Dennis Bevington

[Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Act, February 28th, 2014]

Nine and a half hours, Mr. Speaker. That was it. That speaks for itself in that regard.

Hopefully some better heads will come together over this in committee and the bill will be given a very thorough examination.

[Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Act, February 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the chance to speak to a bill, which, as I mentioned earlier, on first reading seems very simple and straightforward but reveals quite a bit about what the government has been doing over the last number of years and its failure to act correctly in this matter.

Even when the parliamentary secretary answered my question, it is clear that he chose to ignore the fact that in the first period of time the number of applicants were three times over what was originally anticipated. He only talked about the last four months of the program, where the number went over by 45,000 applicants.

How does government work when the process it is entering into with the expectation of 8,000 applicants blossoms to 24,000 applicants? The government simply seems to ignore that fact. Only when the second phase of the application process came in, with 45,000 applications being put on the table, did the government wake up and realize it had some issues with what it was trying to do. What a careless way to run a government. How careless the government is with its business with the first nations people of this country.

I want to get that point in because it was left undone by the parliamentary secretary in his comments in answer to my first question.

What we have is an interesting bill. There is a problem with the huge application process for registration for joining the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation membership order. In my own home community, membership lists of first nations, of Métis people, are very complex issues, and that is when we are dealing with 1,000 people. When we are dealing with 500 people, the complicated nature of these membership applications is quite clear. The government has known for 40 years that this is not an easy issue to deal with.

When we set this thing in motion, we had a failure. Let the government admit that it created a failure with the process it put into place. The first step toward fixing it would be to admit the failure.

Now a bill has come forward to fix some of the issues we are engaged with here, not to determine the nature of what has happened, but simply to find a way to reduce the government's exposure on this issue.

First the Conservatives want to have a system on any of the previously accepted registrations for this band. They have gone through a process with five individuals, two from the first nations, two from the government, and one independent person, who have examined the first 23,800 applications that were made. They were accepted and put in place. The minister now wants the opportunity to take those off that list as he sees fits. Further, he does not want to have any responsibility for doing that. He wants to walk away from that clean.

The minister indicated that he is worried about the taxpayers of this country being liable for the mistakes that the government made. The taxpayers are liable for the mistakes that elected representatives make on their behalf. That is part of government. That is the way the government should operate. That is the way that government has a responsibility to operate.

It is interesting. When it comes to liability, we have made many international agreements over the last 20 years, through the Liberals and the Conservatives. They have guaranteed multinational companies with the right to sue the government if any of the provisions they enter into when they come into this country for investment purposes are changed through government legislation. The Liberals and the Conservatives signed agreements internationally that the government is under obligation to allow itself to be sued, and we have seen many large suits come of that to date.

On one hand, the government is fine with protecting the opportunities to sue for liability on the part of multinational corporations. Now we come to the 23,800 citizens of this country, who under a due process were given registration for Mi'kmaq claims.

I am not saying that all of these people would have a case for damages if they were to be taken off of the list. I am not saying they would even bother to do that. I am saying that they took the time to put the application in. They felt that they had a right to be on the list because they put their application in. They were accepted. Many of them would have made decisions about their life and their time based on the decision that was made by the tribunal about their participation in the Mi'kmaq membership order.

Someone has made a decision. They may have changed their lifestyle. They may have relocated to a different community. They may have established a business in an area that could be considered reserve land in the future, with tax benefits. They might have done one of a hundred things that would have put their life in a different direction previous to the decision that was made by the registration tribunal.

There it is. On one hand, we have a government that is quite willing to sign international agreements to allow multinational corporations to sue us at any time that we change a law here in Parliament, but on the other, it wants to put a law in place to make sure that Mi'kmaq people do not have the opportunity to sue it for something it has done wrong to them.

What kind of logic is that? What kind of equity is that in the system? Why do citizens of this country have substandard rights compared to multinational companies?

I find that the parallel between the two is indicative of the nature of the Conservative government, and the nature of our country, in some respects. We have been governed by the Liberals and the Conservatives for many years, and they have permitted this type of differentiation to go on.

That is the philosophy that we are dealing with here. As with the first reading and second reading of any bill, we want to talk about what the philosophy is going forward. There it is, folks; that is what is happening here.

What do the Mi'kmaq peoples think about this? The Mi'Kmaq First Nations Assembly of Newfoundland was set up to try to deal with what is going on with this bill and the process of registration. It is not impressed with this legislation.

