STANDING COMMITTEE ON ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS AND NORTHERN DEVELOPMENT

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES AFFAIRES AUTOCHTONES ET DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DU GRAND NORD

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Friday, November 19, 1999

• 0909

[English]

The Chair (Mrs. Sue Barnes (London West, Lib.)): Welcome, everyone. My name is Sue Barnes. I'm the chair of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. We are starting meeting 13, and will be dealing with the order of the day, which is Bill C-9, an act to give effect to the Nisga'a Final Agreement.

Before we start, because we have some new members joining us today and some local members from B.C., I will just take a moment to introduce our panel.

• 0910

Mr. Cummins is joining us in the hearings today as a local member.

Please go ahead and say hello.

Mr. John Cummins (Delta—South Richmond, Ref.): Good morning.

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Ref.): I'm Paul Forseth, and the name of my riding is New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby.

Mr. Jim Gouk (Kootenay—Boundary—Okanagan, Ref.): I'm Jim Gouk, the member of Parliament for Kootenay—Boundary—Okanagan.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand (Saint-Jean, BQ): My name is Claude Bachand and I am a member of the House of Commons with the Bloc Québécois. I represent the riding of Saint-Jean, which lies 25 miles south of Montreal.

[English]

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): Hello, everybody. My name is Libby Davies. I'm the member of Parliament for Vancouver East. Welcome to Vancouver, to all the committee members.

Mr. Gerald Keddy (South Shore, PC): Gerald Keddy. I'm the member of Parliament for South Shore, Nova Scotia.

Mr. John O'Reilly (Haliburton—Victoria—Brock, Lib.): I'm John O'Reilly, member of Parliament for Haliburton—Victoria—Brock in central Ontario.

Mr. John Finlay (Oxford, Lib.): I'm John Finlay, member of Parliament for Oxford riding in southwestern Ontario. I'm vice-chair of this committee.

Mrs. Nancy Karetak-Lindell (Nunavut, Lib.): My name is Nancy Karetak-Lindell. I'm the member of Parliament for Nunavut, the newest territory in Canada, in the eastern Arctic.

Mr. David Iftody (Provencher, Lib.): Good morning. My name is David Iftody, member of Parliament for Provencher in Manitoba. I'm also the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Northern Affairs and Northern Development.

The Chair: Okay. Now we have our witnesses, and I'd like to welcome all of you. We have a large panel today, but we have until 12 noon. I know you have important things to tell us. I'm going to welcome Ms. Roslyn Kunin, Mr. Mike Harcourt, Mr. John Richards, Mr. Robin Richardson, Mr. Rod Dobell, and Mr. Jim Fulton.

We are asking you to do your presentations within 10 to 15 minutes maximum. That will hopefully then leave the panel a couple of rounds of five-minute questionings. We will try to make this questioning as dynamic as possible to gather as much information as possible. The five-minute rounds, just to assist you in our work, include both the question and the answer. I will not cut you off mid-sentence; I'll let you finish your thought, but I won't let you start a new paragraph per se. It will be up to the next person whether they wish to pursue that line of questioning.

I will try to be fair in all of this. Occasionally somebody might get a few seconds or even a minute or two more than someone else, but it's to try to finish their thought, not to be unequal. So I think we all understand that.

As a commencing point, from the C.D. Howe Institute, I would invite Mr. John Richards, adjunct scholar, to start us off for the day.

[Translation]

Mr. John Richards (Adjunct Scholar, C.D. Howe Institute): I could begin in French, but seeing as we are in Vancouver, I will continue in English.

Mr. Bachand, I'd like to welcome you to our city, despite the rain that is falling today.

[English]

Ladies, gentlemen, members of the committee and anybody else who has come here to this meeting, let me first make a very brief personal introduction.

In my irresponsible youth in Saskatchewan I was a member of the Saskatchewan legislature and a politician for the New Democrats. Having been roundly beaten at the next election, I had to earn an honourable living. I'm now a middle-aged academic teaching at Simon Fraser University. I also work fairly extensively for the C.D. Howe Institute, which I have often described as corporate Canada at prayer, inasmuch as its offices are one-half of the Anglican Diocese in downtown Toronto. I take up the social conscience of the institute, inasmuch as I have edited a large amount of social policy material for the institute.

What I have delivered for the committee this morning—and I understand copies are presently being run off to be distributed—are excerpts of material dealing with aboriginal issues, some of which we have published at the institute. Before I get to it, let me make a couple of opening points.

First, aboriginal poverty, family distress, and the general alienation of aboriginal people from the mainstream of Canadian society is by far the most serious single social problem facing the country. This is particularly a problem in western Canada, because aboriginal people live west of Toronto in disproportionate numbers. In my home province of Saskatchewan and in Manitoba, they comprise, depending on how one defines aboriginal, one in eight of the population. Even in British Columbia here, where their numbers are smaller, about 6% of the population is aboriginal.

• 0915

Having said that, I'm going to proceed to what is the most controversial aspect of what I want to say. I think there are two broad dimensions of public policy as it deals with aboriginal people. One is the extent to which, given the profound cultural differences between aboriginal and mainstream industrial culture, we should accommodate cultural separateness. The second dimension is the extent to which we should economically make special provisions for aboriginal people. The two dimensions, then, are culture on the one hand and economic incentives on the other.

With regard to the cultural dimension, I consider myself a moderate. That means I don't agree with anybody in this province, which is a highly polarized jurisdiction. Certainly I am not someone who believes all Canadians are unambiguously unhyphenated Canadians and that there should be equal individual rights applied to all.

Wearing another hat, j'ai pas mal écrit sur la Loi 101. I have written a great deal on the need within Quebec for there to be linguistic protection for French as the lingua franca within that province. That inevitably entails restrictions on the use of English. I think Bill 101 is a very reasonable compromise that is, from my point of view, part of the constitutional foundation of the country.

To use another parallel, if it is the case for francophone Quebeckers that they deserve and should have legislation that allows, in a fundamentally constitutional manner, their provincial government to undertake legislation that is different from legislation with respect to language elsewhere in the country, then it applies all the more so to aboriginals. The differences culturally between francophone Quebeckers and anglophones in the rest of the country are much smaller than the differences between many aboriginals and many other Canadians.

Having said that, I think the treaty goes too far. It is the first flowering of the agenda of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. It is an exceedingly complex document. It has many provisions, the ultimate nature of which I think it's impossible at this point to determine. It is a document that I do not think will, a generation hence, be seen as the way forward.

Let me now move to the economic dimension. I say all of this fully conscious of being a middle-class, prosperous, white Canadian. The economic dimension has been gravely underestimated, I think, in the public debate about aboriginals in the last generation.

One of the documents you will see when you come to the package I have arranged for the committee is material reproduced from a publication of the institute several years ago, which I edited. The material, entitled “Market Solutions for Native Poverty”, is an exhaustive study of the problems of urban aboriginal employment.

One of the descriptive tables at the beginning of the study notes the extent to which aboriginals are themselves migrating from rural to urban, from reserve to urban.

Admittedly, there are some examples of urban reserves. I'm currently reviewing a book on some urban reserve experiments in Saskatchewan. By and large, however, I think we're going to see the next generation of aboriginals increasingly continue to migrate from reserves to cities.

• 0920

To have expended the amount of energy we Canadians collectively have done—via the Nisga'a treaty, via the royal commission, and via the agreement in the Yukon—on the undeniably real problems of isolated rural reserves is to do a grave injustice to the larger number of aboriginal people who are making the migration from the reserves to the cities.

Whatever the possibility in some instances to create reasonable terms of employment for aboriginals on reserve—for example, aboriginal fishing—I think the final conclusion has to be that, as for Ukrainian immigrants in rural Saskatchewan in the first quarter of this century, if they are to have a good life in this country they must leave the farm and go to the town.

It was hard for Ukrainians to do that. There was prejudice against them in the prairies in the 1920s. There is prejudice against aboriginals in the 1990s in the cities. But the future for the majority of aboriginals is going to be urban employment.

We are not doing nearly enough in Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, or Vancouver to make this transition from reserve to urban life successful. The thrust, the strategy, behind the royal commission and behind the Nisga'a treaty is not to emphasize what are the problems of transition from an aboriginal rural culture to an industrial urban one. The entire thrust of the royal commission is to emphasize the rehabilitation, the revitalization, which is something everybody of good faith wants, of rural reserves.

I conclude with the image of an aboriginal American scholar I greatly respect, Gary Sandefur, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin. He comes originally from Oklahoma. He has made the analogy, and made it publicly, that ideally aboriginal reserves should be, for aboriginal people as they make this very painful transition, equivalent to the role played by the Catholic Church in Ireland when the Irish made an equally painful transition over the last two centuries from rural life in Ireland to urban life in England and America and the cities of Ireland itself.

There are many more people of Irish extraction in England and in America than there are in Ireland itself. The Catholic Church played an important role as a repository of culture, as solace, as a way of maintaining continuity while people made this transition. My ancestors, the English, visited much discrimination, admittedly, on the Irish as they made this transition.

So that is the appropriate image. It is the image of a repository of culture, and very important. An analogy might also be drawn to the role the Catholic Church played in the first half of the 20th century, when Quebeckers made an analogous transition.

Ultimately, the transition will be made by the great majority of aboriginal people. All Canadians, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, are beholden to think very hard, much harder than we have done, about what can be done to make that successful.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Harcourt, please.

Mr. Mike Harcourt (Individual Presentation): Thank you, Chairperson Barnes.

I'm delighted to be here, as a political warrior happily retired after 24 years in the gladiatorial pit of B.C. politics, with a very simple purpose—that is, to urge the ratification and the bringing into law, before the end of the year, of the Nisga'a treaty.

• 0925

This is probably the most discussed, dissected, and examined piece of legislation this province has ever seen, with hundreds of public meetings, treaty advisory committees, regional advisory committees, a provincial committee to review it, the legislature, and this parliamentary committee. It has had a lot of scrutiny, and the time has come to act. I am here to urge this committee to make that recommendation as quickly as possible and to see it carried out, then to move on with the implementation of this first of many treaties.

Treaties to me are simply a way to bring about a modern relationship between the aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in British Columbia. And I would argue across this country that the old treaties and the issue of self-government are issues the rest of Canada is going to have to face up to very shortly, and that the approach we're taking in British Columbia to deal with the question of land claims and self-government—comprehensively, at the same time—is important. Whether you call it a treaty or an agreement, the essence is we need to change—as John Richards said—the terrible squalor most aboriginal people live in, and the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. I believe the Nisga'a treaty is a good start on that modern process.

I've had an interest for over 30 years, from being a young law student who worked with Tom Berger and some of the people who put the Calder case together, through to being a member of the city council and dealing with the urban aboriginal issues John Richards has talked about, to finally being mayor and deciding to get involved in provincial politics, basically because of this issue, to see a resolution of the Nisga'a's patient, martyred attempts to assert that their rights had to be dealt with, and to visit the Nisga'a territory as the just recently elected leader of the New Democratic Party, after a fierce leadership battle of one person.

One of my first visits was to the Nass Valley to visit the Nisga'a and to make a commitment with Larry Guno, a Nisga'a who was our MLA at the time, and Dan Miller, the present premier, that we would get on with that task and get on with some of the practical things that I thought needed to take place, such as building a bridge from Canyon City, instead of the swing bridge that people had to go across to get to their village, building a road through to Greenville, and settling a treaty.

We have done two of the three, or will have shortly. Hopefully the third will be the signing of this treaty and the ratification of it.

I won't get into it today, but I think there's a real need for this committee to examine the present bogged-down treaty process in British Columbia. We need to kick-start it, streamline it, and get on with integrating interim measures so that we can carry out the kinds of practical projects that John and others here will talk about, and this new relationship between the aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in British Columbia. Whether you call them treaties with the summit, or agreements with the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, whatever approach we take, I urge you to look also at the issue of proceeding rapidly with comprehensive agreements throughout the rest of the province.

I want to very briefly deal with some of the issues that have been raised: the question of what I see as the dual benefit of this treaty and other treaties, the question of cost, the issue of special rights, and calls for a referendum. There are others, but those are the three I'd like to touch on.

• 0930

First of all, in terms of benefits, I think the benefit for the aboriginal people is very clear. For the aboriginal citizens in British Columbia who are presently living a life without a lot of hope on welfare reserves, which we created through the Indian Act, this has to change to self-sufficient, self-governing communities where aboriginal people, particularly young people, have a life of hope, with education, employment, decent health services, and healthy communities.

For those who are non-aboriginal, we need to have this healthier relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people, with mutual respect, and live with each other in a much more civil society than we have now. And we need to bring certainty, the kind of stability the investment and entrepreneurial communities need to be able to participate in British Columbia.

We've had many studies. Price Waterhouse did a study eight or ten years ago that showed that at least $1 billion a year—and I think that's far too conservative—is flowing around British Columbia and not being invested here because of the uncertainty that not having treaties and comprehensive agreements between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people has brought us.

Major mining companies and others will not invest in this province if they see there's going to be a confrontation, a lawsuit. I think that is already harming the B.C. economy. If you're a British Columbian, I think you have to be aware of the fact that British Columbia has had only one on-load, to use government language, from Ottawa to British Columbia. That was the CPR. The rest has been off-loaded, whether it's equalization, or the taxes we send and the taxes we receive. We've sent far more benefits from British Columbia to the rest of Canada than vice versa.

