Thursday, March 20, 1997-- com: Aboriginal Affaires (38)

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, March 20, 1997

.0912

[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Raymond Bonin (Nickel Belt, Lib.)): I'll call the meeting to order.

[Translation]

Welcome to the meeting. We are now going to clause-by-clause study of Bill C-79, an Act modifying the application of certain provisions of the Indian Act to the bands who so decide.

[English]

I will try to suggest a process, and if any members are in disagreement, just let us know. For those of you who are new on our committee, this is the way we proceed: I suggest, you change it, and then we do it your way. The members of the committee run it here.

So we are here to go clause by clause. I've been advised by the government side that there are three amendments from their side. I will not speak for the Bloc Québécois, but we can expect that when we go clause by clause, of course, each and every vote will probably be on division, because they are against the process. Mr. Bachand is very capable of explaining to us their position. I will say at the outset that throughout the consultation...

[Translation]

I will say the following in French: I would like to thank Mr. Bachand for all his work and his continued co-operation. The word "co-operation" should not be misinterpreted. Mr. Bachand is a ferocious combatant who defended his position very ably and who, on the other hand, also knows how to respect his word. That is why I would like to thank him publicly.

[English]

Having said this, let's see what I can do next. The officials are here to assist us if we should need them. We will not require a formal presentation, unless any of the members require it, but we may at times ask for your assistance in clarifying certain positions. So we invite you to stay with us throughout. Did you bring sleeping bags? I don't think you'll need them.

.0915

We are now resuming consideration of clause 2. Mr. Hubbard.

Mr. Charles Hubbard (Miramichi, Lib.): Just before we begin looking at the amendments and looking at the proposed modified act, we should realize or hopefully all accept the principle that much of the evidence presented before this committee didn't really pertain to the bill per se but pertained, as Mr. Bachand says, in terms of the process.

As a committee we are not looking at the process; we're looking at the modifications to the Indian Act. Hopefully the evidence that was presented to this committee as it pertained to the proposed sections of the bill will be the only points that will be considered. Only a small number of people indicated concerns with certain aspects of it. I hope that in our deliberations we won't become involved in the periphery of what this process is about. The process this morning is merely to look at the modified act as it was presented to Parliament.

The Chairman: I agree with that position. However, we had a choice of asking the official opposition to speak on each clause and to indicate why they were not in favour of specific clauses. There are 45 of them.

I had agreed that Monsieur Bachand be invited to make a global presentation because their opposition to the bill is global. If the government side doesn't agree, we can renegotiate.

The process contributes to their position. They have taken that position because they don't agree with the process and all the things you made reference to.

I intend to allow that statement. If you require that I stick to each specific clause and rule out of order anything outside of it, I will be forced to do it because that's the right way to do it. Personally, I appreciate that they are willing to do it the way they want to do it.

[Translation]

Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds - Dollard, Lib.): I think that we are going to stick with what you said at the very beginning. The government's position is to examine the bill clause-by-clause and Mr. Bachand, as a member of the Official Opposition, will have the right to make any comments he desires regarding this bill.

[English]

The Chairman: So now we're at (d). Is that right?

[Translation]

Mr. Bachand, I will ask whether section 2 is carried, but before the vote, I will give you the floor.

Mr. Claude Bachand (Saint-Jean, BQ): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for providing me with this opportunity. I would like to tell my colleagues that we have come up with an expression, the "sleeping bag". We can either chose the solution that we have just adopted, or the "sleeping bag solution".

We have a right, which is to say something on each one of the amendments. I could therefore speak and oppose each amendment for a certain time. I could also ask for a recorded division on each one of the clauses, which would make us waste a great deal of time. However Mr. Bonin, with whom I have come to an agreement and who has offered me his co-operation, told me that the best way to go about it would be to make a statement at the beginning of the meeting. That is therefore what I will do.

We will take the time we need. If you want to move amendments on all of the sections, you may do so. As far as we are concerned, we will be opposed to all of the clauses because we are in fact opposed to the entirety of the process and not to the relevance or irrelevance of the clauses which are before us.

It has therefore been decided that I would start my little speech right as we begin the study of clause 1, which will not take more than a few minutes. Once this has been done, we will move to clause-by-clause and it is quite probable that at the end of the day, the bill will be adopted by the majority. I will indicate every time that the Bloc Québécois is opposed to a clause and I will stop there, otherwise the procedures might take quite some time.