I would like to quote from The Western Star, a newspaper from Atlantic Canada, about Bill C-25, the Qalipu Mi'kmaq first nation act. It said:

While the federal government is saying the bill will be an assurance that everyone applying to become a member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation will be treated fairly and equitably, there are concerns that the proposed legislation’s real purpose is to protect the federal government from being sued by people who feel they are not being treated fairly or equally.

[Mr. Hector] Pearce is vice-chairperson of the Mi’kmaq First Nations Assembly of Newfoundland, a group which was formed to fight for the rights of those who feel they are being wronged in the process of enrolment in the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation.

“Once I started reading it, my blood started to boil a little bit,” said Pearce after reading the wording of Bill C-25. “We’re not shocked but we are very disappointed with the legislation. This government has put up so many roadblocks to this Qalipu registration process that nothing surprises us anymore”.

Of course, not only is he concerned about the bill; he is concerned about the process that was followed earlier. Every Canadian would be a little concerned about a process that the government initiated when it thought it was going to get 8,000 applicants and then part of the way through the process that number was exceeded by 300%.

One would think that the government would have taken some action to ensure that what it was doing was correct and working in a good fashion. Now that it has received 100,000 applicants, of course, it has to do something. It has been forced into it. It realizes, too, that is has created some liability for itself if it starts limiting the nature of registrations. If 100,000 people want to be registered and 23,000 people in Newfoundland have already been given membership in this band, one would have to say that maybe some of the qualifications should be changed so that more people are not put into this registration process. We are going to see a backtracking on the registration process and some new rules.

We should remember that this process is subjective. The government itself said it. It said that the registration is determined by people's heritage, but also by their contribution to the community and Mi'kmaq society. That is very subjective. Throughout my time in northern Canada, I have seen membership lists that have been fought over on that basis for years and years. Those are very difficult, time-consuming, and subjective ways of determining membership.

Once we get past the idea that people have the blood heritage of the Mi'kmaq in relationship with others in a similar location in the country and they have rights of membership, and we get into the area where they have to show they have been active participants in the community and the community accepts them, those things become very subjective, difficult to determine, and very likely to be the cause of some dispute, which may lead to liability.

Those are things that the government ought to realize going forward. It has put itself in a position where many people are going to be disappointed with the results of this work that is going ahead right now. It has made choices, and those choices are going to come back and haunt it. What it should do, very clearly, is to reduce its liability for its mistakes and ensure it can make any choice it wants with the 23,800 people who have already been registered and the 70,000 people who have put their names forward for registration. This is a very difficult issue.

New Democrats want to take this issue to committee because we want to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened. That may be part of what can be done. I am not holding my breath over this because I saw the action on Bill C-15. The government made some changes to the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act in the Northwest Territories which took away constitutionally protected parts of land claims agreements. That process is now going to court. The lesson that the government is learning is that it should take away the opportunity for first nations people to go to court over things that are inherently their right to do.

Land ownership is something that people have a right to in this country, and first nations, through their processes, have a right to land and resources. What is being said is that the government is going to arbitrarily determine who has a right to that land and resources through this membership process. If we told private citizens in Canada that we were arbitrarily going to determine whether they have a right to the land and resources that they think they do, I suspect that would not sell very well to Canadians.

Canadians understand that with heritage and the ownership of land through that process of one's ancestry, if it has not been legally taken away from them, they have some rights to it. This is something the government has to operate with carefully. It is taking a very strong step toward this limited liability, which is something it would never think of doing to multinational corporations that exist outside the country but is quite willing to do to the citizens of Canada.

This is an interesting proposition. We will take it to committee. We will have a chance to give it a good, thorough airing, I hope. With the Conservative majorities we have had, the committee has had a tendency to slow down accepting witnesses, The committees have been abysmal in their ability to open up to have the type of examination many of these issues take. I will once again give the instance of Bill C-15, where one day was given to the people of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife to give their evidence in front of the committee.

[Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Act, February 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague across the way for giving us more clarification. I think that a lot more work is going to be required on the bill. It seems like a very simple bill at first, but there are many other details that have come into it.

I would like to do a historical reconnaissance here on the application process started in 2009. By 2012, 23,000 applications had been processed. As the minister told us earlier, it was originally anticipated there would be 8,000 applications.