This settlement and the treaty process itself will be only the second on-load that British Columbia will receive, probably for another century. It will probably result in around $500 million a year of Canadian taxpayers' money coming into this province, going into Williams Lake, Quesnel, Terrace, and the communities around this province. Let's take, for example, $8 billion, for the sake of argument, to be the gross cost—and I would say the net benefits are far more than that. This $8 billion that over the next 20 to 30 years would flow from the treaties would benefit British Columbians tremendously—both aboriginal and non-aboriginal. It would create probably $30 billion worth of economic activity. Those dollars would be circulating through the various communities of British Columbia and benefiting both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.

I think we have to look not just at the human benefits, but the economic benefits, particularly to British Columbia, of having the treaty settlements taking place.

We have a study that was done recently by Grant Thornton management consultants, a financial and economic analysis of treaty settlements in British Columbia, which outlines at least $4 billion worth of direct benefits of the treaty process to the B.C. economy.

The second major issue is that of special rights, that we're creating special rights for aboriginal people. I have two arguments for that. Number one, we have already treated the aboriginal people in this country in a special way. We took away their language and their religion. We prohibited the Nisga'a from hiring lawyers to assert their rights in our system of law. We didn't allow them to vote. We put them on reserves.

More particularly, this issue isn't about creating special rights. It's a very simple old principle of expropriation without compensation, particularly in British Columbia. We seized the aboriginal lands for our tremendous benefit. B.C. is a very fortunate place. But we didn't compensate the aboriginal people, as we did in other parts of the country, with inadequate treaties and with the reserve system, which has not worked.

• 0935

I see this as an issue of compensation so that aboriginal people can move to a more hopeful life of self-sufficiency and self-government, within the laws of Canada, within the Constitution of Canada. We're not creating a Swiss cheese federation of different countries. That's nonsense. That's not what is being talked about at all. Certainly it's not what I agreed to as premier.

Lastly, there is the issue of the referendum. I personally think it's a silly suggestion, particularly with the Nisga'a, because that wasn't what we agreed to with the Nisga'a. We agreed to take it before our parliaments; they would have a vote before the Nisga'a people. We didn't agree to a referendum in B.C. or Canada.

Secondly, who would vote in a referendum? Eighty percent of the settlement is coming from the Canadian taxpayer. Should every Canadian vote? Should it be just British Columbians? Should it be just the people who live in the particular area we're talking about? Should we do it for every treaty? We're going to have 50 or 70 treaty agreements negotiated.

The mind boggles, first of all, at the impracticality of it, and secondly, at the complexity of carrying that out for every treaty. That's why we have legislatures to debate and to decide these issues. That's why we have elections. I ran in 1991 saying we were going to settle with the aboriginal people through negotiation, not through litigation, not through confrontation.

I would urge you not to consider the referendum approach. I don't think it's appropriate and I don't think it would work.

Lastly, concluding the ten minutes, I would urge you, Madam Chair, and the committee to recommend Monday that we proceed with the ratification of the Nisga'a treaty in the House of Commons, then quickly through the Senate, in order to have a Christmas present for the Nisga'a and for those of us in British Columbia who think this is a just way for us to proceed.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

Miss Roslyn Kunin, chief economist of the Laurier Institution, please go ahead.

[Translation]

Ms. Roslyn Kunin (Chief Economist, Laurier Institute): I'd like to begin by welcoming you to the beautiful city of Vancouver, where it never rains.

[English]

First of all, I want to thank you for inviting an economist to come and speak. You all know what you get when you cross an economist with the Godfather: an offer you can't understand. I 'm going to work very hard to compensate for that and to be as clear as possible.

Secondly, you all know that when you get two economists you get three opinions, so I am going to disagree with my colleague, John Richards, who is also an economist. I'm going to present an alternative point of view to his, namely, I am going to speak in favour of ratifying the Nisga'a treaty as quickly as possible.

What gives me any authority at all to speak on the Nisga'a treaty is that the Laurier Institution undertook a very major study, completed about two years ago, looking at the economic impact of treaty settlements in British Columbia. We tried very hard to get objective research. It was funded partly by the federal government, but partly by first nations people, the corporate sector, individuals and so on, so that gave us a degree of autonomy to pursue this particular research and try to shed some light on a question on which there has been an awful lot of heat and not very much light.

The results of our study came out in this book, Prospering Together, which I trust the people around this table have seen. If not, we would be happy to make it available to you. The results are that treaty settlement in British Columbia in general and the Nisga'a treaty in particular, on which we've put a fair amount of weight, because at the time we were preparing this study it was the closest thing to an actual treaty—the agreement in principle was in place—that we had to work with in British Columbia... the results are very positive for first nations people.

Even though I admit to being one of those nasty economists, we did try to take a broad view. We did look at the social impact as well. We realized that issues like health and education have an economic impact as well as a human impact and need to be taken into account, so we did look at those issues. Again—possibly giving up my licence as a dismal economist—we found some optimistic results.

• 0940

One of the most optimistic results—this is information I found in the course of this study—came when we looked at the issue of education. The prospects of treaty settlement in this province had arisen, the negotiations had started, and the vision of treaty settlement was now a reality throughout first nations communities and particularly the Nisga'a community, after well over a hundred years of trying to achieve such status.

One of the things we noticed as a result of putting this treaty negotiation process in place came in the area of education. One of the reasons why many first nations people are doing and have done so badly relative to other Canadians, on reserves and even in the cities, has been lack of education. The high school dropout rate, the lack of formation of human capital—to use my favourite expression—has really deterred and limited first nations people, as it would deter any Canadian that did not at least finish high school and get more education.

Once the treaty process actually got rolling, we began to see that the high-school dropout rate declined among the kids in the Nisga'a area. It declined because, for the first time, the prospect of a treaty meant to these young people that they had more choices than they had in the past.

The choices they had in the past were to give up on their home, their family, their culture, their neighbourhoods, and their towns, and come to the cities and possibly disappear as a first nations person in the larger Canadian society but have a much better chance to prosper economically, or to stay on the reserve with their family, with the people they knew, and with the culture they were brought up in, but have pretty close to zero economic prospects.

Suddenly, the treaty settlement possibility gave them another alternative. It gave them the vision that maybe there could be some economic development, some resources, some opportunities, through self-government, through the funding, through the whole process of the treaty settlement, for them to have a chance to retain their culture, to stay with their family and friends, and to also have some opportunity for economic viability.

So the high school dropout rate declined, and that was one of the more positive signs we saw as we undertook this study.

On the economic side, I won't take too much time repeating what Mike Harcourt has already said. Our studies confirm that the economy of British Columbia, particularly the non-metro economy of British Columbia, which has been doing—if I may speak frankly—not at all well, has been hurt even further by the uncertainty that has been generated by the lack of treaty settlement.

If you don't know what the rules are, if you don't know how to have access to land, industries—not just mining, not just forestry, but tourism, high-tech industries, and all other industries—suddenly become much more uncertain and much less likely to invest in British Columbia, particularly in the areas where our resource industries have been suffering from cyclical downturns, from the Asian flu, and from the other things that have hit us.

Again, it is a minimum of $1 billion worth of investment in this province that is not taking place. Companies can live with almost any set of rules if they know what the rules are, but in this situation with lack of treaty settlement, there are no rules. Nobody knows what the rules are. Reasonable people then choose not to play the game.

On the issue of self-government, we need the treaty to encourage all Canadians, including first nations, to work within the legal framework that the people around this table are maintaining and enhancing. The treaty very clearly specifies that the laws of general application in Canada, including the Criminal Code and human rights laws, do apply. All the laws of general application in Canada will apply. Under the terms of an established treaty, these laws, again, will be recognized, will be respected.

• 0945

In first nations settlements across the country where there are no treaty settlements and no rules, where there is no agreement on who's on first, what happens with respect to access to resources, what happens with respect to banking, what happens with respect to tax laws, and what happens with respect to other issues—you all read the newspapers, I don't have to be more specific on the examples—we have visions of much more anarchic situations, where people say we don't know which rules apply to us, so we'll ignore these rules or make up our own.

The Nisga'a leaders have said to me, to my face, and in many other forums that they are not concerned about leaving Canada. What they want to do with this treaty, very urgently, is to join Canada. They have given up a generation of their people and their lifetimes to come this far. This treaty is a pact whereby the first nations can join Canada and participate fully, as equals, in Canadian society.

Then we have to look at the consequences of not ratifying this treaty. That is a real possibility. Otherwise, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it. What are the consequences of not ratifying this treaty?

The economic consequences, I will say unequivocally as an economist, are large and negative. They are hard to predict with any degree of exactitude, but they will be large and they will be negative.

The other major and final point I want to make concerns the process of getting to the treaty. Again, Mr. Harcourt has described this at great length. We as Canadians, as British Columbians, and as first nations people have sat down and negotiated in good faith to try to solve this long-standing problem and to reach a negotiated agreement that everyone can live with.

Anyone around this table who has ever been involved in negotiations knows negotiations are very hard. Anyone who has ever been involved in negotiations knows this is the real world, and you are never going to get a perfect settlement. Whenever people get up from the negotiating table, there always will be signs of unhappiness.

Take the simple case of labour-management negotiations. The workers' side is going to walk away and say, gee, we probably could have gotten a little bit more. The corporate side is going to walk away and say, gee, we probably gave away a little bit too much. My view is that if there is about equal grousing on both sides of the table, you probably have as fair and as balanced a settlement as we can ever hope to achieve in this real, human world in which we must live and act.

I think the Nisga'a treaty is such a settlement. It is not perfect. I have heard non-first-nations Canadians complain bitterly that it is too generous to first nations. I have heard Nisga'a people complain long and loud that they didn't get enough. Since the noise was about equal on both sides, I think this is a treaty all sides can live with. It can give us the certainty and can give us the opportunity to prosper together.

I'm going to close with a cliché from old western movies, if you will forgive me: “White man speak with forked tongue.” We negotiated, in good faith, in a process to reach an agreement that would be then ratified by the people at the table—namely, Canada and British Columbia and the first nations people—and put into place. If we renege on that process now, the old cliché will come true.

• 0950

We don't know exactly how every implication of the Nisga'a treaty will work out. I see large possible benefits. I see some uncertainties. I see some costs. I think the benefits will largely outweigh the costs. I think the treaty itself provides mechanisms to deal with the outstanding uncertainties with respect to fishing and so on.

I'm going to stop with a quotation I heard from first nations people at a conference in this province not that long ago: “Ask not where the path may lead. Go where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

A voice: On a point of order, Madam Chair—

The Chair: The audience does not talk and the audience does not speak. Order, please.

Please sit down in the audience. Thank you.

We will suspend for a minute to let this person finish trying to do what he's going to do.

• 0951

• 0952

The Chair: We will start again.

I'm glad you're shaking hands there, because you've just delayed the parliamentary process.

I encourage the courtesy of the witnesses before this parliamentary committee. This is not a town hall meeting but as if you're sitting in the House of Commons. It's a House of Commons parliamentary hearing, and most Canadians understand and respect Parliament and its operation.

I will try to maintain order. I will not exclude anybody, because I want them here. The public has a right to be here. The media has a right to be here. But the witnesses before this committee have a right to be heard and to give us their diverse opinions. As Canadians, we hear diverse opinions. I would call upon all people in this room and around this table to show the respect that every person here deserves.

We will continue with Mr. Robin Richardson, president of R.M. Richardson and Associates. Please commence.

Mr. Robin M. Richardson (President, R.M. Richardson and Associates): I agree with your remarks exactly, Madam Chair, having been a former member of Parliament myself.

Thank you for coming to British Columbia and for inviting me to be part of this witness panel.

I trust the clerk has handed out a copy of a study I did earlier this year as well as a little addendum package with maps and a couple of tables and a copy of my prepared remarks. I'm not going to read them completely, because I think I'd be somewhat constrained, but I'll refer to parts of them. I would ask the committee that these handout materials be published in Hansard, if that's possible.

The Chair: Actually, just for clarification for anybody who has any material here today, it will be appended to the record. That will be done for all of the witnesses.

Mr. Robin Richardson: Thank you very much.

My main conclusion as a professional economist is that if the Nisga'a treaty is properly costed, which is basically what I did in my study, there should be substantial financial compensation owing to B.C. taxpayers from the Government of Canada, mainly for valuable crown lands being transferred to the Nisga'a Nation.

As a British Columbian who wants to live in peace with his neighbours of all racial origins, my main hope is that compensation to B.C. taxpayers will help lessen tensions and bring cooperation from most British Columbians for the Indian land claims process.

The alternative to cooperation will be conflict, I fear, as British Columbia becomes increasingly balkanized and carved up into 60 or more Indian nation-states, each with sovereignty association status within British Columbia and Canada and each with its own race-based government with control over vast proportions of what were once crown lands enjoyed by all British Columbians.

• 0955

I'm going to skip a section on the government cost estimates. You may want to look at it, because it's a dismal story about how our governments, federal and provincial, have cost-estimated this Nisga'a treaty.

There are also comments from the Auditor General and the Minister of Finance. The Auditor General consistently in the last few years has criticized the department, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, for not costing land and other things in these treaties. Also, just last month, as I'm sure you are aware, members, the Minister of Finance reported that showing in the government's financial statements from now on will be $200 billion as contingent liabilities for aboriginal land claims. I trust that will put some pressure on proper costing of all land claims no matter where they be, British Columbia or elsewhere.

