Jim Prentice

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member for Desnethé--Missinippi--Churchill River, which is an important riding with a long name.

The hon. member has led the way in the House in fighting for justice for aboriginal people in two respects: first, with respect to recognition and fairness for aboriginal veterans; and second, with respect to fairness for the victims of the aboriginal residential school system. He has done so diligently in this House and as the vice-chair of the standing committee.

However, in doing so, he has had to continually overcome problems with the governing Liberals. They fought him tooth and nail in terms of his efforts to make sure aboriginal veterans were recognized. They also have fought him tooth and nail in terms of trying to see some sort of justice for the survivors of the residential school fiasco.

I wonder if the member has any comments on his experience with the governing Liberals and the steps he has had to take on behalf of his constituents to remedy these injustices.

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, to follow up on that very question, it would seem to me that the best way to judge whether the program has been successful or not is to judge the amount of money which has been spent on this so-called government department in the last four years and determine what percentage of that money went to the claimants and what percentage went to the bureaucracy.

The problem I have with the explanation given by my hon. friend, which is that we need to wait because the program is starting to bear fruit, is that the numbers actually support the contrary conclusion. If we compare the government's fiscal expenditures with the amount of money spent in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, the amount of money that goes to bureaucracy is actually increasing, not decreasing.

We are not reaching the point where there are any efficiencies. In those four years, the amount of money going to victims actually decreased from 30¢ on the dollar to 20¢ on the dollar. We are actually getting less output from the system, not more.

Let my give my hon. friend a comparison. In 1988 this country dealt with the circumstances involving the Japanese Canadian experience. An agreement was signed offering redress for injustice during and after the second world war. That entire program, which was administered by a Conservative government, opened and closed in five years. Within one year the government processed 17,500 applications. Over 65% of the applications were processed and closed within the first 12 months.

By comparison, this program, which is now into its fourth year, has spent $275 million, plus the healing foundation money, and has resolved less than 2% of the cases. How is that a success and why should we wait?

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

With all due respect, Mr. Speaker, there is no obligation on the part of any of the opposition parties in the House to dedicate their opposition days to the debating of concurrence motions. It is preposterous to suggest that is what we have to do to concur in a standing committee report. My hon. friend knows better than that.

This is a concurrence motion where the House is being asked to concur in the report of the standing committee. It is before the House in a proper manner for debate and that is why we are here.

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, what has been put before this House is the report of the standing committee. It represents the consensus that existed at that time among the members of the standing committee. It is a motion which builds in part upon the work of the AFN and the Canadian Bar Association and the reports which they put forward.

It builds as well upon the five days of dedicated time that the standing committee devoted to this issue and considered all of the evidence which the standing committee heard at that time, including the evidence of victims, individuals with experience with the process, the healing foundation, and including participation not only from victims but from their legal counsel. All of that has been put in the mix, including what we heard from the Deputy Prime Minister, who came and spoke to us about this particular program. The result is the motion that was put forward by the standing committee and which is before this House today for debate.

It may be that many of the stakeholders who take part in this issue do not support each and every one of those recommendations. Those recommendations reflect the wisdom of the standing committee put before this House.

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this matter was put before the House in the way that it should be put before the House. There was a standing committee report. This report was passed in due order according to the proper procedure by the standing committee and brought before this House.

As a member I have moved concurrence, as is my entitlement. There has been no attempt to keep this House away from any other order of business. I would say to my hon. friend and the House that there is ample time to return to those other matters.

I am sure the hon. member is not suggesting that this issue, which is probably the most important issue among aboriginal Canadians in terms of their relationship with this country, is one that should not be on the floor of the House of Commons in a debate where all members of this House have an opportunity to speak.

The consequences of the residential school problem have rippled through our society. There are those who know more about this than myself, who link it to the high rates of suicide, to some of the dysfunctionality that we see in some of the communities, to the incidences of social problems, poverty, and to the levels of incarceration.

These are problems which are very important to us as Canadians. I for one see no reason why those issues should not be on the floor of the House of Commons today and subject to debate.

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend has made an excellent point. The member has been very aggressive in putting this matter forward. He has led the House in respect of issues surrounding fairness and equity for aboriginal veterans. He has led the House on that issue, his motion having been approved by the House. As the vice-chair of the standing committee he has exercised real leadership in ensuring that this matter is before the House today.

The long and short of it is that it was through the cooperation of the opposition parties which are represented in the House and their common efforts that the fourth report was approved by the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs. It was approved without the support of the Liberal members. It was achieved only with considerable effort on the part of the opposition parties to craft and arrive at recommendations which we could all support and which were brought before the House to get the debate on the floor of the House of Commons.

