Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their enthusiasm. I am honoured to speak today to Bill C-27, An Act to enhance the financial accountability and transparency of First Nations. This long title is quite pompous. The short title is the First Nations Financial Transparency Act. That sort of title should make us wary of the bill’s intent since, as usual, the Conservative government is targeting a specific, well-defined section of the population.
There is one paradoxical reason for my interest in this subject: I represent a riding where there are no first nations communities and no first nations people. According to the official data from the latest census, conducted by Statistics Canada in 2011, only 5 persons in 100,000 reported speaking an aboriginal language. That was 5, not 5,000. In comparison, there were 345 individuals who reported speaking German, for example, which is not traditionally a language that stands out in Statistics Canada’s figures.
That leads me to another remark: we know that, as of the latest census, the Conservative government abolished the long form census, technically known as form 2B. We can question the accuracy of the current figures, in relation to historic Canadian census figures, and of the conclusions based on these figures. The precision is no longer there because, even though the official statistics say that only 5 people in my riding of over 100,000 inhabitants speak an aboriginal language, I do think there are probably more than that.
And that is why I am interested in this issue. In a riding like mine, without any first nations, the perception of first nations communities is even more important, because it forms the basis for the idea of a nation—the Canadian nation—that wants to include various groups and ethnicities.
Canada is still quite young, as it was created in 1867. That is like one year compared to the multi-millennial history of some European nations. It is quite young. One of the important things in creating a nation is to fight prejudice and generalizations, and we must refrain from targeting specific groups and accusing them, with no evidence, of mismanaging public money. That is what we are talking about today at third reading of this bill.
Another aspect that worries me personally is that of the protection of personal information. Over the years in Canada we have been able to build legislation that protects personal privacy. This bill is something new, because it would disclose information—publicly and even on the Internet—that is truly personal. This kind of personal information is not requested of other groups, but will be specifically required from certain chosen, targeted groups. That also reminds me of a private member’s bill, Bill C-377, which similarly targets a specific group, in that case unions. Through such bills the government is trying to increase red tape and create unnecessary work in order to target these groups. That is the complete opposite of being inclusive and giving people a chance, assuming that people are not dishonest and organizations are not out to commit fraud.
If anyone wants to prove that a specific organization or group is committing fraud or misusing funds, it is up to the individual who makes that allegation to do so.
One of the amendments introduced by my NDP colleagues on the committee was to eliminate this additional burden that is being imposed solely on first nations, not on the population at large, as some of my colleagues have said. It is also important to emphasize that, under this act, the minister would be able to eliminate grants made to certain aboriginal groups based solely on speculation that funds had been misused. Once again, a mechanism is being permitted without the minister having to prove that there has been any misuse of public funds. Based solely on suspicion, he could cut grants and money that, as we saw in Attawapiskat, are sorely needed by the various communities.
Consistent with that logic, a number of reports will be required. In her speech this morning, the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan said that some organizations had to prepare more than 200 reports, which vastly increases the amount of work they have to do and artificially creates work for people who could be providing services to the public.
Do people really read all those reports, or are they merely there to generate work artificially? That is the question I would ask. Those communities need schools and drinking water. The people in my riding cannot even imagine what life can be like in an aboriginal community, because they have access to basic services. Consequently, they do not understand this gap within a single nation, where we have, on the one hand, people who have no drinking water or basic services and, on the other, those who enjoy a relatively decent life.
One may indeed wonder whether people really read all these reports and whether they are not the paradox of the Conservative government, which, as we have seen in recent budgets, is making systematic cuts to services. The main argument, if not the only argument, is that they want to reduce the needless workload involved in those services. Paradoxically, the government is creating an additional workload for groups that have been specifically targeted. This is nothing but red tape that few people can understand. In practice, only accountants will be able to understand the actual management implications of figures on certain lines of a financial report, and only they will be able to determine whether those figures are genuinely indicative of mismanagement.
Once again, I still tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, to consider that organizations, by default, are not poor managers. Aboriginal organizations are not fraudulent, and it is up to those who claim the contrary to prove it, not to create an artificial workload for all the communities, associations and entities that manage public funds.