I undertook a study on behalf of a client back in 1996, when the first agreement in principle for the Nisga'a treaty came out, and then I updated it earlier this year. This study is still, as far as I know, the only independent cost estimate of the Nisga'a treaty. There have been many studies of the Nisga'a treaty, but nothing has been published that looks at the lands, which is the major missing link.

One of the tables you have before you shows the Nisga'a land is worth $406.4 million, and I used a very conservative cost estimation model, one, incidentally, that follows closely what the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs provincially has—they retained a consulting firm a couple of years ago to do this—but did not use. They ignored their consultants.

As part of this $406.4 million, there's $268.2 million for forest resources, $106.9 million for fisheries resources, $17.5 million for water resources, and $13.8 million for mineral resources. A methodology for each of those is found in my study.

To demonstrate how conservative these figures are—and I've been criticized by government particularly that they're too high—it should be noted that the B.C. government recently settled with MacMillan Bloedel for almost $100 million, giving up 32,000 hectares worth of timber rights on Vancouver Island. Forestry experts say the logging potential there is very similar to the Nisga'a Nass Valley. So if you apply the same compensation formula to the Nisga'a settlement lands, the value of the forest lands would be, using this approach, $622.5 million instead of my estimate of $268.2 million.

The long and the short is that when adding up the lands and all of the other costs, I came up with a figure of $1.3 billion as the cost for the Nisga'a treaty, compared with the government's estimate of about $485 million. That's everything—land, cash, the whole ball of wax.

The lands themselves are huge. There's a map over here, the big one that you have in your package. I hired a professional map-making company in Victoria to do that to scale. The Nisga'a treaty lands represent 84% of Vancouver Island—not the settlement lands, but the settlement lands plus the wildlife reserve, plus the remaining parts of the Nass area, which is the watershed. This is for 2,000 residents, 40% of whom are below the age of majority.

There are many other costs—I won't go into them in detail here—that the government didn't even look at. The forest renewal program is one. One Nisga'a spokesman said once they've settled, they're still going to go after provincial funds for forest renewal, to as much as $200 million. They may not get that, but that's their beginning negotiating position.

Then of course it's open-ended as far as the government costs that will still continue. The federal government, the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs, will still be pouring money in, as will the provincial government increasingly. It's an increasing trend in the last six or seven years.

Simply put, the total cost of the Nisga'a treaty in cash, land, and potential resource wealth could be $1.3 billion or more, not the $500 million now admitted to by the B.C. government. If you extrapolate that over the 150,000 aboriginal citizens to perhaps 60 or more treaties, the total cost for treaties could easily reach $35 billion or more and cover about one half of the land mass of British Columbia.

The issue of compensation for the B.C. taxpayer is in my study. It's been picked up in a few places, but not sufficiently, so I bring it to your attention. I used their own cost-sharing formula. Under the cost-sharing formula signed between the British Columbia and Canadian governments, and utilizing the numbers I have, I'd say the federal government should be paying the provincial government about $652 million, which represents B.C.'s 25% of the total cost, but right now it's 75% if you cost the lands properly. If you use a population formula, it could rise to as much as $805 million.

• 1000

Those are substantial amounts of money, which I've argued in my study is something the provincial government here should be going after to help spread the burden of the cost of this treaty more correctly across all taxpayers from coast to coast to coast.

The wise use of compensation payments from Ottawa by the provincial government could build a constituency of support for Indian land claims and turn a potentially negative situation into a positive one. The provincial government could spend it on anything they want. They could reduce the debt, cut taxes, spend it on health—the list goes on and on.

I will conclude by saying again that the proper costing of the Nisga'a treaty, as recommended by the Auditor General of Canada and hopefully as required by the federal Ministry of Finance, should lead to a substantial financial compensation owing to B.C. taxpayers from the Government of Canada, mainly for valuable crown land that's been transferred to the Nisga'a First Nation and subsequently to more than 60 Indian treaties that remain. This should lead to cooperation instead of conflict from most British Columbians—not all, but most—for the Indian land claim process.

British Columbia may avoid the worst of Balkan state history only by proper and prompt compensation from Ottawa for giving up its crown lands to the emerging first nation states. Compensation together with the wise deployment of these funds by the B.C. government for all present and future generations of British Columbians is the way to proceed along this difficult and hazardous road ahead.

Thank you very much.

Voices: Hear, hear!

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Now we'll proceed to a professor of public policy, Mr. Rod Dobell from the University of Victoria. Please commence when you're ready.

Professor Rod Dobell (University of Victoria): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. It's a real privilege for me be here.

Unlike the rest of the panel, I've never been a politician, never been elected. The closest I've been to politics was the opportunity to serve as research director with parliamentary task forces: the Breau committee on fiscal federalism and the Frith committee on pension reform. But that was a long time ago.

I do want to express my thanks to be here. Unlike many of the editorials say, despite much of the commentary about the lack of democracy, this is our democratic system in process, at work. It seems to me that's the system we should be following as we carry through to the end of the debate on the Nisga'a treaty.

I should say just a quick word about where I'm coming from, as they say. I did a PhD at MIT in mathematical economics and taught optimization theory at Harvard and the University of Toronto. Then, in a kind of misguided fashion, I went to Ottawa to teach people how to make decisions and actually finished up spending six years teaching decision-making in Ottawa. I discovered something more was needed; my education was badly lacking. I finished up working subsequently at OECD and in non-government organizations.

Now back, no longer a mathematical economist, I sometimes call myself an ecological-socio-political economist, reflecting the fact that for the last ten years I've been working on social learning, the management of atmospheric risks, economic instruments in forestry, and global change in marine resources.

With that background, it seems to me that much of the discussion of this treaty, particularly the discussion of costs, has failed to come to grips with the real issues, which have to do with management of resources and social programs. So I'd just like to make a couple of comments on the way in which a policy analysis, or an appraisal of this public policy, ought to be structured.

• 1005

The first point is that one has to be very clear about where we are starting in our analysis. We do start from a parliamentary democracy, a Constitution that entrenches group and collective rights, equal recognition of peoples as well as equal recognition of people.

Most particularly, it's important to recognize that we start with a contested initial distribution of titles, initial distribution of rights. We don't have clear title in this world from which the negotiations started. The Supreme Court of Canada has emphasized several times that we have to recognize the possible existence of aboriginal title where it exists. In the words of the Supreme Court, “aboriginal title is a right to the land itself”.

There is a burden, and the extent of that burden on crown title has to be resolved. The Nisga'a negotiation was one step in attempting to come to clarity on the existing balance of rights. So when we try to do an appraisal of the treaty, we can't start with the assumption that we non-Nisga'a have 100% of title and we're going to give up a certain amount and we will make an estimate of that cost. So it's important to be clear from where we're starting.

The second point is it's important to be clear on whose behalf we're doing the analysis. It seems to me that this group does the analysis on behalf of all Canadians, or all residents of Canada, not Canadians excluding the Nisga'a and not the non-Nisga'a taxpayer. If we're doing the analysis on behalf of all Canadians, then a transfer of title from the Nisga'a to non-Nisga'a or a transfer of title from non-Nisga'a to Nisga'a is a transfer within the family and within the group of all Canadians. It is not a cost to that group in total; it is a redistribution within.

That initial distribution has to be established. What we come out of the Nisga'a negotiations with is an agreed understanding of the existing balance of rights. In respect of fish resources, for example, an allocation is agreed that says 26% of quota allocation to one group, 74% to the other.

Those are not costs to the group as a whole. A fundamental proposition in economics is a cost is what you give up. The cost of something is what you have to give up to get it. When the title to access rights to forest operations or quota for fishing is recognized or even assigned to Nisga'a, the forest does not disappear and the fish still swim. The economic impact of that transfer flows if the new owners manage the resource differently from the old owners. If they manage the resource better, then we see an economic benefit. If they manage the resource less well, we see an economic cost.

The cost flows from the management and the incentives that lead to good management. It does not flow from the transfer, the paper title. The proposition can be extended with respect to the financing of programs.

If we look at the economic impact of this negotiated settlement, it seems to me we can argue that we're now going to get resource management closer to the communities that are on the scene. We are going to get something like community-based management of fisheries.

I just finished a panel that's worked for three years on global change in marine resources. Its major message was you have to get the rights and title clear. You have to get the incentives bearing on the individual manager and the individual fisherman in line with the overall social goals of conservation and stewardship. You have to get the incentives right. The proposition in lots of resource management circles these days is the incentives are more likely to flow in a fruitful direction if there's community involvement in the management. That's one thing the treaty brings forward.

• 1010

The program delivery, with a fiscal financing arrangement, enables us to have program delivery closer to home. The evidence is overwhelming that a sense of control, a sense of agency, a sense of involvement, means a healthier community. There's no question, suicide rates go down, health goes up, participation increases, social capital is greater, social cohesion is improved. The treaty provides for a block funding arrangement, much like territorial financing arrangements. It's a reordering of the financial arrangements, it is not a cost.

What do we have in the end out of the agreement? We have a better climate for investment decisions, more particularly a better climate for continuing negotiations, adaptive management, the resolution of the disputes that inevitably will arise. As you interpret these rules of the game in a changing world, you have to have a climate in which it is possible to sit down and work out how the rules of all the people in the community will change as the world changes.

So my basic point is that there are underlying economic realities here that go beyond the cost estimates. I told Robin earlier that I would argue that his cost estimates are inflated. But what's more important is that they're not relevant to the assessment of the treaty. If we look at Canadians, including Nisga'a, there's no case for compensation payments to the crown in right of B.C., because the settlement has clarified the existing balance of rights. If a transfer has occurred, it's internal.

I argued that the MacMillan Bloedel compensation package was silly anyway, but that was for recovery of clear title. We in British Columbia had already assigned the title to MacBlo, and we had to buy it back. I think we paid an inflated price, but that's a different argument. If the tenure rights were transferred from Interfor to MacBlo, we don't call that a cost. If they were to transfer from MacBlo to Weyerhauser, we still don't call it a cost and take the treasury to account and call it a taxpayer burden. In fact, we think of it as job creation. So I don't know why we should call these transfers costs.

There are lots of other questions I would go into if I had my usual 55 minutes, but let me conclude by saying that it's crucial to get the accounting stance right. From whose perspective are we doing the work? It's crucial to recognize that we're not assessing this negotiated settlement in response to the Supreme Court's injunctions to get the titles clear as an employment program. The underlying issue here is an issue of justice and fairness, and a social foundation for future development.

The Nisga'a Final Agreement isn't an income support program, and it shouldn't be assessed that way. It's not a mobility program. It's about redistribution and understanding of the initial balances of rights. It needs to be done anyway, whether John Richards is right or wrong about the possibility of having regional centres of economic activitiy in the face of a globalized economy, whether it's possible to have capitalism without convergence to one uniform model. Whether he's right on that or not, those are programs to be assessed down the road.

The Nisga'a Final Agreement has to be ratified anyway. Understanding on the initial balance and the existing balance of right has to be reached, and then we look at the issues of economic development. But we don't assess this agreement as if we were trying to run an income support program in regions of B.C. The injection of cash into B.C. will be great for business, but that's not the point of this treaty.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

We'll move to our final presenter this morning, from the David Suzuki Foundation, Mr. Jim Fulton, the executive director. Start when you'd like.

Mr. Jim Fulton (Executive Director, David Suzuki Foundation): Thank you, Madam Chair.

[Translation]

I apologize for the fact that this document is only in English.

• 1015

[English]

One thing the Nisga'as would always say at the opening of a meeting like this is simgigat sigidim hanak' k'ubawilksihlkw. They probably said that to you when they made their presentation earlier.

One of the things I find sadly missing from the public debate here in British Columbia is experience-based information. An awful lot of the journalistic and political cold rain that's falling on the treaty and on the process and on the Nisga'a people comes from those who have simply never been to Kincolith, have never been to Gitlakdamix, have never been to Aiyansh, have never been in the Nass. I don't think very many British Columbians yet understand that this is a very mature civilization. For thousands of years they have practised ayookw, which is just as complex in its elements as the Parliament of Canada or the Congress of the United States. This is a very mature civilization. I think those in politics and those in journalism who continue to rain on this do so either because they're fools or worse.

I had the honour to represent the Nisga'a and the residents of the great northern riding of Skeena for four terms, from 1979 until 1993. Over the past 20 years I've had the distinct honour of visiting the Nisga'a communities in the Nass many times, often for long periods of time. I considered my office to be the democratic home for the Nisga'a representation when they travelled to Ottawa. I have publicly supported the treaty negotiations between Canada, British Columbia, and the Nisga'a, and publicly support the final agreement.

I want to begin with a reflection on the immense contribution the Nisga'a have made to the economic and political life of our country. Price Waterhouse were commissioned to study the value of the resources removed from Nisga'a territory just in recent decades, and the amount was found to be in excess of $2 billion. No compensation was paid to the Nisga'a. The treaty offers $190 million over 15 years. If one wants to use some economic figures that we've heard earlier, that's less than 10% of what was taken. Nisga'a territory in the Nass region exceeds 25,000 square kilometres, and the treaty before us provides title fee simple to only 8% of the land.