One thing was very clear. The Liberal members did not want to see this issue in the House of Commons. They did everything they could to make sure that it died at committee and that it was never brought before the House.

Last week when speaking on another matter, I quoted one of the western world's most famous jurists, Justice Brandeis, whose expression was, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”. That adage applies in respect of this matter. What we have to do is shine the light of day on this horrific mismanagement of taxpayers' money.

We have to shine the light of day on the attempts by members of the Liberal government to do everything possible to avoid being accountable on this matter, to avoid repairing and dealing with the healing that aboriginal Canadians require on this issue, and their attempts to avoid any sort of public inquiry, any sort of national truth and reconciliation process, their attempts to continue to jam this into a bureaucracy which at this point has expended in excess of $600 million and has achieved virtually no success.

[Committees of the House, April 11th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure today to move for concurrence in the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

I will turn in a moment to the specific recommendations that the committee puts before the House but let me begin with an overview of the miasma which the government has created with respect to its handling of this matter.

The government's administration of the residential school file exhibits a degree of arrogance, mismanagement and ineffectiveness, which is shocking even by Liberal government standards.

In the time since 1998, when the Liberals made their statement of reconciliation and unveiled their action plan entitled, “Gathering Strength”, their handling of this file has achieved two outcomes: they have spent over $600 million and they have asked Parliament in the most recent budget for an additional $160 million. In result, they have settled less than 2% of the known cases and, in so doing, they have set the survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Bar Association and the taxpayers of Canada all against them. What an achievement.

The residential school saga is a sad and disturbing period in Canadian history and it is a part of our history that we must come to grips with if we are to achieve healing and reconciliation between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians. That is why one of the critical recommendations in the committee's report involves the striking of a national truth and reconciliation process.

Incidentally, the government has ignored the requests of the survivors, the AFN, the RCAP or the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Law Commission of Canada and the Canadian Bar Association, all of whom have called for precisely such a public inquiry. To this very day, the government refuses to do so.

Here is what the Canadian Bar Association says:

The negative consequences of removing Aboriginal children from their parents and communities and forcing them to attend schools where they were raised in "an atmosphere of fear, loneliness and loathing" and where they were forbidden from telling their ancestor and creation stories and from participating in traditional ceremonies and practices are still being felt today. Punishing children for speaking the language of their birth and ridiculing their cultural and spiritual traditions caused profound damage. Their identity, their sense of belonging and their self-respect were taken from them.

Carrying on, in the words of the Canadian Bar Association in its recent report, this is what we have inherited today in Canada as a result of this:

In our view, there is a direct correlation between the policies of oppression and inequality of Canada's Indian Residential Schools, and the challenges Aboriginal individuals, families, their communities and their Nations continue to face in this country in 2005. With Aboriginal offenders representing 40% of Canada's prison population, with Aboriginal peoples experiencing the highest suicide rates in the country, with Aboriginal communities struggling to deal with poverty, substance abuse, and illness, it is clear that Canada has not yet faced the truth. "The effect of the Indian residential school system is like a disease ripping through our communities".

Regrettably, the government is not interested in truth nor in reconciliation. It is interested in tax and spend liberalism and bureaucracy, and it is to that subject that I now turn.

The House must understand first and foremost how much money the government has invested in this residential school strategy.

First is the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. In the time since 1998 when this foundation was established, it has been given $350 million by the Government of Canada and, moreover, in the 2005 budget the government proposes an additional $40 million for the foundation, bringing the total expenditure to close to $400 million.

Second, however, is the Department of Indian Residential Schools Resolution, yet another government bureaucracy invented by the Liberal administration in 2001. Since that time, this so-called department has gobbled up approximately $275 million in administration, expert costs, legal costs and bureaucracy.

In the 2001-02 fiscal year the department spent $42.5 million,of which only $13 million went to the victims. In other words, the victims received 30% of the money; the bureaucracy gobbled up 70%.

In the 2002-03 fiscal year the department spent $55.8 million, of which only $13.5 million went to victims. The bureaucracy's take increased to a higher percentage that year of 75%.

In the 2003-04 fiscal year the department spent $77.4 million, of which less than $16.5 million went to the victims.

We are now seeing the real benefits of Liberal bureaucracy and administration. We have now reached the point that a full 80% of the money which is expended is invested in bureaucracy. The victims get only 20¢ on the dollar.

In this most recent fiscal year, 2004-05, the department's estimates authorized expenditures of $100 million. We assume that all or most of that money has indeed been spent at this point in time.

