EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, February 11, 1997

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[English]

The Chairman: Order. The first order of business for committee members is to approve the subcommittee report on agenda. Having made the decision to invite our guests this morning, I would urge you to present a motion and support it, because we're here.

Mr. Murphy (Annapolis Valley - Hants): I so move.

Motion agreed to

The Chairman: We'll proceed directly to the order of business for today. First of all, I would like to thank our two guests, Mr. Georges Erasmus and Mr. René Dussault, for having agreed to come before us and help us on such short notice.

Really, this is the reason you are here today: to help us. You have worked for many years and you have produced a magnificent report. Now we must work together to assure ourselves that the best outcome comes from this report, for the good of our aboriginal communities.

I want to take a few seconds to explain to you the way this committee works. The committee made a decision that inviting guests to share their expertise with us and then thanking them and forgetting about them for a while would serve no purpose. So we decided that for every meeting in which we have a presentation or we address an issue, it becomes a chapter in a book, a binder we have. Presumably in the future there will be other people here, and if we continue this we'll be able to go back and say yes, the co-chairs of the commission were before the committee on such a date, here's what they said.

.0915

So all this is to say that your presentation today is not going on the shelf, as we want to assure ourselves that the report doesn't go on the shelf. It's so easy for reports to go on shelves on Parliament Hill.

This report is too important; it addresses the real issues of all Canadians. We are asking you today to help us understand the report more and develop a strategy, if you can, to assure ourselves that we will continue to address this report.

I see it as a living document. Many constituents, I'm sure, are approaching our committee members - they're approaching me - and expecting that we will address the report and pass a motion to implement everything in there. Then our job will be done.

I may be wrong, but I don't see the report as that type of a document, but as a resource for our committee. I feel that every time we have a meeting, every time we discuss aboriginal issues, we have to do it en rapport with the report.

We're hoping that this first meeting - hopefully there will be many more with you - will help us understand better and assist us in keeping this report alive. That's the intent of this committee.

I will say to you that every single member of this committee on all sides is very conscientious and very committed to doing what's good for aboriginal communities. So your presentation is being laid on attentive ears.

Having said that, I will turn it over to you. I'll ask you to start your teaching. Thank you.

Mr. Georges Erasmus (Co-Chair, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples): Thank you.

As you said, it was on very short notice, so we don't actually have a written presentation, but René and I will give you an oral presentation. Our expectation was that the primary amount of work would really be in the answering of questions and the back and forth that would occur.

I think the first thing this committee needs is to have a good grasp of some of the basic concepts on which this report is based and, in the end, make an assessment of that for the country as to whether or not you're on side in relation to the assessment.

The major work of the commission was to take a look at how the country approached aboriginal people in the past, analyse that, and take a stand on it.

The basic approach was based on the understanding that aboriginal people would disappear as distinct societies and that their societies in fact had little use for the future or little value for teaching future generations. It was thought that in fact superior cultures had come here from Europe and that the most benign thing that could occur for aboriginal people would be for their societies to disappear. Aboriginal individuals would disappear into a larger society while picking up new values and new ways of life. They would become individual Canadians, leaving behind their Dene, Haida, and Cree ancestry, which would not be the important thing any more.

So there was a concerted effort to assimilate aboriginal people. That's what the residential schools were all about. That's why the attempt was made to destroy the language. There was an attempt made to obliterate their cultural values completely.

The Indian Act was another approach that was used to train aboriginal people in new ways of making decisions. There was a uniform way of making decisions. Elections were used, as opposed to traditional ways of either appointing, selecting, or whatever, to put aboriginal people in place.

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Of course, it all failed, regardless of how hard attempts were made. In some places in the country, in British Columbia, for instance, we had something like 150 years of residential schools; generation after generation after generation of aboriginal people went through residential schools. But it failed, because in the end aboriginal people were just somewhere in the middle. They obviously never fitted into European society. They couldn't say ``my ancestors came from England'', ``my ancestors came from France'' or Belgium or somewhere, ``and that's my history over there''. No matter how much you heard about the royalty and all the rest of it and whether or not you knew all the kings, all the different wars, and how important 1066 was, it didn't make any difference; that was not your culture or your history, and the Europeans didn't accept you as one of them.

It created excessive racism. The very thought that you could take another people and reshape them like that meant you believed they were less than you and you had something superior to teach them.

So in the end, no matter what kind of carbon copy of them you were, you never really were the same as they, and the harder you tried, as an individual person, to be like them, the less you knew about where you came from. So you ended up being caught in the middle. Even the formal education that was provided to aboriginal people never worked.

The unfortunate thing is that the more successful this assault was on aboriginal people, the weaker the institutions were that had made aboriginal people strong in the past. Our assessment is that they failed miserably, and the last thing Canadians and the Canadian government should be thinking about is the quickest way to eliminate aboriginal people's culture and attempt that all over again. The whole concept of equal rights, the same rights for everybody, and all this stuff, seems to bring to us notions that we should continue that process. That has failed.

It also has ignored the historical rights that aboriginal people started out with. When Europeans first came here, there were not wars to take over the land. Aboriginal people were not conquered. There were legal treaties.

At the beginning aboriginal people obviously were the most numerous and the strongest. When you had a few ships coming over and you had 60 million aboriginal people in the Americas, there was no question where the strength was: the strength was here. It would be the same thing as if we were to send a couple of ships over to Europe.

So the treaties that were signed at the beginning were between equals, between sovereigns. The deal that was made was not that these few thousands of people coming over would assimilate into aboriginal culture and would become aboriginal people. That was not the deal. The deal was that the new society coming over would be able to transplant its institutions, its culture, here, beside the aboriginal people, and they would live side by side. That's what the Two Row Wampum is all about. That's what the Mohawks and the Iroquois people keep telling us.

For quite a while that deal worked. But with time, as more and more people came over, that changed. We went through this very dark period when an attempt was made to assimilate aboriginal people.

Our feeling is, even after all this time, that those original rights are protected in the Canadian Constitution. Section 35 recognizes the inherent right to self-government. We also believe aboriginal people have the right to self-determine, because they are peoples. Even though their societies have been assaulted by legislation such as the Indian Act and their rights have been regulated severely, our belief, our understanding of the law, through all our work, our research and otherwise, after we brought together some of the best legal minds in the country, is that aboriginal people's collective rights to govern themselves, to self-determine, are still intact. If we as Canadians set up a process to treaty with aboriginal people, we can put into place self-government agreements that will now provide the opportunity for aboriginal people to assume their rightful control over themselves. Our assessments are that even though there has been a tremendous assault on aboriginal people, the best thing to do is still to go back and strengthen the collectives and the collective institutions. If we're really seriously after healthy individuals, responsible individuals, people who can be 21st century individuals, who will employ themselves, who will be self-reliant, self-sufficient, then the best way to do it is to create a healthy aboriginal society.

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A lot of residue is hanging over from the colonial period. There are the experiences from the residential schools, sexual abuse. As with any people who have been oppressed anywhere, the violence internally, after the society has been colonized, is severe. We see exactly the same kinds of internal turmoil here as anywhere in the world where people have been colonized, whether it's in Africa or Southeast Asia or wherever. The same kind of healing needs to occur.

Unfortunately, some of the stuff perpetuates itself. If you've been sexually abused, you would think you would want it to stop there. Amazingly, what you do is sexually abuse yourself. If you lived in a violent family, having watched your mother perhaps being beaten by your father, you would think you would never want to do that. The amazing thing is you pick up that habit. In fact, that's what you learn.