Many false statements have been made about the Nisga'a and about the treaty. Certain individuals continue to make these false statements despite being factually corrected. Some media outlets continue to publish wilfully ignorant and factually incorrect material. And perhaps as bad, there is a nearly complete exclusion of facts that support the treaty in terms of its benefit to all British Columbians and all Canadians.

Let me give a couple of examples. The proclamation of the treaty will give Ottawa and Victoria, as well as others, certainty in relation to over 23,000 square kilometres of territory presently encumbered by Nisga'a title and rights. Any members who haven't read the Delgamuukw decision from December 1997 should. What is that worth? How many billions? Using Mr. Richardson's formula, the Nisga'a are giving Canada and British Columbia lands worth more than $10 billion because that's what the law says and that's what Canada's Constitution, section 35, means.

Only cost analysis has been the focus. What about the benefits of reduced fishing effort and catch on weak runs or in years of poor returns? What about the benefit of taxes paid to the crown by Nisga'a taxpayers and business? What about the fact that Nisga'a revenues will be going to build local business and services? What about the benefit of hundreds of millions from Ottawa to the British Columbian northwest, which will move into communities like Terrace, Prince Rupert, Kitimat, or Smithers?

A closer look at the benefits to all Canadians of stopping the systematic aggression and moving to certainty, economic development, and peaceful co-existence is rarely done, and it must be done.

In my years working with the Nisga'a people, time and again I was saddened by the negative social, economic, and political consequences of the Indian Act and of the negative effects of reserves.

Let me spend a moment on this. This treaty breaks the yoke created in 1867 by the Constitution's “lands reserved for Indians”, or what are known in the Indian Act as reserves, which are owned by Canada for the use and benefit of Indian bands.

The economic impediment of this arrangement meant that Nisga'a entrepreneurs could not borrow against land or use land as collateral. Nisga'a communities were deprived of an essential economic tool. Canada, without compensation, removed fishing rights by allocating licences to traditional Nass River fisheries to others. Nisga'a fisheries on the Nass have been awarded the highest federal conservation awards for their selective harvesting and protection of weak stocks. The forest resources on Nisga'a lands have been granted to others, and the ombudsman notes, in a recent report on tree farm licence number one, massive overcuts, waste, and destruction.

• 1020

In the book Falldown, by Dr. Patricia Marchak, released earlier this year, the Nass was identified as overcut by over 100%. This means that in the chief forester's own calculations, long-term harvest levels, known as LTHL, and the annual allowable cut are off by over 100%. There is not enough mature or second-growth forest to allow a continuation of present levels of cut. The destruction of the Nass Valley forests by the province has long been a source of sadness to the Nisga'a and other knowledgeable British Columbians. The loss of wildlife and a host of harvestable plants, along with the documented destruction of fish habitat, has been a national disgrace.

Through all of that, after 112 years of representations to the crown, the Nisga'a Nation has offered to sign an honourable settlement to the land question. The Nisga'a economy survived Parliament's disgraceful 1927 act prohibiting the raising of money by any Indian band to prosecute any claim, particularly respecting land. As I'm sure all of you know, that legislation was specifically targeted at the Nisga'a.

The Nisga'a survived the destruction of the potlatch and traditional feasting. This was comparable to the banning of democratic institutions.

The Nisga'a survived brutal attempts at assimilation, including wide-scale sexual abuse and the tearing apart of families, language, and culture with residential schools. Only a handful of Nisga'a ever got jobs from the forest companies, from road construction, or from government. The Nisga'a have, however, maintained a close relation with the land and the living resources. Denied resource extraction rights, denied funding leverage, denied jobs, denied funding, encouraged to fight for Canada in two world wars and then denied the right to vote when they returned, until the 1960s—these are survivors.

Canada has been less than honourable. British Columbia has been less than honourable until now. Some politicians and some media observers make false arguments about the treaty. It is wilful ignorance of the terrible record of Canada, British Columbia, and the resource companies toward this proud first nation.

Surely the Nisga'a may and will make some mistakes as they build a new economy, but I truly believe they will lead on conservation, protecting biodiversity, protecting salmon habitat, protecting the forests, and building a truly sustainable economy for generations to come. I have spent 20 years working with the Nisga'a to build access to the human and economic rights that most Canadians take for granted.

The Nisga'a have a proven track record and a competence in running their own education and health systems, small business, fisheries, and forestry. They are masters of many crafts and carry forward an ancient and intact culture.

With the return of some land, some resources, and a level playing field of governance, the Nisga'a treaty will prove to be a wise investment in people, place, and economics, in British Columbia and in Canada. And as members of the House, I can assure you that you can be proud the day you rise to vote for it.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Fulton.

Thank you to all the panellists for your opening presentations.

Before we go to the first round of questioning, I want to announce that we are joined by Val Meredith, who is the member from—let me get this right—South Surrey—White Rock—Langley, in British Columbia. Is that right?

Ms. Val Meredith (South Surrey—White Rock—Langley, Ref.): It is.

The Chair: She will be substituting for another member of the Reform Party for today's hearings.

We are commencing the first round of questions with Mr. Gouk, from the Reform Party. Please go ahead for five minutes.

Mr. Jim Gouk: Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for taking the time to come here today. Regardless of which side of this you happen to be on, it's good that you're participating.

Given the short amount of time I have, after more than an hour of presentations, I'd like to hit on a couple of points, mainly from Mr. Richards and Mr. Harcourt, but I have a couple of other observations as well. I'd like to start an observation with Mr. Richards and sort of jump the gun on the rest of the parties around.

• 1025

Mr. Richards, you are probably going to be discredited because your study was done at the request of a Reform member of Parliament, and of course that automatically makes you discredited. I would point out that Ms. Kunin was hired by the Liberals and the aboriginal groups, of course, so there is at least a quid pro quo for when they do start to attack you, sir.

Mr. Richards, you mentioned that there is going to be quite a migration from the reserves to the cities, so I would question how then the Nisga'a treaty is going to benefit anyone, given that there are no real portable benefits per se when you take this amount of land and money and you put it into the hands of the aboriginal leadership, not the individual. When they leave the reserve, it's questionable what benefit they're taking with them. In fact, given that two-thirds of the Nisga'a live off the reserve, I've always questioned what benefits they get out of this at all.

You, together with Mr. Harcourt, touched on another matter. Yours specifically referred to social conditions, the problem of social conditions.

Mr. Harcourt, you mentioned that there's a need to change the terrible squalor aboriginal people live in. Is money the answer? We have the Stoney, 3,300 people, some of them living in the squalor you mentioned, and yet they have a $50-million-a-year income.

There's a variety of examples around, also here in British Columbia. There was a front-page headline this week in one of the Vancouver papers showing that although one of the bands here is extremely well off, some people are living in rusty trailers and some are on waiting lists for housing for years and still not even being allowed to get into housing on the reserve.

On the Nisga'a themselves and just the federal and provincial money currently provided to the Nisga'a, using the figure of 2,000—which I think is slightly generous—men, women, and children on the reserve, there is over $15,000 per capita going in there now, yet they have these problems that we're trying to address with this treaty. So I would say that's not really the answer.

Mr. Harcourt, you in particular, and Mr. Fulton, mentioned the question of certainty, that we have to have certainty, and you also said in order to avoid confrontations and lawsuits.

We heard from the Gitanyow, and the Gitanyow have said that 80% of the land the Nisga'a are getting under the government that you formerly led is Gitanyow land, and it's a very serious violation of trespass. They said they will defend their land, and they invoked such scenes as Bosnia, Chechnya, East Timor, among others. Their comment was “We will defend our land. When you violate our land by trespass you'll get two warnings. The third time is much, much more serious.”

It's either lawsuits or confrontation and violence, so I don't see how we're getting certainty. We're in fact causing perhaps an even worse situation than we had, because we didn't follow what the treaty process says should be an end to these overlaps prior to signing any final agreement.

Finally, Mr. Fulton mentioned the magical 8% figure, how the aboriginal people of the Nisga'a are only getting 8% of their claim. But there are three sets of maps. The first map, taken in part from the Calder decision, the Gitanyow say they have no dispute with. It was Nisga'a land; it was recognized that it was Nisga'a land. But then, in two successive maps, the boundaries expanded, and that's when they started claiming land that the Gitanyow say is clearly theirs, not only through oral history going back 10,000 years, but recorded history going back 130 years. So now we have this incredible confrontation.

The land the Nisga'a are getting, just to put it in perspective, is not 8% of the questionable land; it's 25% of their original claim. So yes, that's a down-switch as well, but it's a significant difference from that. So when I hear people on one side of the legislature—

The Chair: You have 15 seconds left of your time. I will allow short answers.

Mr. Jim Gouk: When I hear people saying there are false figures being thrown out by those opposed to this, it works on both sides, sir.

The Chair: I'm going to allow a short answer to one of the questions. Would you like to choose who you'd like to have answer?

Mr. Jim Gouk: It's principally to Mr. Harcourt and Mr. Richards that I address myself, whichever one wants to respond.

Mr. John Richards: Can both of us respond briefly?

The Chair: Yes, very briefly, please.

• 1030

Mr. Mike Harcourt: I have three brief points. One, I don't automatically discredit what comes from the Reform Party. John Reynolds is an old friend, and I've been working with Val Meredith on a number of issues, so don't take my remarks personally. I happen to believe in the treaty process in this treaty.

In terms of squalor and money being the answer, money isn't the answer. We need time, goodwill, and acceptance that mistakes are going to be made as we move from 100% failure—what we have now—of welfare reserves that were created under the Indian Act. I think it's going take a generation to implement the treaties, and at least two generations to deal with the dysfunctionality we have created through the last one hundred years. So I don't think money is the answer.

I think hope is part of the answer. I think capacity-building and more resources are part of the answer. That's the reason why I wouldn't agree to an Alaska-type settlement of handing over a cheque for $100 billion. That's why we've said the capacity-building and the resources would be over a 10 to 20-year period. So I agree with you that money is not the answer to some of the examples you've given.

Lastly is the issue of certainty and the Gitanyow claim. There is a process to deal with that. I'm not going to judge whether the Gitanyow claim is valid or not, but there is a recognition that it has to be sorted out, and the treaty is subject to that. I think everybody is aware of that.

It is a far better process to go through this approach than to go through an Oka or a Gustafsen Lake. The roadblock confrontation approach doesn't work. The courts have consistently said aboriginal rights exist, they haven't been extinguished, so negotiate. I think that's what we're attempting to do here today.

The Chair: Mr. Richardson for a short answer, please.

Mr. John Richards: Hopefully you now have the material I distributed. If you look at the urban population of selected ethnic groups, as recently as 1951, fewer than 7% of aboriginals lived in an urban context. In 1991 it was 42%, and by the 1996 census it will undoubtedly be greater yet.

A colleague, Alan Cairns, who is about to publish a major volume discussing the royal commission, made the crucial point I want to make. I quote:

Although the Commissioners did not and would not phrase it this way, one of their crucial decisions was whether to stress the economic and other benefits of urban existence for aboriginal peoples, or whether to stress the contributions of self-governing land-based communities to cultural survival. The Commissioners' data clearly indicates various positive features of the urban experience compared to the on-reserve experience. The projected growth of jobs is much more favourable in urban locations. Incomes are significantly higher, educational attainment is superior, labour participation rates are higher and unemployment rates are lower, the likelihood of holding a full-time job is higher, the population of social assistance recipients is much lower. Indian people in urban settings have the highest life expectancy among aboriginal peoples. Various indicators of social breakdown—family violence, suicide, sexual abuse, rape, alcohol and drug abuse—are markedly higher for the on-reserve Indian population over the non-reserve population. On the other hand, cultural retention is weaker for the latter, participation in traditional activities diminishes, and language loss is greater [...]

There is a painful trade-off that aboriginals and non-aboriginals must face up to.

The Chair: Thank you.

I'll remind all the colleagues around the table that it is your rules I am trying to enforce. You asked for five-minute rounds by your consensus. We're at nearly nine minutes and forty seconds on the first round. That will not continue. I will enforce the rules. If people choose to use their five minutes to ask ten questions and not allow room for answers, there will be no answesr. I'm giving warning now because I'm going to enforce the rules you have asked me to enforce.

We'll move on to the second questioner in the first round. By my clock, we should be able to have at least three rounds around this table and get a lot of questions and answers in.

[Translation]

Mr. Bachand, please begin.

• 1035

Mr. Claude Bachand: Madam Chair, this is one of the most interesting groups of witnesses that we're meeting with this morning. Unfortunately, because of the rules of procedure, the time available to us doesn't allow us to question everyone. So I will spend more time with Mr. Richards than with Mr. Mike Harcourt.

With respect to the others, I would like it if we could exchange business cards because there will certainly be some follow-up to your presentations, all of which I found very interesting.

[English]

Monsieur Richards, I want to tell you that you have an excellent French-speaking language. I'm looking forward to meeting you at the break, so we can have a little French chat.

[Translation]

Mr. John Richards: Thanks to the fact that I'm married to a Francophone.

Mr. Claude Bachand: I'd like to come back to a fact that you mentioned on a number of occasions, the fact that Aboriginals are leaving the reserves. I had the opportunity and the honour to twice visit the Nisga'a territory and I visited a number of native reserves there.

In my opinion, in the current context, the solution is not simply staying on the reserves. I've seen what goes on there. I went to the Pikangikum reserve, in northern Ontario, and I saw appalling things there, Mr. Richards. I saw 17 people living in a small four-room house. I saw people with nothing to do but wait for their social assistance cheque at the end of the month because there were absolutely no jobs on these reserves. And I saw young people with no future.

