Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have some comments with respect to page 14, particularly with respect to findings of the review project. It you look through the page, basically what this says is that the North is now becoming a welfare state, if I can use the term, and the North is becoming totally dependent on government, in particular social assistance, and it is growing and the cost of it to the government, and how the government inherited and how they have to address all the problems of unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and poor housing.
When you think of it, this government was basically created in the latter part of the 1960s, taking into account, from what I recall, that prior to that people were fairly independent and did not depend on society to address issues in a monetary way. The native way was to basically share what we had and to use the resources we could from the land.
However, government came in in the 1960s and basically indicated that the housing was not adequate. "You do not live in good conditions and we are going to fix all this up for you." And as the years went by, they developed all these programs, such as housing and social assistance. If they felt you did not make enough money, they gave you money to go and buy food, clothing, and at the same time they basically said, "if you do not look after your kids, well, we will take them away," and all these types of things that caused many social problems.
I want to make a few points, because I am concerned that in the North we are becoming a welfare state. I am not saying no other jurisdiction is a welfare state of the government, because I believe every jurisdiction in Canada is a state of the government. They all rely to a great degree on the federal government. However, it is becoming obvious that our jurisdiction is increasing rapidly, to the point where people feel it is a right to take advantage of all these benefits the government gives them. They feel it is a right to go out and get social assistance, not recognizing that they lost the focus on thinking that social assistance is for people only in need, and the system is set up to encourage people to stay home, even though I recognize that in many of the communities there are no jobs. Where there are jobs, many times the system is set up to encourage people to basically consider living off welfare. I guess as an individual I am concerned about that, because all I think is that the more dependent we become on government, the more social problems we are going to face. As a result of it, I think when you become a dependant of government, probably your violence and crime continually increase, because a person's esteem becomes very, very low; and when a person's self-esteem becomes very low people think in a different mentality and they become discouraged to try to get out of the system.
But I did want to state that it is government's fault in many ways that allowed this dependency. They basically stated to people, "No, you and your children cannot live off the land in an outpost settlement or in a camp. You have to take advantage of our educational system and you have to send your kids to school, so therefore you have to live in the community," not recognizing that to develop a school system that would accommodate their way of life. I find it extremely difficult now that we want to say that we want to...