With people who for 150 years, 8 generations, never had parents and were raised in residential schools, not in families, the parenting skills are long gone. What did you learn there? You learned to be cold and sterile. You couldn't even talk to your own family members. You couldn't show emotion. There was no love there. In fact, what you learned was strict discipline and abuse. So what do you do? What did you learn when you were a child? You repeat it all over again. So we have whole volumes in our report talking about the kinds of human resource nurturing, healing, and development that need to take place.

The kind of education we have had has been very destructive for aboriginal people. A lot of our report talks about the fact that the culture that was here originally, even though it has gone through a tremendous period when it was assaulted, has survived. There has been a lot of loss, but the core essence, the soul of the original cultures, is still here. The cultures need to be nurtured, and the institutions that carry forth a message to young people, such as education, need to be able to pass on the message of the culture.

Aboriginal people themselves, obviously, when they set up their own institutions again, such as education, will create culturally appropriate institutions. But in the larger society - and there will be all kinds of continuing contact, whether it is in corrections, education.... Some 70% of aboriginal students are going to school off reserve in territorially and provincially run schools. If those schools are to become more successful in keeping and graduating students and forwarding them on to post-secondary education, they have to become much more user-friendly to aboriginal people. They must become culturally appropriate for aboriginal people. Our report goes into tremendous detail on that whole area.

The central concept I think you're going to have to grapple with is that we say aboriginal people are nations. As nations, they have the right to self-determine.

They have land rights, we believe. We believe they have the right to have enough of their own land to become economically self-reliant, to be able to nurture their own culture, and to be able to finance aboriginal self-government through their own tax base; through taxing activity on the land, taxing personal income on the land, whether it is their own people or other people living on their land.

.0930

We also make it very, very clear that our strong belief is that we're not talking about racial groups. Perhaps at one time, a very long time ago, we might have been doing so, but not any more, with 500 years of intermixing and intermarriage. Something in the range of half of aboriginal people marry out of their own society. They are marrying all kinds of racial and cultural groups, if you want to use that kind of terminology.

When we say these are nations, we mean it in the sense that you have a people in which you can have continuing new blood, new ideas, and all the rest of it. You have an entrance into the nation in many ways: marriage, adoption, association, belief, etc.

In the end, what are we talking about then when we talk of nations if we're not talking about biological descendancy? We're talking about cultural concepts, identity, and belief. We're talking about culture in the end.

We are of the opinion that this report has created a situation, a model, that can be used elsewhere where aboriginal people live, for instance. But it may even go beyond aboriginal people. It's a situation in which you have a state with many nations within it having the right to self-determination. That ability to self-determination means that, normally, you don't have the right to dismember the state, but you do have the right to decide the terms of union with the state. You have the right to be able to decide the kinds of institutions that will nurture and protect your culture, such as the governing institutions, the cultural institutions, etc.

Aboriginal people come to the table on self-government by two routes, we think. There is their inherent right, which is their original sovereign jurisdiction they had here at contact, which has survived to some degree. It's not exactly the same as it was. Obviously, it has been affected. Obviously, there were agreements. There were treaties that were signed whereby aboriginal people consciously made alterations to their own ability to be sovereign in which obviously the nations agreed to co-existence. Since then, there have been some major changes, but in the end, the inherent right, the original sovereignty, is still in the Constitution.

So if a treaty is signed that deals with self-government and jurisdiction and we've laid out a process about how that should take place, then the sovereignty that could be enjoyed would be the original sovereignty. Also, aboriginal people come to the table as self-determining entities. So there are two routes by which they are able to negotiate with this nation.

We have a number of major things on which we recommend that the federal government and provinces should begin working. One of the suggestions we have is that fairly quickly, within six months or a year, a process should take place to work out a large framework agreement, a Canada-wide framework agreement, in which the provinces, the territorial government, the federal government and the aboriginal people sit together to work on it.

Within that framework agreement, we would want them to deal with certain things, like the principles of land selection. As much as we in Canada would love to think that we've treated aboriginal people better than those in the United States, and obviously other states in the Americas, when you actually take out the land claims that have taken place in the last few years and look at the reservations...when you compare them to the reservations in the United States, there is no comparison. You would virtually have to multiply the land base 30 times before it came to the same level as the land base that aboriginal people have in the south.

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So a large part of our report talks about the need for a much fairer deal. Even of the little land that aboriginal people started off with in relation to the early implementation of treaties and the early reserves, two-thirds has disappeared, through highways, the St. Lawrence Seaway, railways, hydro lines, pipelines. Virtually every time we needed some kind of land...``Take it through that reserve''. So two-thirds of the reserve land base has disappeared.

A framework agreement, then, would talk about the principles that would be needed for everyone around the table to agree on how aboriginal people would re-establish themselves with a much fairer land base. Once that was done there, we hope it would speed up the individual negotiations.

About self-government, we might be able to agree around the table, right there, and say, well, look, why do we have to worry about 101 individual treaty negotiations? Why don't we agree here on what the basic jurisdiction clearly will be of these aboriginal nations, of this one of three orders of government in Canada? Why don't we agree here? If the individual negotiations want to add a bit to it because of their particular circumstances, let them do that, but let's get the core out of the way here. Or, failing that, presumably they could say, well, here's a list of things they could talk about there, and if they agree on the individual negotiations, then they can have that. But if they could make that big leap and actually agree at the table, that would resolve what could happen in the individual...it would speed it up very quickly. With the principles on how the land would be selected and all the rest of it, that would speed up the individual negotiations.

The other thing we would like is in relation to financing of the nation governments. We see these nation governments growing to, in a lot of ways, mini-provinces, if you want, just for the sake of comparison, and we see the financing of them as relatively the same, where there is genuine self-government, where you have nations of government that one way or another are elected, selected, or whatever, and they are answerable to their own electors. Obviously they have to have their own tax base. They tax their people and the development on their own land.

Over time, in the same way as you have provinces that sometimes have been able to finance most of their own costs and really have not needed finances from the centre, we expect evolution within nation governments. But the financing, the support from the other orders of government, would obviously be dependent on the tax base and the ability of internal revenue to be raised from these nation governments themselves. We think those principles should be resolved at a national table like this. Again, it speeds up the individual negotiations.

The other thing we would like is an intermediary process. Even with a wonderful agreement at the national table, the individual negotiations on treaty between the nations, even if we were to bring back together the nations...and let's say sixty or so emerge out there, so that coast to coast to coast to the 49th parallel you have fifty or sixty aboriginal nations and you have everyone covered. You still have to have something like sixty negotiations, some perhaps less than others, because some of them have more or less moved ahead. For instance, the Nunavut agreement, some of the land claims, the Yukon, might need just a few things in addition. The James Bay Cree, for instance, might just want to touch up their original agreement in relation to justice, in relation to some new authority, and so forth. Some are much farther down the road than others. But you would still have to have these negotiations.

What do you do immediately so you can start on this road in a big way? We're suggesting that many of what are now policies federally be embedded in federal legislation: a land claims process, treaty implementation, for instance, the creation of a tribunal to assist in the land claim process and the treaty process.

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But we also want legislation put in place to recognize the nations one at a time. Having met certain requirements, then here is a nation. You have a constitution. You have a fair way of selecting your citizens. You have an appeal process and so forth. You have a clear territory and so forth. This federal legislation that we would want in place, supported by accompanying provincial and territorial legislation, we hope - but basically the federal government could start - would put in place the recognition of certain legislating ability that the nation would be able to exercise immediately upon recognition.