At what point did the government put up some red flags about what was going on with this process, with the way it was being done, and the fact that probably over three times the anticipated number of applications had been received? When did the government start to recognize what was going on here?

[Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Act, February 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, as we delve further into the bill before us, I think we are starting to see that there are some very particular issues surrounding it for many people.

There is this whole question of the government's liability in a process that it entered into, expecting 8,000 people to sign up for it, and over a period of four or five years realizing that many more people were signing up for the process. I find it almost incomprehensible that within the bureaucracy of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development the people who were obviously in charge of this process let this thing get away from them in the fashion it has. Now the government wants to wash its hands of the responsibility it had throughout this whole process in order to ensure that it is fair and correct.

I suppose we will have to take the bill to committee to better understand from the bureaucrats why they let this process turn into the farce that it is today.

[Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Act, February 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech and his concern about getting this bill right. Quite obviously, some things have gone wrong already with the process that has been undertaken for this legislation. The minister indicated that they thought they were going to get 8,000 or 9,000 people signed up, but they ended up with 23,800. Now they have had another 58,000 show up in the very short period after that.

I guess I can go back to the more than 23,000 who have been registered and accepted already. The indication from the minister is that all of those registrations are now under question. Over the past four years, anyone who was first nation and would have been accepted under this registration may have made choices in their lives. They may have made choices about investing in the Mi'kmaq communities and in Newfoundland. They may have made choices about where and how they live. They may have made choices about their relationships. All of a sudden, those 23,000 people are put in some degree of question.

This bill would actually take out the liability of the government for anything that it does to those 23,000 people. Is that not the case?

[Foreign Investment, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, despite the Prime Minister's rhetoric on Arctic sovereignty, the Conservative government has done little to protect Canada's northern resources from foreign interests.

The largest offshore exploration leaseholder in the Beaufort Sea is a small two-person British company called Franklin Petroleum. Under the current rules, these leases could be transferred to anyone, to any country, at any time, without the involvement of Canada in approving the transfer.

Why has the Prime Minister not closed this loophole?

[Northwest Territories Devolution Act, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to list a number of names. One is NICO mine; one is Dominion Diamond mines; one is Diavik mine; one is Gahcho Kue mine. All of these mines exist in the Tlicho region. If the Tlicho go to litigation over the regional boards, licensing of those mines would be put in jeopardy.

Right now, worldwide, mines are fighting for capital costs. What happens when the market realizes that the current government has upset the process in one of the most prosperous areas of the country right now for mining? What are these people doing? Why are doing this stupidity at this time?

[Northwest Territories Devolution Act, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his intervention. I want to talk about how the Conservatives have hung their hats on the words in these three land claims agreements that the contemplation of a larger board means that these regional boards would be taken up.

Land claims are negotiated between two parties. They are between the people who hold the treaty with the Crown and the federal government, which represents the Crown. If I had an agreement that I am contemplating buying someone's vehicle, would I not think that before I bought the vehicle, the price would have to be worked out between the parties?

This is the problem right now. It is the failing in the Conservatives' logic in their position on taking away the regional boards. They say that because the land claims say that we can contemplate this, it means we have the authority to put it in place without the agreement of the other negotiating party. How does that sound to the member?

[Northwest Territories Devolution Act, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague because the support and discussion that has taken place in this House is very valuable to the people in the north right now. It will be a benchmark for the future in how we can deal with some of the issues that would be caused by Bill C-15.

If things had gone differently in the early 1990s, we might have had a single comprehensive claim for the whole Northwest Territories. However, at that time, the federal government made the choice not to proceed with that, and it encouraged the regional claims to develop.

We have now been in a process of developing strong regional aboriginal governments throughout the Northwest Territories. One of the fine examples is Inuvialuit, who still, and will continue to, retain its regional boards in charge of its territory.

How does my colleague think that this change being proposed could cause an imbalance in the system in the Northwest Territories?

We have gone forward with regional boards. We still have one regional board. However, the proposed system would very much be out of balance.

[Northwest Territories Devolution Act, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, in 2002 and 2003 there were larger numbers on the table from the federal government at the time. Devolution was proceeding at that time with a lot more authority and control. There were larger sums of money being offered for the A-base funding. This whole thing fell apart because the first nations were not on board with the territorial government at the time for devolution.

What we have now is a situation where first nations are on board, and we are taking away one of the essential elements they have within their regional claims. Does that make sense you?