On the Pikangikum reserve, it is customary to bury the dead next to the family home. It was a real shock for me when I saw four adolescents, aged 12 to 17 years, who had committed suicide during the year, and were buried next to their parents' house. If I were a young native person on the Pikangikum reserve, I would pack my bags and run as fast as I could to Toronto or somewhere else.

That is part of real life on the reserves. So, the solution doesn't lie there. The solution is now to give these people a certain amount of self-government so that they can decide their own future. We will provide them with enough land so that they can provide for their future and we will respect their culture. If they have their own government, they will succeed in doing so.

In my opinion, that is the solution. I will ask you to comment quickly on that later.

And with respect to you, Mr. Harcourt, I would say that British Columbians aren't the only ones who believe that Ottawa gives back less than it receives. That is an important premise of my party, the Bloc Québécois. I know you are retired, maybe you could run, during the next federal election, under the Bloc Québécois banner in British Columbia. You would make an excellent candidate.

Voices: Ah, ah!

Mr. Claude Bachand: Incidentally, you talked about the economic impact. You said, and I found this important, that Ottawa was finally granting $500 million to British Columbia to provide economic benefits.

I'd like you to explain this a little bit more because you didn't mention that the Agreement that we have here contains a whole section which stipulates that these people will begin to pay taxes to the two levels of government: in 8 years, taxes, and in 12 years, income tax. It seems to me that this should have a major impact and that this will be a big change for the Nisga'as. They must have agreed to certain sacrifices to get to this point.

I'd like to continue speaking, but unfortunately, or rather fortunately, I'd like to give you the time to respond to these questions.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Harcourt.

Mr. Mike Harcourt: Mr. Bachand, I have said for a long time that British Columbia and Quebec share a great deal in our sense of alienation sometimes from Ottawa. We have a great deal in common, which is why we want to make sure Quebec stays part of Canada. It's an ally of British Columbia.

On the question of the $500 million, I agree with Rod Dobell. I think the talk about costs is a shell game, to a large extent. The $500 million from the Canadian taxpayers will be invested back into the Nisga'a territory and communities surrounding the Nisga'a territory—Terrace, Kitimat, and other centres. It will be of tremendous benefit.

None of that money will go to Swiss bank accounts. It's going to stay in British Columbia and be invested in the British Columbia economy. It will be used to buy building supplies and cars, and invest in joint ventures with non-aboriginal business people. The real issue is that it will be there as a resource to help build capacity away from the reserves you talked about, to self-governing, self-sufficient communities.

• 1040

The issue you talked about was choice. The aboriginal people will have the choice to decide to go to the big cities and the bright lights, or stay in rural-based communities in a very rich province, in terms of natural resources and a whole series of other benefits.

The tax provision was the making point of the treaty. I talked to Joe Gosnell the day before he was going to meet. I told him I could not get the people of British Columbia to accept the treaty without a provision that the tax exemption for their new self-government would be lifted, after a certain period of time for capacity-building. That was the bottom line for me. We were going to, at a certain point, phase in sales tax and income tax. As the Nisga'a became employed and self-sufficient, they would be paying a fair share of taxes for the basic services of health, education, social services, and the other services that are provided. So you're right in pointing that provision out.

The Chair: Thank you. The time is up.

Madam Davies, go ahead.

Ms. Libby Davies: Thank you very much, Chairperson. I'll try to keep my question brief.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here today, because I think it is important to have this debate and have questions answered. I really appreciate some of the very wise words that are being made today.

In particular, the one issue I want to focus on is the question that was raised of resource management. I think Mr. Dobell, Mr. Harcourt, Mr. Fulton, and others really raised this issue in a way that I don't think has been examined before. Mr. Dobell commented that this treaty was a manifestation of a just redistribution within the group, within the Canadian family. I think that's a very important comment.

One of the things that has really disturbed me, and I think a lot of people, is the divisiveness of this debate over the treaty—that it's a “them and us” kind of situation. In fact, even today we hear from Reform members who use phases about what they are getting—“What are we giving up?”—and even in how we analyse this: “Are we giving up something? Is another group we're not a part of getting something?”

I think your comments, that this is really a treaty that deals with resource management, social issues, social justice, and restoring the rights of a group that has been very oppressed by white society, are very pertinent to this debate.

I'd like to focus on that for a minute and ask Mr. Dobell, Mr. Fulton, and Mr. Harcourt to discuss the question of stewardship and resource management. When we talk about benefits, what does this treaty provide to all of us, in terms of an accountability and a democratic practice of resource management, that maybe is different from what we've seen over the last hundred-plus years?

You've talked about how we have desecrated the forests and how our society has plundered these natural resources. So I'm very interested to know your opinions on how the resource management laid out in this treaty is actually something we will all benefit from. Perhaps you would care to comment on that.

The Chair: Who would you like to go first?

Ms. Libby Davies: Mr. Dobell and maybe Mr. Fulton.

The Chair: Mr. Dobell.

Prof. Rod Dobell: You've really made the point. We are talking about stewardship. The arrangements represented in the Nisga'a Final Agreement provide for joint management over substantial areas of forest. They provide for devolution of responsibility for environmental management within a general framework, so-called “meet or beat” standards. They require that where the Nisga'a take responsibility for environmental management, they are free to set their own standards, provided they meet or beat the provincial standards for environmental management. They can establish superior standards, where they wish to do so, for their own purposes.

• 1045

Joint management is provided in the treaty in wildlife areas for resource management more generally, with provisions for access by all the public. The institutional arrangements that are built into the final agreement for purposes of resource management reflect what I would take to be the emerging and maybe prevailing view as to the best way in which institutional arrangements can reconcile a need for some overall coordination, some standard that reflects the global character of a lot of ecosystems. At the same time, you have local discretion in interpreting the application of those standards in particular circumstances.

The Chair: There's still time, Mr. Fulton.

Mr. Jim Fulton: Thank you, Madam Chair. Like Mr. Dobell, I think Ms. Davies has described it rather well.

To give you just a little bit on our take on the treaty and the language in it, we think there is a great move with the language towards conservation-based sustainable development. Those who know a bit of the history of the Nisga'a in relation to their cultural attitudes toward protection of the land and conservation of biodiversity need look no further than the Amax files, which are available in Ottawa. Almost alone, they stood up for all British Columbians to protect the fisheries and the marine environment from the placement of more than 100 million metric tons of toxic contaminated waste into the salmon grounds of British Columbia.

Similarly, it was the Nisga'a who triggered the ombudsman's office to undertake the first resource management analysis in B.C., in the analysis of tree farm licence number one, which is the large area lying just to the south of the settlement areas that are described in the treaty. Although the management practices have changed, as I've said in my presentation, the cut on the lands surrounding the territories that are being ratified is in excess of 100%. It's a scandal of immense proportions, and the committee itself might want to look into what's been happening during this period leading up to ratification on very important lands that are not being managed for long-term conservation biodiversity in the area surrounding Nisga'a land.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Mr. Keddy, it's your turn.

Mr. Gerald Keddy: Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd also like to welcome the guests here.

I'd just like to clarify things a bit more on the comment made by Mr. Fulton on the sustainable cut or non-sustainable cut on Nisga'a lands. The cut is 250,000 cubic metres of wood going out of Nisga'a lands every year. The Nisga'a logging agreement allows for 115,000 cubic metres of sustainable allowable cut. There's a tremendous difference there.

There were a couple of comments made here, so I'd like to explain something to the audience and to the witnesses. As a member of Parliament, it's difficult when you have six witnesses, when you have five minutes to ask questions, and there's a lot of debate here that should occur and some debate between witnesses that should occur. It's difficult for all of us. And I'm losing time as I'm saying this, so—

The Chair: The clock's ticking.

Mr. Gerald Keddy: First of all, there was a statement made by Mr. John Richards about urban ghettos and the process of first nations moving from reserves into the cities, and about the fact that the process is bound to continue. I would agree with that statement, because it is bound to continue. However, my argument against what you had said—and I'd like Mr. Rod Dobell to speak further on this—is the fact that there is the whole process of empowerment, the whole process of allowing economic opportunity on reserves, the whole process of allowing first nations to benefit from the treaty-signing process. Where we look at it, we realize the suicide rate goes down, general health is improved, certainly education is improved, we have more high school graduates, we have more university graduates, and this allows other things to happen.

I would compare it, but I'd make a different comparison from the Irish comparison. I would compare it to general Canadian society and the move from rural to urban. I think that's the comparison that needs to be made. Most of us can look at our own families, generations of farmers or loggers in eastern Canada or western Canada or wherever we happen to be. We can look back through our own family history to generations ago, when there were no university graduates, when there were no high school graduates. And that's within our lifetime.

• 1050

You can look at the levels of education. As opportunities arose, people moved off the farm. They moved into urban settings, and many of them did very well in urban settings because they were educated. But when that occurred two or three generations ago, they went to the urban areas—and especially women, because there were no opportunities in the country except for marriage. So they went in, became educated and became trained, and they had opportunities to advance themselves.

I'd like a little more explanation of that from Mr. Dobell.

Prof. Rod Dobell: Thank you.

On the second question first, the stewardship conservation question, there is an important argument that says stewardship flows from a situation in which a group does have a sense of attachment, a sense of place that puts them with the resource, so there is an argument that we will see better stewardship with community-based management. The institutional arrangements set out in the final agreement certainly push in that direction.

I think John Richards has introduced a very important point here. We have to look at the issue of cultural survival and the question of economic prospects as distinct questions. I would argue it's somewhat of an open question yet, about whether it's inevitable that the trend away from a decentralized economy has to continue altogether in a capitalist democracy in a global economy. It's debatable. The question is not resolved as to whether you can have capitalism without complete convergence of the economy toward a single corporate model. I guess I'm of the group that is hopeful that you can have cultural survival without having complete assimilation of all economic activity into the single globalized corporate framework.

I'd be more hopeful than perhaps he is about the kinds of changes that are envisioned in the final agreement. If one looks forward to see the changes in the reserve setting that ought to flow from those provisions, then one could see a viable regional economy not just for Nisga'a, but for people in coastal communities all across B.C. and people in remote communities all across B.C.

It seems to me that this is where the Nisga'a Final Agreement lines up very closely with the hopes many of us have in Canada that we can carve out a way of life separate from the United States, separate from the U.S. economic model, and that within Canada groups can carve out separate ways of life in accord with their own cultural traditions and without giving up their claim to a place in the mainstream economy.

The Chair: Mr. O'Reilly.

Mr. John O'Reilly: Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you very much to the witnesses for attending. I have about 30 minutes' worth of questions, Madam Chair, but I'll try to put them down into these thought-provoking presentations that have been made to us. I'll start off with some comments perhaps on Mr. Richards' presentation.

I think there are 3.5 million people in southern Ireland, with 4.5 million of Irish descent in Canada, and 41 million in the United States. Obviously, by my name, I had to comment on that.

You know, during the famine and the loss of people's ability to provide a livelihood for their family—particularly in Cavan County, where my family came from—the English established soup kitchens. You had to denounce your religion to feed your family. I don't know how that parallels with the Nisga'a agreement. it was a different scenario in a different time, but that's what brought a lot of Irish people to Canada.

Madam Kunin, I recognize the important factor of continuing education beyond the age of sixteen for everyone. I have said in Parliament that the three happiest years of my life were in grade eight.

Voices: Oh, oh!

Mr. John O'Reilly: Of course that's not true, but we'll put it in the record anyway to add some humour.

• 1055

I'm going to ask you all what you would recommend to improve the process of treaty negotiations. We're not here to change the treaty. We're here to change the process, to look at the process, to examine the process, and to deal with it.

By the way, J. Ambrose O'Brien was the founder of the Montreal Canadiens, so the Irish weren't all bad.

In 1994 I attended a Fraser Institute presentation at the Château Laurier—it was my first introduction to them—and they told us that everything was done: it was five minutes to twelve, the clock was beating, we were $42 billion a year in deficit, and it would mushroom under Paul Martin's plans. But now we have back-to-back years of surplus for the first time in fifty years. It's tough to explain when I look at numbers, because I know numbers are manipulated depending on who owns the calculator. I don't mean that as a slam, but you can do anything with numbers. Particularly, the cost of management redistribution not being a give-away is a very interesting concept that we haven't heard before.

Mr. Fulton, I have a humble observation on the press in British Columbia. In the short time I was here, based on the comments that have been quoted in the press to me, I realized that the press does not report the news; they try to create it. I have 13 newspapers in my riding, and of over 650 press releases that I've issued since 1993, one newspaper hasn't printed any of them. So I understand the process here, too.

I think the B.C. press is a very sick organization. They only promote bad news. I would go back to the Governor General's report in 1994, in which he asked the press to give good news a chance. I guess I would have to ask the same of the B.C. press in this treaty process. They do not seem to recognize that there is good news and that they should give it a chance. They use the press to whip up the Luddites, I suppose.

Anyway, if they have time, I'm going to ask each one to recommend to us what we should recommend as an improvement to the treaty process.

Mr. Richards wants to start off, because he's going to contend those Irish numbers.

Mr. John Richards: No, the Irish are better mathematicians than either Rod or I. Both of us have given up on that in our old age.