That is also something that could be discussed at the national table. If, for instance, we could not get an agreement on the full jurisdiction that a nation upon recognition would be able to legislate and negotiate in its treaty, perhaps the next step that could take place would be, upon recognition, what is the core jurisdiction that could be exercised immediately? In our report we list many of those things: education, health, social services, child welfare, their own constitution, economic development - on and on and on.

If the federal government put this legislation in place in the next couple of years, for instance, put in place a support process for nations to come together again, then what you could have would be a way for each nation to extract itself from the Indian Act if the Indian Act applies. Of course, the Indian Act doesn't apply to the Métis and the Inuit, but the majority of the people in Canada who are aboriginal are first nation people, so the Indian Act applies to many aboriginal people.

This would create a situation where, with that federal legislation in place, a recognized nation would be able to start virtually immediately to legislate in a number of core areas. We think it's very important that we get agreement among the provinces, the territorial government, and the federal government, on what those core jurisdictions are. The last thing we would want would be another area of dispute, where you would have the federal government having this legislation in there, the aboriginal people regrouping and then starting to legislate, and some disgruntled province saying, well, you say education is something the Nisga'a can legislate in.... Let's not talk about the Nisga'a; they just got a treaty. Let's say the Haida. ``We don't accept that. Very clearly, constitutionally it's the Province of British Columbia, and we don't agree.'' It would be far better if we had agreement around the table on the transitional jurisdiction that aboriginal people would start with. It would be transitional because when they went through the treaty process they would finalize what that would be.

I'm going to stop there, because I think René would like to supplement this. We do really want to get to the question-and-answer session, and we do want to talk about strategy in relation to what the committee can do.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. I'll say no more. It's so interesting I'll just turn the floor over to Mr. Dussault.

Mr. René Dussault (Co-Chair, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples): Thank you.

What I would like to add is this. This commission was unique in the sense that it was made up of seven commissioners, four of them aboriginal and three non-aboriginal people. Frankly, we think we have produced a report that is the only one of this kind in this country.

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We were in the aboriginal communities, over 50 to 60 mid-north or far-north communities, in addition to the 30-some cities that federally appointed commissions visited. We had more than 178 days of hearings. Frankly, this exposure to the reality of the aboriginal people of this country has enabled us to come together at the end, not to disperse on all kinds of ideological tangents.

There was no in-breeding around the commission table, I can tell you. We had many sessions, in fact 98 sessions among commissioners, of between 3 and 5 days. The mandate that was handed over to us was very large, and we wanted to do justice to each area, but in addition really to show how the various aspects interrelate with each other. We always thought this would be the gem of the report, the major contribution, to come up with an integrated view on how the pieces come together, and to come up with an integrated plan of action.

Now, as non-aboriginal commissioners - and there were three of us - we came to understand that treating aboriginal people mainly as being impoverished minorities who need better education and more economic opportunities would not do the job, would not be enough; that at the same time we had to recognize and respect that they are collectives within the country. Frankly, we thought Canada being a federal country, with provinces and a federal government, this would not be threatening to the country as a whole, nor to the provinces; it could be harmonized.

We thought only the recognition of collectives, along with measures to build the capacity of aboriginal people to self-determine within the country through co-management of lands, through managing services, operating their governments.... We're not talking about the cities here. We addressed the cities because 45% of the aboriginal people live in the cities, but let's leave this aside for the moment. We thought we needed to have a strong rebalancing of both economic and political powers through the recognition of the collectives. Certainly non-aboriginal commissioners understood that if we had measures that would focus only on building capacity, without at the same time recognizing the collective of the aboriginal peoples within the country, it would fail.

We made what we think is an honourable compromise around the commission table. We had in mind that we had to come up with a plan of action that would be acceptable to the majority of aboriginal people - we recognized other views could have been legitimate, but we made our stand - and that at the same time could be acceptable to the Canadian public, the federal government, and also eventually the provinces. We knew we had to have some kind of balancing act to make this happen.

Certainly as non-aboriginal commissioners we came to the strong view that the collective had to be protected through the process Georges Erasmus described: through real self-government. In fact, we're talking about an aboriginal order of government. On the other hand, all commissioners accepted that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would apply to aboriginal governments, with, obviously, the flexibility that will come through section 25, which says the rights enshrined in the charter should not derogate from aboriginal and treaty rights; with the appropriate safeguards.

It remains to be seen what the courts will do with that, but what I know is that people in the U.S. are very jealous of this provision. In the U.S., this has forced an Indian bill of rights, which is a carbon copy of the U.S. Bill of Rights per se. There is no flexibility, and it brings many jurisdictional problems.

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It also became very clear, as Georges said, that aboriginal nations were political and cultural entities at contact. They are still political and cultural entities. This is the big hurdle. With most of the Canadian public, they are seen as a race-based group, but they never were one genetic stock prior to contact, of course. In North America, it's different obviously after 500 years of contact, but they are political and cultural entities, and they have to be recognized as such today.

Another recommendation is that it should be made clear that there should not in the membership code be a minimum blood quantum as a general prerequisite that will transcend everything else imposed by an aboriginal nation for its membership. Ascendancy could be a factor obviously, among others, but it should not be a floor, a general requirement.

We also make clear in the process that while many aboriginal people would like to negotiate only with the federal government, most treaties, certainly the numbered treaties, were signed essentially with the Canadian government, or, prior to that, with the British Crown. Some of them were signed with the provinces, but we're very clear that if we are to achieve real self-government, with land and resource jurisdictions being addressed, the provinces have to be full partners at the table.

Also, in the land issues, we are very clear that of course there are historical rights. There is the continuity of title through aboriginal title. We think we can have certainty without asking aboriginal people to have a blanket extinguishment of their rights, which is what happened in federal comprehensive land claim policies. The first breakthrough on this general principle came in the Yukon, where there is some adjustment.

By and large, what is at stake here is an economic desire to give greater self-sufficiency in the allocation of land. But there is also economic development, because land is not a panacea. That's very important to aboriginal people, but you still have to work out access to capital, getting the skills and so forth. We have a huge economic development chapter.

There are two pillars if self-government is to be real.

We make it clear that accountability in the community at the moment is essentially toward the federal government, which gives all the money to the chiefs through the Indian Act down to the people. We have to shift that while retaining what is necessary in terms of accountability for transfer payments.

We have to develop an approach whereby, for the aboriginal people in the community, the leaders would be accountable to their people. At the moment, they are accountable only in terms of how they spend the money that comes from the feds. If you have a taxation base, then there would be a balance and the two will go together.

Here is essentially what we say in our report. It's probably the most central, directional proposal we're making. The vision we have for well into the next century is not a vision whereby the money and aboriginal people continue to be under the Indian Act. Frankly, we believe that when people think about equality rights, being under section 91.24 and saying we're all equal from there is not acceptable. To have a whole group of people under the jurisdiction of another, whether the federal government or the provinces, is not what will bring political and economic stability to the aboriginal people in this country.

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So the vision is that well into the next century the obligation of Canada towards the aboriginal people will be towards their collectives, the nations, the sixty-some nations Georges Erasmus talked about, through transfer payments. There will be an economic base sufficient for taxation powers and other own-source revenue by the aboriginal nations. The obligation, then, instead of being to each aboriginal individual, as it is now through the Indian Act, which forced the Indian Act to define who is an Indian, which is a big sore point - it has to be done that way in order to avoid the programs being open-ended. Our proposal is that this vision is that the obligations of Canada will be towards their collectives, through transfer payments, and the nations will decide their priorities and how the money will be spent - money from these transfer payments and money raised by their taxation powers.