I do not know whether some of you were here when we held a filibuster last year. It is an interesting experience, but I would prefer to avoid it today. As for the process, you know that at second reading, and the Bloc Québécois did mention it, we had seven speakers who expressed an opinion as to the procedure that should be followed.

.0920

As the Official Opposition, we then looked through the Red Book and took a close look at the issues dealing with Aboriginals. We discovered that the Liberal Party never made any election promises regarding changes to the Indian Act. Yet, a few years later, native people are saying that the federal government is not respecting the promises made in the Red Book.

So, we wanted to ensure that certain passages of the Red Book were made known, passages where it was stated, among other things, that the Liberal Party would consult with Aboriginals on all living conditions which would affect them or have an influence upon them.

I mentioned this passage in my first presentation, when we started to discuss the process. Personally, I feel that the government did not sufficiently consult Aboriginals on Bill C-79.

Of course, there has to be a discussion regarding consultation. What is a consultation? One must never forget that, when dealing with native people, we are dealing with individuals whose culture is very different from our own.

Minister Irwin told me that I was probably, in all of Canada's parliamentary history, the Indian Affairs critic who had written the most. I have several file folders full, since over the years, I have been writing to intervene with certain people. I write to the chair of the committee, to the minister, and even to some of you in order to solicit support or express a point of view. We feel that is consultation.

The typical example is probably the way that the chairman and I came to an agreement on process. We consulted with each other, we spoke to each other and we exchanged correspondence. That is important.

However, it must be understood that in native culture that is not the way to proceed in order to settle a difficulty. I am not going to go into the history of Canada and the history of Quebec and I do not want to go into volume one of the Erasmus-Dussault Commission report either, but it is quite clear from a variety of sources that with Aboriginals one must sit down and talk.

It is not surprising that certain Aboriginals receive letters and do not answer those letters. They require more than a mere letter. They need some telephone conversations as well as a few meetings. And that was not done on Bill C-79.

The minister told us that he did some consultations. Very well. In a non-native context, we can accept to consider that an exchange of correspondence constitutes consultation, but that is not the case in native culture. And I do believe that several witnesses also said this to you.

Therefore, this new way of dealing with election promises on the part of the Liberals was not understood by the natives because this is not what they were expecting.

Several witnesses told us that only modernization of the treaties was important. Others told us that it was through the inherent right to self-government that we would settle native issues. Yet others also told us that it was through land claims that they would be given a sufficient land base to allow them to become autonomous.

And yet there is a subtle nuance in the bill that must be addressed: this is a bill which modifies the option of coming under the Indian Act or not. But the Aboriginals do not see it this way since they believe that it will create two classes of individuals: those who accept to submit to the Indian Act and those others who will have chosen to opt out through the provisions which are before you.

For Aboriginals, Bill C-79 is therefore not the appropriate solution. We have seen that 550 of 610 nations indicated their disagreement as to the process, which accounts for 85 per cent of First Nations. You will also have noted that several witnesses who appeared before us told us that this or that had to be changed if we intended to impose a bill upon them. We have often heard, «we do not want this» and English expressions such as being railroaded and have something shoved down one's throat.

And that is why we said to ourselves that we could not participate in such a process. We gave our co-operation as Official Opposition through the criticism that we have made regarding government actions, which was totally acceptable. But I would go even further and state that native affairs have been treated a little bit like natural resources here in Ottawa in the past 100 or 122 years that we have had the Indian Act. They are a matter of federal jurisdiction. Therefore, Parliament, the minister, and the bureaucracy of the department have a word to say about how Aboriginal people live.

.0925

When I arrived in Ottawa and Mr. Bouchard told me that I was to be appointed Indian Affairs critic, I could not accept it. As far as I am concerned, we have to sit down with natives to see how to break the chains that constrict them in the Indian Act. And I am not the only to say so. There is also a great writer, Elijah Harper, who says so: to change the Indian Act just makes the ball and chain longer that it is under the current Indian Act.

I would agree with this opinion, because I went to visit the reserves. There are some where things are going very well. Where Aboriginals are no longer governed by the Indian Act is where things are going the best of all. The Cree and the Naskapis of Quebec, the Sechelt, all those who withdrew from the Indian Act are now improving their lifestyle. So you can understand that when the minister proposes amendments to what has been a prison for them in the past 122 years, we cannot agree.

Therefore, there are 550 communities that the minister told us that he wrote to. He says that people responded and that he is proceeding according to the opinions received.