I'll make a very quick defence of the British Columbia press, since they can't make their own defence. Editorially, the Vancouver Sun has actually come out in favour of this treaty, so do not think there is uniformity among the press.

I think the single most important point I want to make to the committee is that you make recommendations, to the extent that you can, that while there are good aspects to this treaty—and maybe overall you want to endorse it, given the sincerity, the time, and the efforts the Nisga'a put into it—the core issue is accommodating the rural-to-urban migration, and that the agenda that has been set in place by the royal commission, by the courts, and by the Assembly of First Nations leadership is seriously distorting the public debate. There must be much more discussion of how to make that transition proceed successfully.

No one has denied the basic economic and social statistics. To wit, aboriginal people do better when they leave the reserve and they come to the city. While I agree with Mr. Keddy that there is some potential that we can enhance and rehabilitate, it is folly to think we can accommodate a decent lifestyle for aboriginals on the reserves any more than for Saskatchewan farmers or Irish people. There has to be a continuation of the migration process, and we would make it work.

Mr. John O'Reilly: Mr. Dobell.

The Chair: I'm sorry, Mr. O'Reilly.

Mr. Cummins, go ahead.

Mr. John Cummins: Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd just like to compliment you for your handling of the meeting this morning. I think things are going well.

That being said, I'd like to allow Mr. O'Reilly the opportunity to bypass the press here, and I'd invite him to a public meeting in my riding at any time. He can go directly to the people to explain his point of view on this issue.

• 1100

That being said, I want to thank the witnesses for appearing this morning. I think they've all made a significant contribution to the debate. But I can't let this matter go by. I must observe that three of them are NDP and one is an economist, funded at least in part by the federal government and native groups. That group is simply not reflective of the people who come to my office with concerns about this particular treaty and other treaty issues. I just have to make that comment.

Mr. Richardson, I'd like to address my remark and this first question to you. Professor Dobell has suggested that the transfer of resources in the treaty is done without cost. You'll recall, I'm sure, that 25% of Nass fish will be going to the Nisga'a and that there are four other bands with claims to those fish. Mr. Dobell might like to tell the fishermen, including natives who are going to lose access to those fish, that there is no cost to them. I'll leave that manipulation to him. He also suggested that your numbers are inflated. I wonder if you'd care to correct his misconception.

Mr. Robin Richardson: As I pointed out in my remarks, if anything they're too low, based on the recent payments to MacMillan Bloedel. So I disagree with that.

The model I developed back in 1996 is based on stumpage. It's stumpage times the size of the lands, and not market value. That is where I've been criticized by some professional foresters. I'm not a forester; I'm an economist. But as I was doing the first study and then the second study this year, I consulted extensively with foresters, both in the government and outside of the government. A few of them felt that I was far too low, that I should have used market value, which would put it at least at a $3 billion treaty.

I'm quite happy being somewhere between the government's obviously too low $500 million and these others. I think both are extreme. So if anything, I'm too low, and I've conceded that for the first time today, in these remarks to you.

Incidentally, I just want to add to Mr. O'Reilly that I believe you could recommend and should recommend to the ministry—I'd recommend that you recommend—that the federal government in all future Indian land claims hire an independent, outside consultant. It doesn't have to be me, but I'm there.

Mr. John Cummins: Mr. Richardson, your point is well taken, and it's certainly the point that was made by the Auditor General in his recent study, as you know.

Mr. Robin Richardson: Yes, that's right.

Mr. John Cummins: I'd like now to direct a question to former premier Harcourt.

Mr. Harcourt, the matter was before the courts when you were premier. You removed the legal firm that was successful at the Supreme Court level and replaced it with one that was sympathetic to the native presentation. At that point, who was speaking for non-native Canadians?

The other point about that trial that I'd like to raise and I'd like you to comment on is that you acknowledged that when the matter went to appeal, aboriginal title existed. You didn't define it. Given the recent decisions of the court in Marshall, the one this week, for example, do you think the matter needed a full and open debate before you made that concession?

So there are two questions here: who was speaking for Canadians, and were you not somewhat presumptuous in allowing that aboriginal title existed without defining it?

The Chair: Mr. Harcourt.

Mr. Mike Harcourt: Thank you, Madam Chair.

First of all, I ran in the 1991 election on the basis that aboriginal title existed and had not been extinguished.

Mr. John Cummins: Did you get a majority of the votes, Mr. Harcourt?

Mr. Mike Harcourt: I got about the same majority that you did, Mr. Cummins, about 65% of the vote in my riding.

Mr. John Cummins: No, I mean provincially.

The Chair: The microphones will be turned on by the chair. You're now over time, so I will give you 30 seconds.

Mr. Mike Harcourt: Thirty seconds. Good.

The position that aboriginal title existed was proven to be true in the Supreme Court of Canada in Delgamuukw. It hasn't been extinguished, and we have to negotiate the definition of that.

• 1105

The definition has been around since the 1830s, Mr. Cummins. The definition of aboriginal title isn't a fee simple. It is a use and occupation for the sustenance of the aboriginal community within their traditional territory. It is not new. And that is the basis on which we amended the pleadings, which the previous governments had ignored for over a hundred years. They were found to be wrong. Our position was found to be right by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Mr. John Cummins: But it was found wrong by the Supreme Court of B.C.

The Chair: Mr. Cummins, we're starting our second round.

Mr. Finlay, go ahead, please.

Mr. John Finlay: Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to sincerely thank the panel. I think this has been the most lively presentation we've had, and I suggest it has been the presentation from the people who have lived part of this and who are involved in it and have been for some years. I mean Mr. Fulton and Mr. Harcourt and so on.

Mr. Gouk commented that Mr. Richardson's report wouldn't be of interest to us because it was paid for by his colleague, Mr. Cummins. Mr. Cummins and I have been colleagues on a number of committees and matters, and when I saw his name at the bottom, I thought here's a man who has put his money where his mouth is and done some research on his own, and I'll certainly read that.

I was a little disappointed, however, when I read the fine print at the top. It's an update of a study on the Nisga'a agreement in principle prepared for the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition. I know you don't pick your clients; they pick you. Having heard from the B.C. Fisheries Survival Coalition, I'm really a little bit—

Mr. Robin Richardson: I have reserved the right to choose my clients.

The first study I did on the Nisga'a treaty in 1996 was commissioned... I'm sorry.

The Chair: I didn't turn on your microphone. It must have just gone on automatically. I think Mr. Finlay was in the middle of his point.

Mr. Robin Richardson: I'm sorry, Mr. Finlay. I thought you were finished.

Mr. John Finlay: It wasn't a comment directed at you. It was a comment generally. I will read your report. However, I must say that I don't agree with your basic principle, and therefore I'm going to have to read it for the important things you say about various industries and so on.

I go back to something that one of the other members of the panel said. I think maybe it was Mr. Fulton or Mr. Dobell. I was in the House when Elijah Harper lectured all of us on where we were with respect to aboriginal affairs and treaties. He said to all of us, “You just don't get it, do you? You don't get it. We were here for 10,000 years. The land is ours. You can't give us what is ours.” That's what we heard from the Gitanyow and the Gitxsan, and that's what we heard from the Nisga'a.

The Nisga'a have come forward and agreed to negotiate. The problem with the Gitanyow and the Gitxsan is not that they are confusing areas. I don't want to get into the map argument, but the figures given publicly here by the opposition were not correct. That's beside the point. There is a little bit of land in dispute eventually. Their problem is that they don't think we're negotiating from the right point. They want it admitted before they start that all the land is theirs. Then they'll negotiate.

I think all of you have added something to my understanding. My two questions are these.

We had a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. It cost the taxpayers $6 million. It took three to five years. I can't remember whether it was three or five years for that report to come. Mr. Fulton will know.

The Parliament of Canada is littered with royal commission reports, which no one normally does much with. We can go back to the arts and cultures royal commission, chaired by our first Canadian Governor General. I was a young student at university and it was a great thing and a lot of the students read it. I don't know if the politicians read it; I never heard of one who did. Nevertheless, that's a method we have of studying some of these problems that you cannot settle by partisan debate.

I think the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples is a fine document. I'd like to know what each of you think and whether it has helped in these treaty negotiations. Did that report help? It certainly helped my understanding. I just want to know whether you think it did.

• 1110

The other question I have—

The Chair: Mr. Finlay, we're never going to get six answers to that question within the time.

Mr. John Finlay: We're not?

The Chair: Would you like to choose somebody to answer your question so they have some time to answer it, please?

Mr. John Finlay: I think I'll ask Ms. Kunin to answer that question. She seemed to have the most clearly stated description of what a negotiation is and of how it ends up.

Ms. Roslyn Kunin: I have to confess I have not read the report of the royal commission on native affairs. For one thing, I understand it is very large and very time-consuming. I have not read the report.

I do want to take this opportunity to say that we did consult very many other sources from very many different kinds of people. The report we produced was supported extensively by the corporate sector and by individuals, not only by government and first nations organizations.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

The next round is for Mr. Bouchard... I mean Mr. Bachand. Poor Mr. Bachand. Excuse me.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: I'm flattered by the comparison, Madam Chair.

In politics, we have a tendency to like to know who is for something and who is against something. After having heard you speak this morning, I can see that you are divided into two camps. You could say that Ms. Kunin and Messrs. Dobell, Fulton and Harcourt are pretty much in favour of the treaty, while Messrs. Richard and Richardson have some reservations.

So I would ask Mr. Fulton and Mr. Richardson to react to what I have to say, in order that we might have the opportunity to discuss this.

Since the beginning there have been two concepts that opponents of this treaty have used and have developed. First of all the importance of equality. Oftentimes we hear opponents of the treaty saying that it's not fair and that it must be fair. The other objection refers to the climate of uncertainty that it creates. They say that the treaty creates enormous uncertainty and that it is terrible.

I have my own ideas and I'm going to ask representatives from both camps to respond to the train of thought that I developed in order to try and solve these issues.

First of all I'm going to ask representatives from both camps if they recognize the existence of Aboriginal peoples in Canada and if so, do they believe that these peoples are to be granted specific rights? With respect to the specific rights, they may be granted either by legislators or by the courts. I'd like to add that in the context of the court decisions, the score is 50 to 0 for Aboriginals.

If we do recognize their specific rights, then we would now have to negotiate people-to-people or nation-to-nation. The solution would be to arrive at a partnership. I believe that the treaty that we have here today, nation-to-nation, is a partnership treaty where two nations have managed to agree on how to live together on the same territory from now on.

Lastly, if this is the case, and if you followed my train of thought and you agree with me, then there is no more uncertainty; it is a very clear and sure situation. This treaty creates a certainty. We have a treaty in due form, negotiated nation-to-nation, and everyone agrees that this is what we need.

You may ask, Madam Chair, representatives from both camps to respond to my comments.

[English]

The Chair: Would you like one... Mr. Dobell or—

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: I asked Mr. Fulton as well as Mr. Richardson, who represents the other camp, to respond very briefly.

The Chair: Very well.

[English]

Mr. Fulton, go ahead.

Mr. Jim Fulton: Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll try to be quick—

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Jim Fulton: —so that John has a chance to respond as well.

I think you have followed a good and reasoned intellectual path in getting to your conclusion. On the matter of equality, it is used by many journalists and many political blowhards as the issue that they circle a lot of their false arguments around. Those who want to go back to the period of 1980-82 and read the debate surrounding how subsection 35(1) in particular came to be there—the recognition and affirmation of existing aboriginal rights—would have a lot to learn from that debate.

• 1115

Others have said here—I think Mr. Finlay and Mr. O'Reilly both alluded to the fact—that aboriginal people were here in Canada and controlled all of the land mass for thousands and thousands of years. So on the issue of equality, this is where a lot of the terminology is about race-based rights, race-based fisheries. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Canada's Constitution is crystal clear: these are rights and these are rights of people. Those who continue to use the “race” word are doing so disingenuously. I think many people have said it's no longer a matter of wilful ignorance in the press in British Columbia; it's something far worse, and it's very unhelpful.

On the matter of uncertainty, I think it's very clear that the Nisga'a treaty is a bright light in British Columbia as to how we get towards certainty on those 25,000 square kilometres of land, on the 2,000 square kilometres of land. I think it's a great day, and it demonstrates a great deal of ingenuity on the part of the negotiators in getting us this far.

In terms of the partnership, the language, I think, was brought up by Dr. Dobell, and it's very important that this committee reflect on it and broadcast it more widely. Both Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Finlay wondered what this committee might do in making recommendations. It's very important, now and in the future, that much more consumable information—factual information—on this issue gets out to the Canadian public.

People who are interested in misinformation and disinformation have had a heyday in this province. The people who have been hurt the most are the Nisga'a people and the young aboriginal people in this province, who have been deeply scarred and wounded. Parliament has to step in and help in that way. The redistribution is truly the issue within the Canadian family politics. I thank you for your question.

The Chair: I'm going to allow you a brief time to respond.

Mr. Robin Richardson: I'll try to keep it quick, Madam Chair.

I'll take it in reverse order. In terms of the uncertainty issue, there's a great deal of uncertainty with the existing Nisga'a treaty. I know that from industry sources—from the forest industry, from mining, from various resource-based industries. It's specifically because the model—or the template, as our former premier called it—this Nisga'a treaty, is to have settlement lands with very large “other” lands attached to them, in particular, a wildlife area. I'm told there's a legal opinion—I'm not a lawyer, but an economist—that there's a great deal of uncertainty about the management model that's going to be there, about what will happen and whether the private companies, non-Nisga'a companies, will have access. This remains to be seen. We're in new territory here, very much so.

