Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to make some remarks on the government's emphasis on community transfer agreements. The Hon. Stephen Kakfwi early today briefly acknowledged the concern that band councils may have respecting the question of aboriginal self-government and the government's new initiative respecting the Beatty report's recommendation of community transfer agreements. My comments today will revolve around this concern that the Hon. Stephen Kakfwi acknowledged respecting aboriginal self-government and the community transfer agreements.

As the government is aware, the long sought-after constitutional guarantee of the right to aboriginal self-government may be close at hand. The federal government has now stated quite clearly that the entrenchment of the right to aboriginal self-government is being very seriously considered. If this constitutional entrenchment takes place in the near future, it would accomplish two very important objectives that aboriginal people across Canada have been working very hard at. These two objectives are: 1) it would enable aboriginal communities to escape half-political arrangements which have stressed individual rights, welfare and municipal structures; 2) it would expand the powers and authority base traditionally exercised by aboriginal governments and make allowance for new forms of aboriginal government.

My region, the North Slave, recently made a presentation to the NWT Commission for Constitutional Development. Prior to this presentation we held a two-day meeting with leaders from across the North Slave to flesh out an initial position on constitutional and political development. At this meeting, Mr. Chairman, one of our elders, Alex Arrowmaker, pointed out that we already have the institutions for self-government in Tli Cho region. "We do not want anything new," he said. "We want to keep what we have now." In other words, we do not need any new structures imposed on us by a new constitution. What we want is a structure which recognizes our existing institutions as the instrument of self-government.

Aboriginal Self-Government Should Come About Through Negotiation With Federal Government

Mr. Chairman, the people of my region want aboriginal self-government. Our understanding of the government's proposed community transfer agreements is that it will be a delegated form of municipal self-government. The Tli Cho people of my region, North Slave, are simply not prepared to get locked into, at this time, the government's new form of delegated authority in light of the potential constitutional entrenchment of what we believe to be a pre-existing and independent aboriginal right to self-government. In other words, the Tli Cho people do not believe that self-government should be imposed by either the Government of the Northwest Territories, through the community agreements or by the various methods available presently through direct negotiations with the federal government.

What the Tli Cho people are saying in effect, is that if the right to self-government is entrenched in the Canadian constitution, aboriginal people in the Northwest Territories could negotiate directly with the federal government in order to gain and exercise decisive control over, and to redesign where necessary, the activities, institutions, financial arrangements required to meet the challenges of economic development, health, education, social services, resource management and any number of common concerns in their communities and on their land.

The Government of the Northwest Territories approach to community self-government, through the proposed community transfer agreements, seems to be, according to the Tli Cho people of the North Slave region, just a continuation of delegated power from the Government of the Northwest Territories. Although communities will be given the right to decide not to accept a responsibility that the Government of the Northwest Territories is ready to give it, it does not have the fundamental right to decide for itself what responsibilities it wants. That is the right we expect in a constitution for the western Northwest Territories.

We are now engaged in redefining who we are through the commission for constitutional development process, and the government is at the same time attempting to short-circuit this process by introducing a form of self-government at a municipal level that may be totally rejected by aboriginal communities as an acceptable model for community and regional self-government. The status of the government's proposed community transfer agreements should be exactly that, a proposal for discussions within the constitutional development process. It should not be anything more, certainly not a municipal form of self-government that the government is committed to implementing. Mahsi cho.