We think this is far more natural to the Canadian structure of government and more understandable by the public than continuing well into the next century to channel all the money through the Indian Act in a special fashion. It will fit much better and it will enable the aboriginal people to have their nations together again, to make the decision to do away with status and non-status people, to have the larger collectives. This vision is central to our report.

We are saying if a committee like yours or the Canadian public think a vision like this is much better than the system we are all caught in - and we've been caught in this system for over a hundred years, mainly through the Indian Act but in other ways too - if they think so, they should say it loud and clear. We've tried to be very clear in our report on the destination I've just described, with those nations recognized through the legislation Georges talked about, on the taxation power, the transfer payments. We would need an equalization formula between the feds and the sixty-some nations like the one that exists with the provinces. We thought we had to be very clear on this destination in order for Canadians to be able to see what it would look like, how it would fit within the Canadian structure.

At the same time, we had to be clear on how we would hammer out the transition to move from where we are to this destination. We have a major section in our governance chapter in volume II, part 1, where we address the transition.

Here we put a large challenge to the aboriginal people themselves to make their choice. It's a valid choice if a single community wants to remain under the Indian Act, but what we are saying is that then by and large the expectation will be municipal powers. But if they want to move in the direction of being part of the aboriginal order of government, with a larger self-governing authority, they will have to reconnect their ties with the nation and be recognized through the process we're talking about. Then they will have the financing of those transfer payments through an agreement.

What we are saying is that then we will come up with a very detailed fashion to make sure people are not left out in the way the new membership code is decided, and for those who want to reconnect their ties and go the nation route.... I was with the Micmac in the Maritimes for three days last week and we had a lot of discussions about that, because the Micmacs are a good case. Ultimately they could all come together, including the communities in Quebec and the various maritime provinces where they are found. That would mean the final deal would have to be decided at the table, where the Province of Quebec, the Maritimes, the federal government, and the Micmac nation will be present.

It's doable. We're not talking about nation-states within the state of Canada. We're talking about nations in the sociological sense of the term.

On aboriginal lands, if there are to be extended lands, as Georges said, people are marrying out in the proportion of 50%, but in addition there are likely to be more and more non-aboriginal people living on those lands. We're very clear that these people, even with a nation-base model of self-government, should be given a right of representation, of influence, if they are going to be taxed and subjected to the laws on these territories.

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I'm not talking about criminal law. We came out with a special report a year ago that recommended people living on aboriginal lands be given an option to go to the mainstream justice system if a distinct justice system is established by the nation. Otherwise, generally, if they are to be subject to the laws in the aboriginal lands and pay tax to the aboriginal government, they should have the right of representation.

For those such as the Inuit and probably the Métis in the northern part of the prairie provinces, those who are going in the direction of public government, as in Nunavut, that's obviously easier, because it's clear there that everybody has the same right of representation, except for some guaranteed aboriginal rights in hunting or fishing.

In the cities essentially what we talk about is a community of interests, a government that brings together people of various nations in a city. We have in mind not so much law-making authority alongside the city council - not really - as the distribution of services; setting up their own institutions, school boards or social services, or influencing the mainstream services and making sure they are culturally appropriate for the aboriginal people. It might happen in some instances that there will be a strong group of the same aboriginal people in a given city and they might decide to become a local community of the whole nation, such as eventually the Micmac in Halifax or the Siksika in Calgary. These are specific instances. But by and large there are many aboriginal people in the city and it should be done through a community of interests, focusing on the services.

Again, to get back to the role of the committee, we think this report being huge and complex in its numbers of recommendations, the first assessment should be of this direction, and of the principles on which the direction is built: recognition, respect, sharing, and mutual responsibility. If this appears to be sound - we should not get caught up in all the details at the same time - if this direction appears to be able to rally both Canadians and aboriginal people, I think you should say it loud and clear, and the sooner the better, after you have assessed that, obviously, as a first step in order to bring people together to do the hard work, the capacity-building in the aboriginal communities and also in the larger public, to forge ahead towards the goal and start addressing the transition to move from where we are to this direction. I think it will be very important.

I'll just finish by saying the big challenge.... What we say in our report is that with the number of young aboriginal people, 36.5% of them being under 15, 56.2% being 24 and under, there is an opportunity to do something real if we act now. If we wait until the age pyramid reverses it will be much more difficult 25 years from now.

We have to avoid these young people being on social assistance. Some twenty years from now they will be only 35% or 45%, the same proportion as their parents are. At the moment 47% of them on reserve are on welfare. The excess spending is horrendous for both the federal government and the provinces. We're not going with the pressure of the demography. We're not going to sustain a system like that. We have to break this dependency. We have to bring more responsibility to the aboriginal people. This will give greater economic and certainly political stability to the country.

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That's the message. If we don't act now, then we're going to lose a major opportunity to turn this situation, which is seen as a problem to be fixed, as a burden to the Canadian taxpayers, into an asset for the country.

The Chairman: Thank you. It's so interesting I'm tempted to forgo the question period and just ask you to go on. But we will proceed to question period.

We'll do this informally so everyone will have ample opportunity to jump in. Mr. Murphy.

Mr. Murphy: Thank you both for your presentation. It's a clearer picture than I've ever heard, and I've thought a lot about this issue.

I'm going to be frank and say what was going through my head when I heard you talking. I'm still having difficulty in seeing some of the remarks, René, you made at the end about reversing social welfare with regard to economic development. We do know at this time there are a lot of first nations in Nova Scotia, where I'm from, who do not want to be lifted from the Indian Act. They want to stay there. The framework we, and you, talk about talks about that collapsing.

One of the elements of all of this is trust; how we get aboriginal people to trust and vice versa. That's so key. They would dump the Indian Act tomorrow if they thought there was trust, if they thought they could trust what the hell was going to happen. They don't.

I just wonder about the leap we have to make and how we do that. If I'm impatient, I can imagine how much more impatient you are, having been through this process. But I just don't know quickly that leap can be made.

We talk about trying to get self-sufficiency. I understand the point about the land and getting a land base that you can then start to work with and how that will bring returns. But how long are we talking about?

I'm just musing here a bit, but those are some of the concerns I have. I would just ask you if you want to respond.

Mr. Erasmus: There's no question there's incredible mistrust out there. To tell you the truth, weeks after the commission's report came out, the minister's coming out with an Indian Act where it seems a large portion of first nation people don't want it to occur and over their complaints and worries this is going to be shoved down their throats is not doing a thing to create any kind of trust out there. Undoubtedly there are those who support it, and that's the reason the minister is moving ahead.

But there is a big, big issue of trust that needs to be somehow overcome, and we suggest a number of ways that could occur. Federal legislation by way of a recognition act I think would be a very big move. Federal legislation to implement the treaties -

Mr. Murphy: Explain that recognition.

Mr. Erasmus: - I think would be a very big step, because the treaties have been ignored for a long time and in some cases have not been recognized at all, and so forth. That would begin a process of sitting down and implementing the old treaties.

The recognition act we're talking about would be based on the concept that aboriginal people are nations and they should reconstruct themselves. Where you now have status and non-status Indians, you wouldn't have that any more. Everyone would somehow or other trace themselves back to and attach themselves to a nation, so they would become a citizen of the Micmac or the Shuswap or the Haida, the Dene, the Cree, the Métis, the Inuit. So whether you lived off reserve or otherwise, you would still know what nation you are part of.