On the rights issue, yes, I would agree, there are rights. But again, I'm an economist, not a lawyer, and in my understanding of it, I tend to agree more with the position of Mel Smith, who I think spoke to you the other day in Victoria. He is a constitutional lawyer.

On nation-to-nation, I say to you, sir, being from the province of Quebec, that the Nisga'a treaty is the finest example, in my opinion, of a sovereignty association model that I have seen. I studied that proposal in your province and looked at those aspects when I worked a few years ago for the Fraser Institute and looked at the public debt of an independent Quebec. I think we could see little sovereignty association nation-states popping up all over British Columbia, as fine examples of what you and others in your party had proposed in Quebec. So nation-to-nation for sure.

The Chair: Ms. Karetak-Lindell, please, five minutes.

Mrs. Nancy Karetak-Lindell: Thank you.

It's been a very interesting morning. Over the six days I've been travelling, I have heard many things.

I'm going to put myself in the shoes of the Nisga'a people. In Prince George I was told to go back to my reserve. Here I'm being told that I should urbanize and not choose where I can live. I was told to take $250,000 and sell my culture and language, and he will have the choice whether he wants to archive it and put it in a museum or if he wants to flush it down the toilet. He'll have that choice.

Someone told me he wants to vote first from the parameters of what rights I can exercise, and then I guess I can try to find out how to fit the square peg in the round hole. One of the only options might be to change my square peg.

• 1120

In Victoria I was told that I was not an ordinary Canadian.

If I didn't have an identity crisis before my next birthday, I do now. I'm not sure what my options are any more. Which choice should I take? I would think that I would take the Nisga'a treaty with my defined rights and hope for the best.

We have also heard about examples of bands failing in different parts of Canada, but that hasn't stopped any of us from taking marriage vows when we hear about all the divorces going on in this country and about one spouse being taken to the cleaners. I think we all like to hope that when we get married we will be taken on our own integrity and on our own merits.

So I would like to ask Mr. Richardson what I am supposed to do now. Which choice sounds like the best choice for me? Any of the panellists can answer if they want.

Mr. Robin Richardson: I live in Victoria. I want to apologize. I don't know who said that to you, but that's deplorable, and it's not my position. You're Canadian.

Mrs. Nancy Karetak-Lindell: It was Mr. Mel Smith, who is a constitutional expert, by the way.

Mr. Robin Richardson: I am surprised at him. That's not my position, that's for sure. I'm surprised, because I thought I knew his view. I'll speak to him about that.

You're a Canadian citizen and you have a particular ethnic background, like many of us do. You should cherish that and live within the bounds of that. But to say that you're not... You're obviously a Canadian citizen. You're a member of Parliament too. That should prove it.

The Chair: You have more time if you'd like it.

Mrs. Nancy Karetak-Lindell: Well, if anyone else wants to say exactly what they feel is the right choice, the “most right” choice, I guess, it's open to any panellist to say what they want.

Ms. Roslyn Kunin: On that matter, tying it into the Nisga'a treaty, which we are discussing today, one of the things I like about the treaty, one of the things I like about the establishment of Nunavut, on which I congratulate the new member from Nunavut, is that it gives native peoples choice. They no longer are obliged to stay in a limited environment on reserve and remain in impoverished conditions. They no longer are obliged to leave their families and culture and go to the city to try to make their way.

I disagree, respectfully, with Mr. Richards that urbanization will be the only way in the 21st century to achieve a degree of economic viability. As we move into the 21st century with its new techniques and its new communications, I think the choice will be available to the Nisga'a and to all native and all non-native people in Canada to have a lot more geographic freedom and to exercise their options as citizens and as prosperous Canadians as well.

A voice: Hear, hear!

The Chair: Thank you.

Ms. Davies.

Ms. Libby Davies: I'd actually like to come back to a comment that Mr. Richards made at the beginning of his presentation, which a number of people have picked up on, that is, that somehow we should be opposed to the treaty because we're on the wrong track and that the issue is migration to the urban environment and that's where we should be focusing our attention. A number of people have commented on this.

I guess the way I look at it is that to me it would be like saying, well, we abandon smaller communities, that there is migration generally, but somehow we should just let smaller or rural communities go and focus our efforts in the urban environment. To me, it's not an either/or situation. It's a matter of understanding who we are as Canadians in this very vast country and that we have to work on many different fronts.

• 1125

I represent Vancouver East, and it includes the poorest urban community in Canada. I probably have the highest percentage of urban aboriginal people in East Vancouver, particularly in the downtown east side, where there is a huge amount of suffering and pain as a result of generations of oppression by colonization. So I'm certainly not immune to and in fact I'm a very strong advocate for the idea that the federal government and provincial governments have a responsibility. Certainly the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility to urban aboriginal people. This idea of playing one against the other I just don't buy into.

I actually want to ask Mr. Harcourt, as someone who chose the track of negotiation and not litigation and conflict, some questions.

The treaty deals with a very specific geographic area. What can we learn from that to actually now move forward to deal with other issues, say in the urban environment? What can we learn from that to make sure that aboriginal people generally can realize their full human rights and entitlements under the Constitution and under their aboriginal title? How would you speak to that in terms of the urban environment, from what we've learned from the process that you initiated and were very much a part of provincially?

The Chair: Mr. Harcourt.

Mr. Mike Harcourt: I don't think it's a choice of reserve and hopelessness and urban living and prosperity and opportunity. We're trying to get rid of the reserves and change them into self-governing, self-sufficient communities... for people to have a choice of wanting to live in the Nass Valley, hopefully, in prosperity with a great sense of hope for themselves and their children, or of wanting to live in Vancouver.

I represented, as you did, Ms. Davies, the downtown east side. It breaks your heart to see the young aboriginal men and women who are preyed upon by the pimps, by the drug dealers, by people in our society who misuse children. They should not be there. They should not be in the downtown east side. I think it's sad that the federal government stopped its funding for housing and for urban aboriginal services. We need to have those restored and we need to have that broken society brought back to being healthy and vigorous.

Hopefully, we can speed up the treaty process. The problem is there's no disincentive for bureaucratic negotiators, for lawyers, for consultants, for aboriginal negotiators to stop negotiating. When you're making $150,000 a year, when you're making $350 an hour, you don't want to stop that. So we have to somehow or another get some certainty to the amount of time that's going into the negotiations and fast-track them.

I passed on those ideas to Eddie Goldenberg and to the deputy minister to say we have to break the log-jam here in British Columbia, speed up the process. I have some specific ideas about how we could do that. Then we can get into the capacity-building, where people in the communities, which will stop being reserves and become communities, can enjoy life or come to the big city and enjoy life too. It's going to take us 20 years to 40 years to get to that question of choice.

[Editor's Note: Technical Difficulty]

The Chair: Mr. Iftody.

Mr. David Iftody: Thank you very much for the presentations and for all of you taking time from very busy schedules to be with us here this morning.

• 1130

We've had a good discussion, and I'd like to continue that. I would like to pick up on the whole question of this renewed, very faulty notion of disbanding reserves and moving people to the cities. This social experiment was tried somewhat in different patchwork means and measures throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and of course it was also documented to be quite tragic.

I say this to Mr. Richards, in particular. I'm familiar with the work of Chief Justice Kimelman from Manitoba, who wrote a number of the reports on aboriginal child welfare in Manitoba leading up to the development of those agencies and who categorized quite clearly the removal of some 1,000 children between the late 1950s to late 1970s from aboriginal families in Manitoba. The consequence of taking them into non-aboriginal homes in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Philadelphia, or wherever they were was indeed one of the most profound social mistakes made at the time. It is interesting that the social workers and people involved with the Children's Aid Society at the time deeply believed they were doing the right thing and they had the best interests of these children and these families in mind.

Judge Kimelman called this “cultural genocide”. This very strong language indeed has been reiterated in a number of reports: the royal commission, the aboriginal justice inquiry following that, and so on. I'm not sure where you have found your evidence, but if you reviewed a number of these national and regional reports on these practices, I suggest you would find a different answer.

Before Mr. Richards responds, Mr. Richardson, the Auditor General appeared before this committee last year. I had the opportunity to ask Mr. Desautels and his officials about their views of the methodology, the protocol used to evaluate, in this particular instance, the Nisga'a deal, the land involved in that evaluation.

I read the quote from your report. I could table some Hansard documents. I asked them whether they were comfortable with the methodology used in that particular instance for this Nisga'a agreement, and they said they were.

Mr. Robin Richardson: I'm surprised. I'd certainly like to see that material. My understanding is that when consulting with the federal and provincial negotiators, the federal negotiators just took the land value of $107 million from the province, and it was referred to as a “notional” value. So if we're talking about costing the land, and perhaps he was referring to some of the other items, I don't think the federal negotiators were involved in it at all. They just took it from the province, and the province took a number out of the air for a public relations value, as near as we can tell.

Mr. John Richards: May I respond?

We have a responsibility here to be respectful of the complexity and difficulties of this issue. I am not an aboriginal, but I have worked with aboriginal people quite closely in Saskatchewan. As Mr. Bachand was describing and as Libby Davies was describing, the realities are very painful. We must not, because of the dire nature of the problem, caricature. Certainly anything that I said was not to be equated with the kind of wholesale apprehension that went on by social workers in the sixties throughout the country. If we caricature each other's opinions on these issues, there's no communication.

I come back to what I think is the core painful trade-off that aboriginals are individually going to make in the next generation. Far be it for me to say we should destroy reserves. I would like that they be vibrant.

I hope that Mike Harcourt, Jim Fulton, and others who have discussed what might be the future of aboriginal reserves are right. We should not create large economic incentives that distort the free decision that aboriginal people should be able to make. What we are doing is distorting, by the extent to which the financial incentives are to stay on the reserve under current policy. That is a major disincentive to aboriginal people freely deciding whether or not they want to live their life on the reserve or in the city.

• 1135

I don't want to read it, but I invite you to think hard about it. I don't agree with everything he has said, but the welfare minister in Alberta under Ralph Klein's Conservative administration was a status Indian and a social worker, and nobody more eloquent than he has denounced these incentives.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Richards.

Mr. Keddy, it's your five minutes now.

Mr. Gerald Keddy: My first question is to Mr. Fulton.

I've had a number of letters concerned about wildlife, in particular about the eagle population in the Nass Valley, from constituents and from environmental groups. When I read the NFA I see a lot of protection for habitat and I see a lot of protection for migratory birds and fish, game, and wildlife. I'd like your opinion on whether or not there's appropriate, proper, and enough protection.

Mr. Jim Fulton: I think you're probably referring to a road proposal to connect Kincolith to the rest of the Nass Valley. For a variety of reasons at the foundation, I have become part of a circle of correspondence regarding the bald eagle population—just so that members have some sense of it—at the mouth of the Nass, which is a highly productive system both for oolichans and other anadromous stocks such as salmon and steelhead.

At certain times of the year, particularly in the spring, there are huge congregations of bald eagles, sometimes in excess of a thousand in that area. There is a concern from migratory bird specialists both inside and outside of Canada on where the routing of the road will go. It's a fairly narrow area in a couple of places, and bald eagle feeding behaviour and nesting behaviour can be unduly influenced by road traffic.

My sense is that the provisions, both in the agreement and perhaps more importantly in the requirements of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Canadian Wildlife Service, and the Ministry of Transportation and Highways here in B.C. in picking the route, which they are now doing, will be increasingly sensitive to making sure that the best route is chosen to minimize any impacts on those very important and globally significant bald eagle populations.

Mr. Gerald Keddy: My second question is for former premier Harcourt.

We can break this debate into a couple of areas. There are groups on both sides who support the treaty process. Their opposition seems to be that we don't support this treaty. I have a great deal of difficulty with that.

I don't want to be too political here, but certainly the Reform has a wrecking-ball approach to public policy debate in this country. That's exactly what it is—that somehow you can break everything down to its basic common denominator and start over: forget the Supreme Court precedents and forget everything that's gone before us; you can just wipe the slate clean and start again. And we just can't do that.

I've talked to every member of Parliament at this table at some time or another, and you can check the records and find they will have said they support the treaty process. Our Reform members who sat at the table certainly have said the same thing. They support the treaty process.

Yet yesterday I read in the Globe and Mail an article by Mr. Cummins, the Reform fisheries critic, saying outright that the Marshall decision shows us that the treaty process can be changed. It was a very hotly debated decision on the east coast, where I live.

So I'm having a real problem with the logic. Either we support the treaty process or we don't.

• 1140

One of the big things you related to and that other members here have related to is the cost. So what's the cost if we don't support the treaty process, and what's the cost now? I'll try to be quick, but I have to say, we spend $6 billion a year on first nations in this country. We spend $6 billion on the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.

The wish and the hope behind this process, the aspirations, are that at the end of it, the money flowing out of Ottawa and out of Vancouver and Victoria and out of the capitals of all the provinces certainly will be less. First nations will have their own opportunities and their own incomes. They will be paying taxes and they will be equal Canadian citizens.

Whatever is the cost today, therefore, it will be less tomorrow and less the day after, until somewhere down the road we have certainty at the end of the process, and the cost is no cost at all.

The Chair: Mr. Harcourt.

