Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to rise today on an issue I raised yesterday in the House. I find it kind of ironic that the Government of the Northwest Territories is falling back to federal legislation that was passed in the federal Parliament in 1960 to deal with an issue in 2010. I think, Mr. Speaker, it’s a bad precedent that this government is setting on how we manage the affairs of the Northwest Territories by going back to the colonial government of John Diefenbaker.
At that time, we used to have a council which was appointed by Ottawa and ran the government out of Ottawa, and now we are in the situation where we are going back to that same legislation and same process of falling back instead of going ahead and agreeing to acknowledging aboriginal rights, aboriginal land claims and Canadian constitutional changes in regards to Section 35, acknowledging aboriginal people’s rights in the Northwest Territories and enhancing those processes to enact those legislative agreements that have been passed in this Legislature by adhering to aboriginal rights with regard to constitutional rights and, more importantly, Mr. Speaker, the right as Canadians to upholding our Constitution, Section 35.
Mr. Speaker, I find it kind of hard to understand how a government can make a political decision on outdated decisions regarding a government which no longer applies to the Northwest Territories. We are a new Territory after division. We have land claims settled in the Northwest Territories. We also have agreements that clearly stipulate the process this government must follow before it takes any type of radical decisions such as the one we’re dealing with today by ensuring due process, making sure that the needs levels of indigenous people are upheld, and allowing those aboriginal people the right to subsistence harvesting on a manageable level. I think for myself, a Member of this House going on 15 years, this sets a bad precedent in regard to how we make decisions in this Legislature for the people of the Northwest Territories, running back to Ottawa, going through their archives to dig up something that might be...