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We have in the report a clear process where a nation would have to take a number of steps before it would come before an independent panel that would assess whether or not it had done the basic prerequisites. One would be to have some kind of great law or constitution that clearly defined itself. It would have to have a citizenship code or a membership code that clearly was not overly restrictive. For instance, we think that using the basis that everyone has to have a quarter blood or half blood or something like this wouldn't stand a charter challenge, and it's not really the way to go. Nations have gone a long way beyond that. They're continuing to have new people coming into it who are not based on that kind of blood.

So the panel would take a look at these few things. Is there a nation government in place? Obviously if you have a constitution you've dealt with that. Do you have appeals, so that if individuals have sought membership and have been turned away, there is a way to have a fair appeal? Those would be the minimum things to be done.

But I wanted to answer your original question. You wonder about these communities that don't want to leave the Indian Act now and want to do other kinds of things. We're not too concerned about that right now, and the reason we're not is that we know there are enough places in the country where people want to move forward as a nation, right now. If there was a process today, you would have many nations from British Columbia, the Métis, the Cree, the Dene, coming forth already at your table right now, saying, okay, this is the way you want to go; this is the way we wanted it to go all along.

So there are going to be individual communities, parts of the country that are less interested in doing that, that are going to want to move ahead. That's no problem, because there is so much to be done.

In the area of capturing this generation of young people so that you don't lose any more generations of young people, there is all the work necessary virtually one person at a time. There is the healing from sexual abuse that needs to take place. If you're already a teenager in your middle teens and you've dropped out of high school, you really need to get back to formal training and finish your high school, go and get some kind of post-secondary education. We know already that virtually any aboriginal person who has a certificate or degree, or even experience at the post-secondary level, can virtually demand employment somewhere and can get it. There are, even in the age of cutbacks, jobs for aboriginal people with degrees; there is no question about it.

But the unfortunate thing is that even with the money that Indian Affairs has been putting into post-secondary education funding for aboriginal people, what has happened is that over a twenty-year period we've gone from a little less than 2% to a little less than 3% of aboriginal people with post-secondary education completion.

So the government may think they've been putting a lot of money in there - and they have been putting money. It's certainly not to criticize the government for not putting money there. But the reality is that if we want to stop a situation where there's not enough money - you're on a given reserve, 200 young people can go to university, and what you have is enough funding for 50. It doesn't matter who you are or what chief you are, you're going to dissatisfy people. On the other hand, there's no work for them, so what do you do? You put them on social assistance.

The process here is that whatever the welfare budget is gets funded, because that's the way we run the country. When you examine the same amount of money in relation to what would go into university, it's not very different. But on the one hand, it's a situation where it's virtually dead money, useless money to anybody, and on the other hand, you'd be giving people the tools to be able to become individually self-sufficient and contributing.

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So we have suggestions in here for how that money could be freed up. We want aboriginal communities and nations to be able to take their welfare money and do things with it.

On the one hand, we want them to be able to design individual programs. So if the post-secondary education funding runs out - we think it should be increased - and they have welfare dollars, then we can take these young people and say they're not going to get this money for nothing. They need to give us something. Work, go back to school, design a program for yourself that's going to work, but we want some end results here. We want some effort and responsibility on your part with a real goal at the end of it. We'll help them. We'll let them choose whatever career path they want. It's not for us to choose for them, but we'll assist them in that.

The other possibility is to take that money and couple it with housing and infrastructure dollars to create jobs. What we're suggesting is that in five years, the infrastructure needs, such as water and sewers, etc., on reserves should be cleaned up and caught up, while housing should be dealt with within ten years. If the housing backlog we now have is not dealt with now, with this bubble of young people coming up, it's going to be nothing compared to the problem we're going to have in ten years. So there's no end in sight.

You know those kinds of things, so you can take your welfare money, if you have control of it, to be able to design it this way and actually create jobs and training. If you know that you're going to have a housing and infrastructure budget for something like ten years to catch up to housing, then you can actually set up a partnership, training on the job, or all kinds of skills. There are all these carpenter, plumber, and electrician positions you know every year you're going to be building on. So you could design actual work, training, and educational experiences for people. At the end of it, when you're caught up in housing and everything, you'll have an infrastructure at home through which you can build these houses from now on, and you've got young people working and all the rest of it.

When we looked at the costs of what's happened in the past, yes, the money has been increasing. But how has it been increasing? Basically, it has been driven by demographics. The budget has always just been covering the costs. There has never been a real strategy to say we should take a look at what we've been doing. There's no end in sight. We have 200 more people on welfare. So because there are 200 more people on welfare, the budget covers it. There has never been a strategy to say that we've been doing that for a long time and we're now going to end it and do something completely different.

You don't always have a situation in which nearly 60% of the people are under 24 or 25 years old. So you really can do something with the fact that you have the young people. You're not talking about people in their 50s or late 40s who are now going to say they want an opportunity for post-secondary education and a new career and the rest of it. They've been working and they're tired, and their dreams are virtually fading. You're talking about the young people who haven't had a chance to have a real dream yet. So rather than nickel and dime these people and say only another four or five people are going to go to university, it's obviously in the interests of this country to make sure that every available young aboriginal person gets all the training and education possible.

We also make it very clear that just the regular educational process aboriginal people go through is extremely tough on aboriginal people. We give you all the reasons why - culturally, and all the rest of it. Starting from pre-school up, whether it's run by aboriginal people or provincial or territorial governments, we tell you how we can make these institutions more effective for aboriginal people.

In each case, we examine something in relation to why it's not working and we take another situation in which it is working. We find it somewhere else. Generally, it's in an aboriginal community. It could be in the United States, Canada, or New Zealand.

But if you do ever read the report - if people like yourselves don't read the report, then I wonder who will read the report - you will find that it is one success story after another. And there's another story here of why it hasn't worked. In each case you're lifted up, because when you read what is not working, you say my God, that's what we would do for everybody else; why is it not working for aboriginal people? Then on the other side we give you the reasons why it doesn't work for aboriginal people and what does work for aboriginal people.

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So we're not concerned about whether individual communities are not going to be interested in the Indian Act. If they are interested in cleaning up their employment, if they are interested in dealing with the sexual abuse that seems to be rampant in their communities, if they want to deal with all the healing requirements and all the rest of it, what we say is more power to them; support them as much as possible in those areas, and by example. Give Godspeed to the ones who want to move ahead in the nation government, because as fast as possible we need examples in the country of healthy individuals, healthy families and communities, and whole nations that are once again operating; both examples internally for the aboriginal people and also - this is going to be big - an experiment for the whole country. We want to know whether it's going to work before we go too far down that road, so we need a number of these examples.

The Chairman: If everyone agrees, I'll ask you all to pose your questions now, because it may be more productive than one-shot questions and answers.

Mr. Patry.

[Translation]

Mr. Patry (Pierrefonds - Dollard): Thank you very much, gentlemen. Like my colleagues, I am very pleased with your presentation this morning. To be quite frank, I thought it was very educational for us.

Mr. Erasmus gave us an overview of native history, and it certainly was very different from history I learned in my books at school.

I've finished reading the first volume. It's long. It's not hard to digest, but you have to take your time. The first volume of the report deals with history, and what I retained from it is that you support the four principles that you set out, which should guide the new relationship between Natives and non-Natives. Mr. Dussault listed them: mutual responsibility, mutual respect, sharing, and certain responsibilities between nations.