Under a Liberal administration the waste will continue. For the current 2005 budget the Deputy Prime Minister has asked for an additional $121 million for this department which settled fewer than 100 cases last year.

In addition, not included in the costs of which I speak is the expense associated with hundreds and hundreds of lawyers within the Department of Justice who are employed on these files. Some estimates indicate that as many as 25% of the lawyers working for the Department of Justice spend time on the residential school files. Those costs, whatever they are, are buried deep in the Department of Justice figures.

In total since its inception this so-called department has spent $275 million of which the victims have received less than 20% to 25% of the money. Today it has the audacity to seek another $121 million.

What has been the success rate resulting from all of this? Again we must understand at the outset that the department of which I speak handles only a fraction of the residential school cases. Let us get the numbers straight. Approximately 150,000 students attended residential schools in the time between the 1940s and the 1970s. As of January 31, 2005 there are 85,975 former students who are still alive. This is the available pool of possible claimants.

Of a total of, let us say 86,000 people, a total of 13,396 former students have filed claims against the Government of Canada. The vast majority of these cases are in court. Fully 12,000 of the 13,000 cases are represented by lawyers and they are plaintiffs in class actions started in Ontario and Alberta.

The cases which this department is handling at an expense of $275 million are only 1,400 in number as of today's date. After a full three years of operation this department is handling less than 2% of the available pool of claimants and less than 10% of all of the cases which have been filed against the government at this point.

The Deputy Prime Minister calls this much vaunted ADR process the centrepiece of the government strategy. It is certainly the centrepiece in terms of cost. The reality of matters is that people are not using the ADR process of which the government is so fond. Perhaps they are dissuaded by the 40 page application which requires the assistance of experts to fill out, or perhaps it is the Liberal government's cultural sensitivity which is frightening them away.

For example, according to lawyers and claimants who are experienced with the system, the government spends approximately $20,000 per case to fight the small cases that involve $500 to $3,500 in compensation, and the government sometimes appeals those decisions.

The Deputy Prime Minister clings to this ADR process as her lifeline, describing it as culturally sensitive and holistic. In fact it has no supporters, other than her and those who are part of the administration. The survivors describe it as a demeaning process which revictimizes them. The Assembly of First Nations describes it as abusive. The Canadian Bar Association says that it is flawed and that it has failed both aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians. The departmental officials will admit privately that it is flawed. Even the Ontario Court of Appeal in the Cloud decision offers little respect or support for the ADR process, which has cost all so much money.

The Ontario Court of Appeal criticized the ADR process as follows: “I do not agree that this ADR system displaces the conclusion that the class action is the preferable procedure. It is a system unilaterally created by one of the respondents in this action and could be unilaterally dismantled without the consent of the appellants. It caps the amount of possible recovery and, most importantly in these circumstances, compared to the class action it shares the access to justice deficiencies of individual actions. It does not compare favourably with a common trial”.

Only the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada applauds the process. In the House on November 15, 2004 she said, “There is no mismanagement involved here”. The facts are different. At committee on February 22, 2005 she said, “Our ADR approach is groundbreaking, culturally based, humane and holistic”. All of the evidence that was put before the standing committee indicated the contrary without exception.

There is a way forward. There is a better way. There is a path which is outlined in brief in the recommendation of the standing committee. First, as a nation we must attack the challenge of restorative justice. That objective is not about money. It goes beyond reparation in a material sense. It focuses upon a national truth and reconciliation process, a national process, a public process which is comprehensive and respectful. It will be a process which heals wounds in a way that money does not, indeed, in a way which money cannot. This is precisely what other commentators, the Law Reform Commission, the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Canadian Bar Association and RCAP, among others, the AFN and the survivors have been calling for, for many years, denied only by the Liberal Government of Canada.

The difficult issues surrounding corrective justice or, put more simply, how much money does the government owe to those claimants who have sued the government, can also be resolved much more quickly than the current government is proceeding. Over 12,000 litigants are suing the Crown. They include three classes of plaintiffs: first, the former students; second, the siblings and parents of the former students; and third, the children and the spouses of former students. Their claims are based on breaches of duty which are characterized as breaches of treaty, breaches of fiduciary duty and negligence.

These issues are currently before the courts of Ontario and Alberta on an expedited basis. Over 90% of the claimants who now claim against the government have opted for this process. It seems obvious to us that the government should be aggressively engaged in court supervised negotiations to settle all of those claims. There are 12,000 claimants. They have legal counsel. They are aggressively proceeding in court with their cases. The courts are prepared to intercede. They have capable mediators and arbitrators. There would seem to be no impediment to resolving those cases through such a process.