But there is also the fact that the minister himself decided to make some changes just to clean things up. It is not a matter of bad faith on the part of the bureaucrats and on the part of the government, except that it is an unacceptable way of going about things.

Furthermore, when the minister contends that people wrote to him and we ask him who, he answers that he cannot tell us. Therefore, there is a flagrant lack of transparency. The documents we have have been censured. All that we can do is try to guess who may have written the letter. Any allusion to First Nations has been blacked out. Therefore, in our opinion, this is not a transparent way to proceed.

I do not want to impugn the minister's motives and claim that he wanted to leave his mark upon history. We have heard all kinds of things, among others that the laws adopted thus far were formerly proposals made by the Conservative Party which have only been updated a bit by the Liberal Party. I do not want to go impugn anybody's motives, but the difficulty in our opinion is rather large. The Bloc Québécois cannot accept that we now make amendments to the Indian Act.

There are people who warned us about the delays which might be caused to agreements on self-government or on land claims. There are departmental resources who are currently assigned to this project and the people feel that they are under the gun. We as well in the Bloc Québécois feel some pressure.

We are not fooling ourselves and that is why we are being much more flexible in regards to the procedure. I could hold the fort here for two weeks, even if I am not that interested in being here next week. I think that the only two people in the room might be myself and Mr. Bonin. And I am really not sure that my colleagues of the Liberal Party would be willing to hold down the fort for a week.

Basically, what purpose would that serve? We would hold a two-week filibuster. We would perhaps hear more people who are opposed to the bill, and yet the infernal parliamentary machine would grind on. I am not fooling myself: this will be adopted. There will probably be only one voice opposed, my own, and then we will move on to report stage. The report will also be adopted, as parliamentary democracy compels it to be, which I do not object to. It is the Liberal Party which was democratically elected to lead Canada. The Bloc Québécois was democratically elected as Official Opposition because it got more seats than the Reform Party.

Of course, I know what the end result will be when it comes time to vote in the House if the members of the governing Liberal Party stick together, since there are more of them than there are Bloc or Reform members, in spite of our efforts to get our point of view across, as I am doing right now.

That is why I thought it was important to first come to an agreement with Mr. Bonin as well as to obtain your assent. Obviously, as Mr. Bonin who is a great democrat said, the committee is the one to decide. He said that if we wanted to overturn his decision and study the bill clause by clause..., I think the solution chosen is the right one because otherwise I would have no choice but to wage a war. There will still be one, but it will be more civilized, there will be some rules. You will be able to go back to your constituency next week and I can do likewise. But the Bloc Québécois will keep up the fight. There is the report stage as well as third reading.

There are some other points that I may want to bring up in the debate. For example, one of the arguments that comes to mind is the fact that the department over the past 100 years has been using the tactic of dividing to reign. When an option is provided, some people adopt it and others refuse it and thus two categories of people are created.

.0930

To some extent this is what is happened with Bill C-31. At one time women who married white men were excluded along with all their descendants. When Bill C-31 set out to change this, there was an influx of new Aboriginals in the reserves and this gave rise to a major problem. This demonstrates that when the non-Aboriginal population decides to go too far without sufficient consultations, problems inevitably arise. But they are the ones who have to cope with the problems and live with the consequences, not us.

It so happens that my constituency does not have a reservation. That does not mean that I have no expertise in this matter. I visited many of them. The conditions are not the same as ours, their social and economic situation is much worse. These are the living conditions you find in the third world and even the fourth world, that is conditions far worse than in the former.

There is also the philosophical point of view. I have learned that the trust of the Aboriginal nations is not something that is developed here in Ottawa or that is based on a bill, it is a result of consultation and dialogue. In this respect, the Bloc Québécois does have an asset in that it considers these people to be representative. It considers the Assembly of First Nations, among others, to be representative.

Obviously there are differences, and I have observed them, among the 600 communities. The situation is not the same in Conne River and at the other end of the country among the Sechelt. It is not at all the same. However they do have people representing them and there is a common denominator in that they are Aboriginal. I consider the Assembly of First Nations to be important just like the Inuit Tapirisat, as well as the Metis who have come to meet us. These are important people whom I consult regularly.