Could you give more details about the treaties mentioned in the second volume, which I have begun to read? You say in the second volume that there should be a new process to establish treaties, replacing the current policy on comprehensive land claims, but that this new treaty would not necessarily mean the total extinguishment of Aboriginal land rights. I have a hard time understanding how we could have a land base treaty without total extinguishment of these Aboriginal rights. I would like to get some information about that point.

The Chairman: Mr. Bachand.

Mr. Bachand (Saint-Jean): First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your presentation and on your excellent work.

I have many questions for you, but I will only ask two. The first one has to do with self-determination. Mr. Erasmus, earlier you were talking about the principle of self-government, and I think there is a nuance in international law regarding self-government. I agree with you that we have to begin with a process of recognition, which by the way was done in Quebec. Quebec has recognized the 11 Aboriginal nations.

Many people have fears about the international law in this case. Self-determination could take two forms: self-government, or secession. Judging by your remarks, you are favouring self-government with a large enough land base for these people to break the ties of dependency. Could you be more specific about this issue and could you confirm whether or not I understood you correctly.

In addition, I'd like to raise an issue that was dealt with during the seminar at McGill University. Several people, most of whom were Natives, criticized the commission because it did not do enough work on the Quebec issue. What is your impression? You know, in 1867, the Fathers of Confederation did not ask the Aboriginal nations to sign the Constitutional agreement. Nor were they asked to sign, in 1982. Moreover, Quebec did not sign the Constitution Act in 1982, either.

Don't you think this situation creates a distortion that will make it difficult to implement all the measures that you would like to bring forward?

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In the final analysis, you are on the same side of the fence as we are. Quebec did not sign the Constitution, and you didn't either. No matter what decision Quebec makes, I myself am a sovereignist. I am sure that there will be pressure on Quebec to remain within the Constitution and within the Canadian federation. But don't you have the impression that there is a distortion in the landscape for the time being because of this problem?

[English]

The Chairman: Mr. Finlay, your question, please. We're asking all the questions and we'll get integrated answers.

Mr. Finlay (Oxford): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I certainly appreciate the commissioners coming, having been one who urged this committee to invite them. I've learned a great deal already, and it has fleshed out what I've read, but I have a couple of niggling questions of fact.

I think, Mr. Erasmus, you said 60 million aboriginal people in the new.... I don't know whether you meant in the new world or in the world or in North or South America, but the summary said 500,000 was the aboriginal population of Canada in the 1500s.

Mr. Erasmus: I was referring to the Americas at contact.

Mr. Finlay: Okay. Thank you.

You talked about three levels of government in this Canada-wide framework agreement. Do they include the municipalities? Where do municipal governments fit in with your third level of self-government? Within urban communities you have proposed a form of self-government for aboriginal people.

Did I read somewhere that the Canadian Human Rights Act would apply? I'm thinking of some of the problems of women in aboriginal communities and their involvement in the government and so on. I like your idea that there are aboriginal nations who are ready now to undertake some of these things, and I think we have to make sure human rights are respected. It would be unfortunate to go forward and backward at the same time.

The Chairman: Mr. Duncan.

Mr. Duncan (North Island - Powell River): I have several questions. When you were talking, Mr. Erasmus, quite early on in your presentation you were saying your real direction here is to strengthen the collectives. In modern circumstances, is this not just establishing government-entrenched socialism? We're in a world right now where everything is moving in the opposite direction. What if your own individuals don't want this form of government? What if the two senior levels of government don't want this form of government? Isn't this just doing your people a huge disservice by not addressing their day-to-day problems but rather creating a sort of radical political system?

You gave some examples of wanting to break the cycle of sexual abuse and other things. My observation right now is that very recently in some respects we have gone in the wrong direction. You mentioned 70% of aboriginal students are going to schools off reserve, but we have had a recent movement to create more schooling on reserves. In some of those community situations we've actually placed children in a very unhealthy situation. Rather than breaking the cycle by getting them away from that sexual abuse pattern, we've actually placed them in higher jeopardy. I wonder how much you've thought about that.

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As for this whole question of membership, there are some ironies here. The way things are happening in some circumstances now, if membership is something that's decided by the leadership, if you agree with the leadership and decide not to rock the boat, then membership is assured. If you disagree with the leadership, you may not be welcomed into the community or the nation, as you're describing it.

Under the recent Nisga'a Agreement in Principle, the whole question of membership remains with the Indian Act. It's the only part of the Indian Act that remains. My analysis of that is that anything else is inevitably unworkable...or anything else that contemplates continued absolute differentiation between being Canadian and being a member of an aboriginal grouping that is somehow receiving differential status. I didn't hear specifics from you as to how we can get around that, so that's another question I would pose.

Mr. Erasmus: What is your question?

Mr. Duncan: The question really is that if this were a workable concept, then -

Mr. Erasmus: Are you trying to ask us what we are proposing for membership?

Mr. Duncan: Yes. You're leaving it very open-ended, and I'm saying it can't be open-ended because that's unworkable. I think the Nisga'a recognized that and that's why they kept the Indian Act definition. But that's obviously flawed too. I understand your concept, but what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unworkable.

I have several other questions, but I'm concerned that I'm going on too long.

The Chairman: We'll ask Mr. Hubbard for his question, and I know it's very difficult for you because there are a lot of questions. I think we will have time for another round, so if your question has not been answered maybe you can ask it again.

Mr. Hubbard.

Mr. Hubbard (Miramichi): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Probably in terms of our country this is an historical moment, when we're presenting a major report and looking at the history of the contacts between our different groups over the last 500 years or more. But in terms of the writings of the report and the studies of civilization and societies - for example, you must have had some very good historians working on this - and trying to put into context what has happened with our own people in Canada, and what has happened with Toynbee's A Study of History, is it a reality that we can look back and turn back the wheels of time?

I have some trouble too with the concept of what a nation is. Many of our 600 different communities across this country call themselves nations, and in your report you speak of 50 or 60 and maybe as low as four groups of peoples. In terms of nations historically, we always think in terms of a fixed land base. Whether it be Claude with his Quebec or whether it be another nation-state, there's always a fixed geographic unit.

We speak of the Micmacs, for example, of eastern Canada, and with them, of course, we are dealing with the province of Quebec, probably the other four Atlantic provinces, and even the states of Maine and Massachusetts. So it's a very broad geographical group we're speaking of.

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I would like to hear something in terms of how this geography aspect is going to relate to the concept of nation. Also, can the various communities, even in New Brunswick where we have probably eight or nine different Micmac communities, work together as a unit, politically and socially and economically? These are some of the concerns I have, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: If you could take twenty minutes.... I know you could take three hours on this, and we might have a chance at another quick round. If the committee wishes to extend and you're able to stay, that's a decision the committee will make. The floor is yours.

Mr. Erasmus: I'll start. I'll leave some of the questions in relation to self-determination in Quebec and treaty non-extinguishment and so forth to René.

The first one I'll start with is in relation to the three levels of government and the role of the municipalities. When we talk about orders of government we're talking about the federal government and the provinces now. Municipal governments are the creation of one of those orders. The legislation provincially creates municipal governments. It's not a constitutionally created government structure; it's through legislation in the provinces. This is why Ontario, if it wants, can squeeze Metro Toronto and a number of municipalities into a mega city. If they had the jurisdiction constitutionally, I suspect that would not be possible.