Certainly many of these claims raise difficult legal and factual questions. For example, did every single person who attended residential school suffer, and suffer equally, at the hands of these institutions? What sort of duty did the government of the day have? Was that duty breached? Was it a treaty breach? Was it negligence? Was it a breach of fiduciary duty? Is loss of language and culture compensable in law? The Government of Canada will be answerable on all of these questions once some guidance is obtained from the courts.

I would also emphasize that the difficult cases involving sexual abuse, physical abuse and wrongful confinement must be dealt with in an expeditious manner. The current department and the current process have no credibility as an efficient, compassionate, culturally sensitive way to get to the bottom of these cases.

We must recognize that there have been less than 1,000 extreme circumstance cases which have been brought before the government at this point. It is unclear to all of us how many such cases exist, but it is very clear that it should not cost $275 million to resolve less than 10% of them.

We do not need a separate government department. We currently have other mechanisms in the Government of Canada. The Indian Claims Commission of Canada deals on a daily basis with issues involving breaches of fiduciary duty and treaty rights. There are other bodies that have the requisite financial experience, independence, expertise and credibility among aboriginal Canadians to get to the bottom of these cases. Why would we not consider expanding, for example, the mandate of the commission to resolve these difficult cases in an expedited way?

The net effect of all this is that the current approach which is being followed by this administration is not working. It is horrendously expensive. This program at this point in time is well into an expenditure of $600 million of public money, somewhere in the $700 million quadrant in fact, and we are not seeing the results. Less than 2% of the cases which are known to exist have been resolved.

In sum, the Liberal administration of the residential school file has been a complete disaster from every conceivable human or public policy perspective. The recommendations of the standing committee in respect of which we moved concurrence set out an alternate path. We urge and implore the government to take the measures outlined in our report seriously and to move forward.

[Supply, April 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have indeed heard from other Canadians with those very concerns.

I want to return to the comments made by the Deputy Prime Minister. She put forward the case for the government that there should not be a public inquiry. In her comments today she referred to CSIS working closely with the RCMP. She also referred to a 1992 report by an arm's length independent security intelligence review committee that lauded CSIS. She quoted the immediate and full cooperation between CSIS and the RCMP.

What is puzzling to all Canadians, if one stops and considers this, is how an independent review in 1992 could be laudatory of CSIS when in 2005 the judge who heard all the evidence accused it of unacceptable negligence. That contradiction alone demands some sort of investigation. How then can we place any confidence in another so-called independent review conducted outside of public scrutiny to get to the bottom of this? Clearly, we cannot as Canadians.

[Supply, April 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member raises two separate issues, one being the question of eminent Canadians as opposed to a public inquiry, and the second being what has happened over time, the passage of time and the change of circumstances.

No one disagrees that a lot has happened in the last 20 years but the parliamentary secretary misses the point. The point of the motion is to find out why the investigation was bungled and why hundreds of hours of transcript were destroyed resulting in the inability to pursue this case through to conviction.

I assume that there are transportation related questions with which the government has dealt. Perhaps on another day and in another time those will be investigated. I hope, as a Canadian, that some of those issues have been dealt with by the government but that is not the question in front of us.

The question in front of us concerns one of the most significant trials in Canadian history in which a respected judge made a decision in favour of acquittal and uncategorically said that one of the reasons he acquitted was because of the bungled investigation. What assurances do Canadians have that that miscarriage of justice will not happen again?

The only way we can get to the bottom of that is to do it in public. It is not eminent Canadians or any eminent Canadian who needs to have that question answered, it is all Canadians, eminent or not. All Canadians, including the families of the victims, want to get to the bottom of this but not through a secretive, reclusive process between the minister and a hand-picked person.

[Supply, April 7th, 2005]

There are many suggestions emerging from the House as to who some of these eminent Canadians might be.

The Deputy Prime Minister of Canada puts forward the proposition that we will not have a public inquiry, we will not have an investigation, we will not have it in public. Rather, we are going to have the spectre of her seeking the independent advice of an undetermined person who will identify the public interest questions and give her advice so that we, collectively she says, can all move forward.

It is a remarkable proposition that a public interest question would be resolved in private by the Deputy Prime Minister. What is wrong with a public inquiry? That is what the Indo Canadian families and the victims' families have been demanding for some time. That is what this House should be sensitive to. That is what all Canadians are interested in.