When they start saying that certain things may not be going well, I make a point to finding out what is happening in the reserves. If they tell me that it is a serious problem, I have no choice but to take their word for it because once this decision taken by the Liberal Party is imposed on them - and it is not too late for you to reconsider your position - they are the people who will have to live with the consequences. The First Nations will be faced with the situation where certain communities decide to join in the process, and where others refuse. Once again, two categories of Aboriginal will be created. It will just be another application of that failproof method of dividing to reign.

My wish would be for us to find an agreement with the entire Aboriginal community in Canada. I think we need direct negotiation, perhaps with certain groups as was suggested by the Royal Commission of Inquiry. There may be about 50 or 60 nations in Canada we could have discussions with, rather than undertake them with each individual community making up these groups. I agree with that approach.

But the matter has to be discussed with them and they must be given an opportunity to start their social and economic development without remaining prisoners of the Indian Act and without the Canadian Parliament deciding that on such and such a date, when the Senate sanctions the Act, it will come into effect. We have heard what you have to say and now we are the ones to decide. This is the way the departments and ministers have been functioning for the past 122 years and we cannot accept this behaviour.

We must be careful to avoid the same mistakes. I do not want to find myself in the situation where I have not consulted anyone or engaged in a kind of phony consultation for the sake of appearances. That is not something I can do. It is important for us to listen to what they have to say. Of course we may not always be in agreement. In such a case, negotiations can be suspended and we can wait or else we make a counterproposal and we return to the table.

There is no doubt that Parliament does have control over the legislation. Parliament is the one to decide. But when we make decisions affecting people's living conditions, then in-depth consultation is necessary particularly when the people concerned are against the proposals. I think we have a legal and moral obligation not to impose such a legislation. That is why the Bloc Québécois has been opposed to it from the very beginning and it will vote against each of the clauses. I do not intend to come back and make a speech on each of the clauses.

I do not know how long I have been speaking, but if I have to do this another 45 times, you will probably be fed up. I will have the rug pulled out from under me and once again we will have to come back and deal with questions of procedure. But that is not the way it will happen because we will follow the procedure that the chair and I agreed upon. But I had to set the record straight at the beginning.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the chairman once again for his flexibility. If you would like to proceed, go ahead. I think we can do so very quickly. If you want to make any amendments and present your arguments, I do not intend to answer them individually because you already know why I intend to vote against the bill as a whole.

.0935

I think I have said all I have to say. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[English]

The Chairman: To committee members, I neglected to mention and I will make sure it's on record that my part of the agreement was that I would not table the bill tomorrow, Friday. Naturally they will want to debate it in the House. I will table it upon our return. I made everyone aware of that before agreeing to it and it's been accepted by all. I gave my word and I'll stick to it.

The procedure we use will be different this time. We usually say, ``Will clause 2 carry?'', and if somebody wants to debate it, we withdraw it and then come back to it. But today we will deal with each one of them as we proceed.

Clauses 2 to 4 inclusive agreed to on division

On clause 5 - Schedule

The Chairman: Mr. Patry.

Mr. Bernard Patry: We have an amendment to clause 5. Everyone received the amendment. Clause 5 on page 2 of Bill C-79 would read:

5. (1) At the request of the council of a band, assented to in a secret ballot by a majority of the electors of the band who are present at a meeting of the band called for the purpose, the Minister shall, by order, add the name of the band to the schedule. The Chairman: Therefore we're saying it would not merely require a band council meeting, but we would consult with the band members.

Mr. Bernard Patry: Yes.

The Chairman: That issue was brought up by many witnesses.

Do we wish debate on the amendment?

Amendment agreed to on division

Clause 5 as amended agreed to on division

Clauses 6 to 9 inclusive agreed to on division

On clause 10

[Translation]

Mr. Bernard Patry: Mr. Chairman, I move that Bill C-79, in clause 10, be amended by replacing line 40 on page 3 with the following:

10. Section 24 of the Act shall be read as subsection 24(1) and as

[English]

The Chairman: Is there any debate on the amendment?

Some hon. members: No.

Amendment agreed to on division

Clause 10 as amended agreed to on division

Clauses 11 to 16 inclusive agreed to on division

On clause 17

The Chairman: Mr. Patry.

Mr. Bernard Patry: I have an amendment that Bill C-79 in clause 17 be amended by replacing, in the English version only, line 5 on page 7 with the following:

including the following after subsection 15. The Chairman: Is there debate on the amendment?

Amendment agreed to on division

Clause 17 as amended agreed to on division

Clauses 18 to 45 inclusive agreed to on division

.0940

The Chairman: Shall clause 1 carry?