Mr. Mike Harcourt: Very briefly, the courts have said over and over and over again that they're not the place to settle these issues. In every one of those 55 decisions Mr. Bachand referred to where aboriginal rights were recognized as existing, they said don't ask them to define or to make it practical. That's not what the courts are for. And litigation, I think, is a dead end. It is just going to lead us back to that very simple proposition.

Oka, Gustafsen Lake, roadblocks, confrontation—it doesn't benefit anybody. Therefore, you're left, whether you like it or not, with one solution, and that's negotiation.

Now, you can agree or disagree on the treaty process that's presently under way on the Nisga'a treaty. I have some very good friends in the Reform Party, and we just agree to disagree on that particular point.

I think the Nisga'a treaty is a good compromise. I think it does provide certainty. I think it will certainly provide a much better relationship for aboriginal and non-aboriginal people, particularly in the Nass Valley and Terrace areas.

Are there other ways? Yes, there probably are other ways, and we certainly can improve on the process, but I think we are into negotiations all over Canada. The Marshall decision is just the opening shot of what Canada is going to have to face.

Think of what we're facing here in British Columbia. We're usually looked at as the last part of Canada to come to grips with the land question, but I would argue that we're the first part of the country to come comprehensively to grips with the land issue and self-government. They're both included in our negotiating approach.

I'll very quickly wrap up, because I know there are other questions and noon is coming, but I think there are two or three ways to do it. We have the Nisga'a approach. I don't think it's a template, but I think it's worked well. We have the approach that's been put forward by the summit. We also have the approach being put forward by the people who belong to the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs: First admit that we own all the land and then we'll negotiate, but we won't negotiate with the provincial government because you're not a nation.

They're wrong. We're not New Zealand. We're a federal state, and the province is sovereign under section 92, so you're going to have deal with us whether you want to or not.

In any event, I think we can take a variety of approaches that would be flexible, but I'm firmly convinced that, whether we like like it or not, we're into a set of negotiations for this generation of Canadians.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. O'Reilly, are you going now?

Oh, sorry, it's Mr. Forseth.

Mr. John O'Reilly: We look the same.

Mr. Paul Forseth: Are you going back and forth?

The Chair: It is Mr. O'Reilly, and then it goes to you, Mr. Forseth.

Mr. Gerald Keddy: But I'll take Mr. O'Reilly's time.

The Chair: I think Mr. O'Reilly already gave away his time earlier this week.

Mr. John O'Reilly: If you ask Keddy the time, he builds you a grandfather clock.

Mr. Gerald Keddy: I'll try not to do that.

The Chair: Okay, Mr. O'Reilly.

Mr. John O'Reilly: Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I want to come back to the urban-rural shift and just explain to you that I have the second-largest riding in southern Ontario, with 10,000 square kilometres, three area codes, 750 miles of waterway, and a very healthy fishing industry in the Kawartha Lakes region.

By the way, Ontario does have something the east coast doesn't have. It has a really good fishing industry.

When I visited Labrador I went to the Sheshatshit Reserve. I saw there was no future, no hope, no past. It's ninety miles from nowhere. There are no fish. There's no industry. There's no lumber. There are no caribou. There's no reason. We, the past generations of white people, put them there, on the reserve. We send them a cheque every month and tell them not to bother us. I consider the treaty process, as opposed to the reserve process, to be the only way to go.

• 1145

You talked about the urban-rural split. I don't think taking people and moving them into the cities is the answer when you talk about east Vancouver. You only have to come to Toronto, which is 80 miles from where I live, to see the problems that exist with native people being shoved into the cities, delivering pamphlets and being preyed on by the various organizations. So I think you're wrong.

In fact, people from Toronto who are dying to get out of there and come to my area are lacking some of the facilities, such as Internet access and those types of things, in order to be able to operate.

Why would you want to be in Vancouver when you could be in Prince George with a computer? Would you rather be in Toronto or in the beautiful Kawartha Lakes with a computer? You know, work isn't all moving to the cities. It is another shift.

I'd like some comment on the treaty process and the urban-rural split from Mr. Dobell, who was indicating earlier that he wanted to comment on that. Perhaps I can start with him, Madam Chair.

The Chair: Mr. Dobell.

Prof. Rod Dobell: To pick up on one point with respect to this shift from the rural to the urban setting, I think we have to be clear about where we're starting from. The fact that we recognize John Richards' title to his house does not mean we're creating an inappropriate incentive for him to stay in Vancouver.

The incentive systems we're creating flow from some prior considerations. The hope of being able to maintain a decentralized economy with, as you mentioned, dependence on the communications system; the possibility that in the so-called high-tech, knowledge-based economy and society a lot of virtual employment can be undertaken from various places; and the possibility that economic development will move in the direction of a more viable resource stewardship—these all may mean that we don't have to follow this economic adjustment, this transition, all the way to the extreme of a few urban polls in the community.

So it does seem to me that there are alternatives to explore and that the prospects created by the final agreement hold out some hope that those tracks will be there to create some differences from the historic track John Richards is properly pointing to.

The Chair: Mr. Harcourt.

Mr. John O'Reilly: On the urban-rural shift...

Mr. Mike Harcourt: Oh, yes, the urban-rural shift. I have to give a speech in about twenty minutes, so I was rolling it around in my head.

Frankly, I think people have greater choices now, and I think the information revolution is making a huge change. They can live in Mr. O'Reilly's beautiful riding or they can live in beautiful downtown Toronto. It depends on what kind of a lifestyle you want, if you have a choice.

People are moving out of Vancouver and Prince George and Kelowna and going to Burns Lake and Nelson and other more attractive communities. A lot of that is because of air transportation access and the Internet revolution. So for the growing number of people involved in services or who have some mobility, I think that's going to happen.

Frankly, with the aboriginal people, I think we're missing the point John's trying to make—that the present reserve system is a failure. You have a 100% chance of failure there, while in the city, just random choice, you have a 50-50 chance. There are more services and so on.

I think the argument needs to be shifted. We want to get rid of reserves so that people have a good way of life, whether they're living on a rural reserve or in Vancouver. There are three different land claims in Vancouver right now between the Burrard, the Squamish, and the Musqueam. We still have to settle those issues.

Mr. John O'Reilly: Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

• 1150

The Chair: Thank you very much.

We'll have Mr. Forseth for five minutes, and then our last round will be over. There will be one more round on the government side, and then we'll be ending. Go ahead.

Mr. Paul Forseth: Thank you. Time is short, so I'll try to be succinct.

I would ask our presenters, how do you respond to the general sense of the need for political legitimacy in the long term? What we're doing today, and what's been done, is what I can at best characterize very charitably as a managed democratic process. What I observed in the process of the Charlottetown Accord was that as the terms and consequences were gradually absorbed by the public, political legitimacy evaporated. At least that deal went away. The consequences of this one won't.

Based on what I've observed in the process so far, as Canada absorbs the consequences of Nisga'a, I think it's going to bring uncertainty and trouble, rather than help and certainty. Certainly, to really help someone and help a situation there must be a basic understanding and agreement that is far beyond law. I call it political legitimacy.

I conducted a community-wide survey in the riding of New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, and I asked three questions. I asked, “Do you believe that a province-wide binding referendum is necessary before ratifying the Nisga'a treaty?” I had 67.8% say yes; 27.55% said no; 4.33% said they were unsure; and 0.31% had no answer.

Then I asked the second question: “Would you read more detailed information on the deal if it were available?” Well, 65.33% said yes; 24.46% said no; 7.74% were unsure; and there was no answer from 2.48%.

Then I asked the final question: “When the Nisga'a treaty is tabled in the House of Commons, how do you wish me to vote?” In favour of the deal was 26.0%; against the deal was 59.13%; 11.15% said they did not have enough information to make an informed decision; 3.41% were undecided; and 0.31% had no answer.

To me, this then presents a difficulty for the idea of political legitimacy. In the theme of needing long-term political legitimacy, and in view of how Nisga'a has unfolded, what advice do you have for the next rounds in the remaining fifty-some deals to be done? Certainly we need to learn a lot from how Nisga'a has unfolded for the required political legitimacy for the others to come.

Who would like to comment on that?

The Chair: Mr. Fulton, go ahead.

Mr. Jim Fulton: Well, I'd be glad to start.

When you put statistics like that out, I remind you that the University of Calgary did a poll not so long ago, and 31% of the people living in Calgary think that Elvis Presley is still alive. It really depends on who you're polling and what you think you're telling this committee.

The simple fact of the matter is that this committee is going to have to become a lot more powerful and focused. The Nisga'a agreement and treaty is not a template for the aboriginal people in British Columbia, and former premier Harcourt has said that.

In terms of what's happened with the Marshall decision, there are lots of changes there. In terms of Delgamuukw, there are lots of changes there. What the public needs—and I was just saying this to Dr. Dobell—is a lot more precise, understandable material, and a lot less of this bombastic, blowhard stuff about race-based fisheries, race-based rights, and all of that kind of inflammatory, exaggerated garbage.

People in this country are very open-hearted and open-minded, and frankly, they're disgusted at how aboriginal people have been treated throughout most of this century and since contact. Those who for cowardly reasons go out and attack aboriginal people and continually...

Listen to what the one aboriginal member on this committee has gone through. As a British Columbian—as a Canadian—I apologize for what's happened to you as a member of Parliament sitting on this committee.

Committees like this had better face up to the fact that there is some big damn change coming in this country, and there's no use hiding in the weeds, hiding behind little stats, and hiding behind race-based language. Get with the program. Either you go the Oka route or you go the negotiation route. It's about time all members on this committee started rowing in the same direction, or there's going to be hell to pay.

The Chair: Mr. Richardson, go ahead.

Mr. Robin Richardson: I think that's a very perceptive question about political acceptance, and my plea earlier, in my opening remarks, was that if we're going to have acceptance of more and more British Columbians—and I think it's just a question of more knowledge—we need to recognize that we're talking about huge amounts of crown land that are being transferred to a very small number of people, and that the B.C. taxpayers have a legitimate claim to some compensation from Ottawa for these huge amounts of crown land they're losing.

• 1155

So if your committee would recognize and accept that position, and recommend that some money come back from Ottawa to British Columbia, it would go a long way to turning around many people—not everyone, but many people—in getting this acceptance. This is the first of more than sixty, and it is a template. It is not an elimination of the reserve system; it's the creation of a larger reserve.

The Chair: Thank you.

Do you have a point of order, Ms. Davies?

Ms. Libby Davies: I haven't been at the other hearings, and I just wonder how it works in terms of the rounds. If one opposition member gets an additional question, do the rest not?

The Chair: Right now, because of the time, we have extended time for this panel. Basically, I'm going to allow one question to balance the opposition, because the Reform Party has had one extra round here. I'm going to allow one question within our timeframe. If people had stuck to their time, it would have worked out perfectly. Unfortunately...

Mr. Finlay, go ahead.

Mr. John Finlay: Madam Chair, if I'm very brief, maybe Ms. Davies can put her question.

I couldn't agree more with Mr. Fulton.

Mr. Richardson, I hope that perhaps you've listened to some of the things we've said, because if you're going to start from a false premise, then we're going to get bad numbers. I just can't imagine... It seems to me passing strange that our government would send some of our troops to Bosnia and East Timor, where people are being dispossessed, human rights are being violated, and we would calculate how much it costs. The cost goes across the country. The federal government doesn't have a great barrel of money that it gives out. It's all taxpayers' money. We're all responsible for it. I find it interesting that you are going to make costs to this treaty that are absolutely unfounded on the philosophy and the principles we're talking about.

Land doesn't belong to B.C. It belongs to Canada and to the people of Canada, and the aboriginal people happen to be one of them.

Ms. Kunin said that in her opinion this treaty has been negotiated in good faith by all involved, and if you get equal grousing then you've probably got a good agreement. Now, I want to know, on that basis, whether we have a good agreement. Then we can go on to other agreements. If we can get rid of the straw men and the imaginary costs and all this other stuff that doesn't apply to what we're trying to solve... We're practical politicians. We're trying to do what the people of this country want, and we're going to move in that direction come hell or high water—as long as I'm a politician.

The Chair: Mr. Richardson, for a very brief response.

Mr. Robin Richardson: Thank you.

Ninety-five percent of the land in British Columbia is crown land and it belongs to the people of British Columbia. What I've said in my study—the methodology is there, and you can agree with it or not—is that we can take an objective approach to measuring the value of this crown land. My approach is being conservative. If that's true, if we cost it properly, there's compensation coming back to B.C. taxpayers. Our provincial government's missed the boat entirely on this.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Now, before we close our meeting, I want to announce again that any person in the public who wishes to present a written brief—that's how you get your input into this committee—can give it to the clerk, who is either outside or over here to the left.

I also want to thank my colleagues around the table and the colleagues presenting. This was a larger panel, but it was felt that having the opposing viewpoints together at the same panel would help us do our questioning better. That was the philosophy. Normally we don't have so many people. This afternoon we have a fairly large group again.

I want to say thank you to the presenters. The discussion is on divergent viewpoints, especially here, it seems, so we'll have to hear from both sides all the time. You've made our meeting very useful.

I also want to thank the audience, because they have assisted us today so that we could clearly hear all of the testimonial as it was given. I hope it was beneficial for you also.

Thank you. We'll adjourn and reconvene at one o'clock and go all afternoon again. Thank you very much.