We see the aboriginal nations as another order. Some people suggest they are the first order, but they would be another order. Within that we expect that besides nation governments you would undoubtedly have communities, municipalities if you wish - just so you have some image in your mind and some understanding - a village community. The powers they have would obviously be resolved within the aboriginal nation itself.

With respect to the Nisga'a, we actually have an example. I don't know how many people have read the agreement completely, but you have an example there. You're going to have a nation government for the Nisga'a. You're going to have community governments. They're also going to have some urban governments - three urban villages in fact.

Some nations are so big they might have regional.... In northern Ontario the Nishnawbe-Aski have something like 55 or more communities, and at the moment they have half a dozen or more different tribal regional groupings. They cover such a big territory. So it's very likely that when the constitution is being discussed, you will have powers given to municipal and maybe even regional and nation governments.

Another question asked if the charter applies. The charter does apply. There is no question at all. We're firmly of the opinion, as René said in his presentation, that individual rights of citizens within the nation would have the same charter protection against their nation government as Canadians now have against their provincial or federal governments.

In the urban areas, obviously you have a situation.... First of all, our image of the jurisdiction of aboriginal people would be territorially based. It will depend on the land base aboriginal people have. If the recognition act were to pass, it would mean at the beginning that obviously the existing land, the reserve bases, would in fact be where those nation governments would be able to legislate.

Strengthening the collective means entrenching socialism. By strengthening the collective, we mean simply reversing what we've been doing until now.

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The impression we as Canadians have had in the past was the best thing to do for aboriginal people was to save them one individual at a time and remake them and fit them into a new society, and their own institutions had virtually nothing to offer these individuals. We think that was extremely wrong, it's still wrong today, and the best thing to do in fact is to strengthen aboriginal institutions. Why do you do that? Because they have the ability collectively, we think, to nurture their own people better. There are many, many examples of that.

So what we're talking about with setting up their own governments would be for them to decide among themselves, as a collective, the kind of national constitution they would have and the kind of government they would have, based on it. There has been a lot of time. No one's talking about going back in time, particularly aboriginal people. They are very much talking about looking forward. We know cultural values and ideas have been changed and altered, and they know it very well. So it's very likely you will see major changes from what has happened in the past.

For instance, amongst the Iroquois it used to be that clan mothers appointed political leaders and had the ability, after three warnings, to remove the political mantle. We don't know if the Iroquois are going to sit down and say, well, the great law worked for us before contact and for the first couple of hundred years after, but in the last 150 years or so, since the Indian Act imposed band councils on us...we now want elections.

We're not sure. In the north the Inuit are experimenting with a completely new type of government. They are talking about every riding having a male and a female being elected. That's not necessarily something from their past, but it's something they want for the future. What we're suggesting is that each aboriginal collective be provided the opportunity to decide it for themselves and experiment over time. Undoubtedly there will be change.

We strongly suspect that given the proper time and given the possibility for experimentation, aboriginal people will borrow from their past and borrow from examples they are looking at themselves, and so forth. The concept of individual rights is extremely important for aboriginal people, whether it is from the past or otherwise. Individually, in the past, each individual was given his own name. You didn't have this baggage of a family name you carried around. Everybody was given their own name, and everybody had strong individual rights. So I don't think there's much problem there. Individual rights will be a strong part of the cultures.

About socialism, there is a continuing community interest amongst aboriginal people. I don't think it's based on what we have all grown to know as ``socialism''. If you have studied the evolution of Marx and Engels and Mao's little books of thoughts and the evolution of world communism and so forth, or even the concept of social democratic governments.... Aboriginal people have their own culture, which doesn't tie them up in those kinds of strict party concepts. I don't really think we can use that as an excuse to suggest aboriginal people cannot be provided with self-government because they're going to bring communism to the Americas in a new way. That's absolute nonsense.

About leaders imposing something on individuals who wouldn't want it, setting up radical systems, I don't know where that comes from. What we're talking about is simply the aboriginal people themselves sitting down and deciding what they want, deciding whether they want to continue with the chief and council system and elections or they want to have some way in which there is better representation.

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One of the problems the elected system has brought to the reserves happens when you have a very small community and a large family that dominates. You can keep the leadership just in that one family. The first one across the winning line assumes all power.

First of all, that was completely alien among aboriginal peoples. Most aboriginal people had a way to distribute power. It was a diffuse kind of power structure. We didn't have the hierarchical structure very often. Most times, it was a system whereby the power was in fact shared. One of the most culturally difficult things for aboriginal people is to plug themselves into a situation where they are supposed to be just a little cog in a big wheel. This assumed that there was hierarchical power.

Here is the most difficult thing for aboriginal people who come from a traditional society. They go into a classroom and the teacher's sitting up there with all the power. They go into a courtroom and there's a judge sitting up on a high podium with all the power over that. They go into a religious situation where the priest, or whomever, has all the power. It's completely foreign to aboriginal cultures, which generally share the power.

So what we're talking about is setting up a situation in which you once again exercise your power. I don't know why you would set up the kind of dictatorships that presumably some people think aboriginal people would be setting up. In fact, that is culturally alienating and would perpetuate the problems we now have.

In relation to sexual abuse and children in high jeopardy, there's no question that we have sexual abuse, violence, and suicide because of it. We have all the problems of poverty and colonization. But we're convinced, first of all, with individual work and community work, that there are examples out there now among aboriginal people in which absolutely incredible work is being done. The unfortunate thing is that they are badly funded. They are funded on a year-by-year basis. Their future is perhaps in jeopardy.

Aboriginal people have found ways in which they can address these issues locally. In our report on justice, and also in volume III of this report, we document numerous ways in which aboriginal people are taking control of their community in this area. We very, very strongly endorse the kind of grassroots approach that has been taken.

We demonstrate, for instance, an alternative to just sending sexual abusers to jail for two, three, or four years. This is instead of locking them up and, once they came out, making pariahs out of them, and saying that they should move because we don't want them in our community. That doesn't solve anything. The thing to do is address the individual and go through a lengthy process of healing that individual plus all of the people who have been affected.

In the report, we have very clearly demonstrated that those issues are dealt with in the community. That doesn't mean there aren't examples right now where children are in jeopardy. There's no question about it, and we've addressed those kinds of things.

In relation to membership being decided by leaders, I don't know what's being talked about there. Maybe it's something that goes on now. I don't know where that would go on now. With the Indian Act, there's a very clear way in which you become a part of the band. If the community has assumed leadership, then what has been put in place is a new membership code. It's a code, and if you meet the requirements, then you're accepted.

What we're proposing in the future is a code that must meet certain requirements. The charter does apply, no question, to aboriginal people, their governments, and their rights. So you can't set up a situation in which, regardless of who the individual is, they can just go back and forth and say, well, I like you, or you're going to give me favours and you're going to become a member. It just would not work. It could not withstand a charter challenge.

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Not only that, but if you're talking about a nation government situation, they would have had to have gone through a process where there would have to have been public acceptance of this process even to have set up the constitution. Very clearly, we have referenda that have to be met numerous times along the way, for reconstructing your nation through a constitution, through a citizenship code, and all the rest of it.

Then on the end of it, before you are recognized by the government, you have to go to an independent panel. Anyone can come there, as in this committee, and say, look, we don't like what they did, we don't like the kind of system they have there, and we suggest you, Independent Panel, cannot accept this; send them back to the drawing board; their citizenship code doesn't work because of this and all the rest of it. Then part of the process has to be that an appeal is set up if in fact an individual has moved forward and attempted to be accepted and has not been.