It is very noteworthy that in other circumstances this government and this Deputy Prime Minister have been prepared to embrace a public inquiry as exactly the way to get to the bottom of things. I quote the Deputy Prime Minister from February 16, 2004, speaking about the Gomery inquiry. She said:

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister and the government have been absolutely clear. We want to get to the bottom of this matter for the Canadian public. That is why we have instituted what can only be described as the most comprehensive action plan that probably any government has ever put in place: a public inquiry...

On that same day she said:

That is why we called for a public inquiry. We want to get to the bottom of this. We all want to know what happened here. We believe that is what the Canadian public deserves to know.

By parity of reasoning, that is what the Canadian public wants to know in this case. That is what the Indo Canadian families of the victims want to know in this case. They want a public inquiry. They want sunlight as a disinfectant in this miscarriage of justice. They want to know what happened. They do not want to see someone described as an eminent Canadian meeting in private with the Deputy Prime Minister, investigating the very people who report to the Deputy Prime Minister, to conduct a review outside of public scrutiny, not in public.

Returning to the motion, there is really only one question before the House today, and that is whether we strike an independent judicial inquiry into the investigation itself, the bungled investigation. There is a real question that emerges from all of this. What is the Deputy Prime Minister, and her agencies, seeking to withhold from public scrutiny? What is the difficulty with a public inquiry?

There are many questions which remain unanswered. Why was this investigation bungled? What investigative errors of the government is the government attempting to hide from public scrutiny? What errors were made? Who made them? What steps have been taken since that time to ensure that those sorts of errors are never made again? Who was responsible? What has been done to change the situation?

Why were the working relationships between the RCMP and CSIS so strained that individuals destroyed investigative evidence, specifically tape recordings, wiretap evidence, as I understand it, of witnesses who were taped or in some cases interviewed? We are not speaking, as I understand it, of the inadvertent destruction of small portions of evidence. We are talking about the wholesale erasure of hundreds of hours of investigation, destroyed by the very agents who were supposed to be responsible for the investigation and the protection of Canadian public security.

What kind of law enforcement agency would take it upon itself in the context of the worst terrorist act in Canadian history, and at that time one of the worst in the world, to destroy the evidence? All Canadians are puzzled by that and ask themselves that question. The court described the destruction of the evidence as “unacceptable negligence”.

Returning to the eminent Canadian, the Deputy Prime Minister points out to the House that we need the assistance of an eminent Canadian to find out what questions we need to investigate. There is no need to hire anyone, eminent or otherwise, to determine what the questions are. The questions have been put right before this House by another eminent Canadian, Mr. Justice Josephson, who said very clearly that one of the reasons for acquittal was unacceptable negligence on the part of the investigative agencies.

That is the issue, that is the question and that is the matter that should be before a judicial inquiry. It has nothing to do with all the other matters that have been brought before the House today by the Deputy Prime Minister and the parliamentary secretary.

In addition to the questions surrounding the bungling of the evidence itself, there are, not surprisingly, accusations of a cover-up on the part of some of those who are involved, an intentional cover-up to make sure that this matter was not investigated. What we need to know is whether that is true.

The purpose of the inquiry would be to get to the bottom of that. Perhaps we will find that much of this has been put to rest. Perhaps we will find there has been no cover-up, but that in itself is of importance because these are important law investigative agencies. CSIS, in particular, is very important to the safety of Canadians. We need to go forward in the future knowing that sunlight has cleansed the situation, that Canadians have confidence in CSIS in its capacity to do its work and that there has not been a miscarriage of justice in this case.

Why is the government not prepared to convene a public inquiry? What is the issue? The Deputy Prime Minister's spokesperson says that cost is not an argument. Several weeks ago the minister's own spokesperson said publicly that the question of cost was not a consideration and not the reason for not having a public inquiry.

Several weeks ago the Deputy Prime Minister said that the reason we were not having an inquiry was that it was not possible for her to say that there would be any benefit from a public inquiry. If there is no benefit from a public inquiry, why is the Deputy Prime Minister hiring an eminent Canadian to investigate the situation? What is the benefit of hiring an eminent Canadian if there is no benefit to having an investigation or inquiry to begin with? The bottom line is that the government does not want to see a public inquiry. It does not want to see sunlight as a disinfectant getting to the bottom of this issue.

Justice Josephson, in his acquittal of the accused, said that there had been unacceptable negligence in the investigation. Those facts demand and cry out for some sort of investigation. The best way to get to the bottom of this for the sake of the victims, for the sake of the families who remain, for the sake of all Canadians and, indeed, for the sake of the law enforcement agencies, is a public inquiry, which is what the motion put forward by the member for Newton—North Delta is asking for.