoric and the minister's statements today matched in the budget by real and genuine progress.
I want to be able to go back to the Six Nations Reserve, which I visited over a couple of months ago, and to the delegation from the city of Brantford and the county of Brant I met more recently, and the Six Nations leaders, who all said, “You have to resolve the land claim issue here because it is blocking all of the progress we need to make in our communities”.
In many ways the communities have gone beyond the government. The government has to catch up. We want to see these changes made in the budget. We want to see real progress made, and we want to see it made on a basis that truly respects the fact there is another level and order of government and governance in this country.
I say to my fellow Canadians, when Samuel de Champlain came here, that level of governance was here. We did not come to this country and find a wilderness in which no people lived. There were people working, living, celebrating, praying and creating cultures and languages thousands and thousands of years old.
They were not savages, although they were treated as such for a long time. They did not need to be civilized by the Europeans when they arrived. They already had their own civilization.
All over the Americas there was a civilization. It was a civilization that was proud, complex, deep and rich, one that the clash of civilizations, the arrival of European settlement, helped to destroy, by disease, by war, by conquest and by an attitude of imperialism that has no place in where we are today as Canadians.
We genuinely have a rendezvous with our own destiny, with an understanding that even now it is not too late, that even now there is still time; but it is time not just for rhetoric, not just for words or even just for structures. It is a time for real action, and the budget is the test. The budget will be the test of action and the budget will be the test of commitment. We look forward to seeing the budget and to the government's actions matching its rhetoric.
I would like to see action from the government matching the eloquence of the Prime Minister's apology on the floor of the House of Commons. I was in the House on that day. No one in the House on that day could not have been moved by the sincerity, by the depth, by the compassion and by the understanding it showed, but now the walk begins. The walk has to match the talk of that discussion. The sincerity of that apology has to be matched by the sincerity of our commitments.
I say to the minister, we shall continue to work with him and the government. We take a positive, constructive attitude to this. There is no monopoly on the truth in any political party, but there has to be a common ground of political will, and let this resolution express a political will that is more than just words.