So the panel has to make sure many checkmarks have gone across the board before in fact you can set up the situation. Numerous safeguards are put in place so the kind of abuse you're talking about would not necessarily take place.

About the membership being open-ended, and why it wouldn't work, I don't understand. Canadians keep telling the world that our open-ended approach here is the best example for all countries in the world. We're just talking about it in a microcosm, where in fact whomever individuals marry, their spouse, male or female, has the natural ability to become a member of the nation they are marrying into. Their children obviously are members, and onwards. Perhaps even by residency...if you're a very long-term resident in the area you could become a member.

The only way you would have problems with this is if you thought this was somehow racially based; that rights were attached to race rather than to a political entity, a cultural entity. So I don't understand what the problem is.

About the study of civilizations and turning back, we're not talking about turning back - far, far from it - but rather that a historical deal was made at the beginning and we should live up to it. Even if there wasn't a historical deal, we are of the opinion that this is the best way. If any nation anywhere in the world finds indigenous or aboriginal people like this, the best thing to do is to provide that nation with enough land, enough control over their lives, that they can do the normal things that make strong individuals who fit into society, who are not dysfunctional, who are cooperative beings within the society, responsible beings, contributing beings.

About a fixed land base and geography and the Micmac and so on, obviously the easiest land base situation is when it's contiguous and it has borders all the way around. If Canada wants to take that approach and make sure aboriginal people have big land bases that are all contiguous, go for it. But I suspect what is going to happen, if the other negotiations have been an example, is the Canada side, whether or not it's the province and the territory sitting there with the federal government, has always pushed such a hard bargain that you end up walking away with very little land. At the time of the treaties it was something like 1%. If you put all your land, your 1%, in one area, you don't have much in the way of selecting the land. Even when it grows to 5% or 10%, you're still there saying, well, you know, we need that land over there for one reason, we need this land here for another reason, and all the rest of it. So you end up having non-contiguous land. But if Canada were to say, well, we'll give you 75% of your land back, maybe we could have.... So if you want it to go that route, push that.

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I suspect that the country, as generous as it's going to be, is still going to be pushing for a much smaller piece of land. Unfortunately, the ironic thing is that the more successful your federal negotiator and your provincial negotiator are, and the more measly they are, and if aboriginal people walk away with small land, it means that then you will not be economically self-sufficient. So you really haven't done the country much of a favour. You're going to have people who continue to be socially dependent and all the rest of it.

In relation to the reconstruction of the nation, obviously the political boundaries that are in place now, such as in the Maritimes, make it tougher. When you go from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., Newfoundland, Quebec...obviously the more provinces you involve the more difficult it gets. There's no question about it.

So that is a long-term view. It may well be that the Micmacs of Nova Scotia will start first and move ahead, and with time New Brunswick will come on-side, and maybe P.E.I. not too long along the road, because they have a very small population and they're very closely tied with Nova Scotia. They look to Nova Scotia for leadership most of the time. So they may in fact join very quickly with the people of Nova Scotia.

But we certainly do not try to understate the problem of bringing back full membership - status and non-status. What the Indian Act has done is set up a situation where, because of this federal act, you recognize some people as aboriginal and some people as non-aboriginal. For a long time, if women married out they lost their status. So you've created a whole assortment of people, some of whom, even though they're related - they're the same people, basically - are status and some are non-status. That has created all kinds of problems. There are some real human difficulties that you have to get over to bring people back together. We would not be doing anybody a service by trying to gloss over that and trying to say that this is extremely easy.

What we are saying is that we're fairly confident that our concepts and our approach will result...even with close examination, we're prepared to defend this. The unfortunate thing is that we're defending things that have nothing to do with our report. There are letters in the paper, there are speeches being written on our report as if, for instance, we say the charter doesn't apply - extraordinary stuff. So we're defending against things that are not even in our report. People say extraordinary things about what will happen in relation to what we're suggesting that have nothing to do with what we're proposing at all. That's the unfortunate thing, that we're dealing with myths.

If at least this committee, which has a responsibility to deal with this report, would read the report.... If you don't read it, and you have a responsibility to deal with this, who in the world is going to read this report?

The Chairman: Since it is 11 a.m., I think we'll adjourn, but not before saying that you have given life to your report. You will have an opportunity, of course, to have the closing remarks and you can take the time you need.

For committee members, I know you have more questions. You may want to invite our guests again at another time. I would not want anyone to think that we've dealt with the report and now it's over. It's a living document and the concerns will be continued. We will continue to work at the report.

I turn the floor over to you for closing remarks. Please take the time you need.

[Translation]

Mr. Dussault: I would like to answer the question about the right to self-determination and the question about why we did not take a closer look at Aboriginals and what their situation would be if Quebec were to become a sovereign nation. I'll be brief.

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As for the question of self-determination, our report is very clear about the emerging standard in international law. A declaration of Aboriginal rights is being studied at the United Nations, although it has not been adopted yet. This emerging standard in international law is mainly based on human rights and moral principles. Thus, our report says that throughout Canada and in other countries, the right to self-determination means that in the countries where Aboriginal peoples are found, they basically are entitled to self-government, to establish their own institutions and to respect for their values and their culture.

We don't go so far as to advocate secession, unless Natives were excluded from the political process, were not entitled to vote or were ostracized in terms of human rights.

We did not study this issue assuming that Quebec might become a sovereign nation, because we thought that our mandate was to look at the situation of Native people in Quebec assuming the reality that Quebec is a part of Canada. We would have been going beyond our mandate. We felt that we didn't have a mandate to look at Native issues and Native dealings with Canada and at the same time look at Quebec and its dealings with Canada, which brings us to the Constitution Act, 1982. Nonetheless, in Volume I we did explain very clearly that the repeated failures over the past 30 years to have Quebec's inherent rights recognized, including the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, and the repeated failures to recognize Aboriginal rights after 1982, during the four constitutional conferences between 1983 and 1987, mean that ever since the failure of Charlottetown, the two issues are in some ways intertwined. We didn't think that it was part of our mandate to attempt to solve the question of Quebec and its relationship with Canada. We did so for the issue of Natives and their relationship with Canada, which includes Quebec.

As for the issue of coexistence and the establishment of treaties, we are convinced that it is possible, as the special report we drafted on this issue explains, to enter into treaties without requiring total extinguishment of rights, without breaking the continuity of rights. We have drawn up specific recommendations in this regard, and we think that legal certainty will be reached by means of mutual recognition of rights. The committee members could look at their copy of the special report on negotiating treaties in the spirit of coexistence.

Justice Hamilton also looked at that issue when he and Murray Sinclair co-chaired the Manitoba inquiry. He came to the same conclusion that we did and he made some very practical suggestions about how the policy on government claims could be changed.

[English]

I would like to say that we are concerned about some lack of democracy within the aboriginal communities. It has to do with the lack of economic vitality there. All the money coming from the top down is unhealthy. That's why we propose a change, where there would be an economic base and economic vitality. Democracy and the political aspect and respect for rights go along with economic vitality in the community.

The Chairman: Committee members, do you wish to continue, or do you wish to ask our guest to come back?

[Translation]

Mr. Dussault: Mr. Chairman,

[English]

I must say I have, along with Georges Erasmus, a flight to Toronto to catch at 12 a.m.

The Chairman: Yes, you have a flight to catch. So you have answered my question.

I will simply thank you and save my closing remarks for the next time you come, because we would like to see you again, if you are willing to come back. It's very profitable for us. Thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.

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