Just using the Minister's scenario, if an aboriginal person living in a social economy knowing that your wage economy is a lot less than, say, a non-aboriginal economy, if that is one of the factors that you look at - which in 90 percent of the time it is - and because you are so-called "unfit" your child will be taken away because of the status you have of being who you are. That is my concern. The system we have in place, using the rules that we do use, has always been a hindrance to aboriginal people because that was the excuse used to take children away and send them off to school, to residential schools, to the hostel system, and here we are again using that same argument.

As a parent or a family member, the welfare of the child should include consideration of its cultural background -- the family connection and the family unit that we have within aboriginal communities - not looking at it as a social or economic stamp that you put on somebody because your value is less than someone else because of the social conditions that you live in.

That is why so many of our aboriginal children have been taken away from aboriginal communities and put into homes outside our communities and in the south. I think we should learn from that. For aboriginal groups that have been fighting to try to get land claims, trying to get self-government and trying to get the status to determine our membership, this falls totally against that notion that we are trying to establish a system of keeping our children within the families and keeping them at home with their parents or grandparents, their nephews and nieces.