Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord.
I did not expect to rise and speak to the House of Commons when I decided last week to come here today to renew my experience of this House where I have already spent a great deal of time and where I am still proud of representing the citizens of La Pointe-de-l'Île. I am here today and this debate concerns me deeply. I will try to speak of that in the short time I have, and I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to tell me when I have one minute remaining.
I want to remind members that Quebeckers have formed a nation for a very long time and that, unfortunately, Canada as a whole has never agreed to recognize that fact. Today, I am astounded to hear certain arguments from members, whom I otherwise very much respect, speaking of this trap that the Bloc Québécois is setting for Parliament by tabling this motion today.
First of all, Quebeckers have formed a nation for a very long time. My first field of study was history. At that time, people spoke of the history of Quebec and of Canada. We can believe—and there are quotations to that effect — that from the time of the French regime, before the British conquest, the Canadiens—because Quebeckers of that period called themselves Canadiens to distinguish themselves from the French—already formed a nation. The Americans had given themselves a country, they had claimed their independence, but even if they had not declared their independence they would have been different from the British. They were Americans. They made up the American nation. In the same way, the Canadiens of that period, in the Canada that was a French colony, made that distinction and there was already that difference. There was this nation that was there.
Needless to say that in the British conquest—the fact that the very great majority of colonists were settled, according to the wishes of British governors, on the Ontario side for one part, and in the Eastern Townships for the other part—the high birth rate of those Canadiens, who later became French-Canadians, emphasized even more this feeling of difference. I could speak about that at length.
I want to remind members that when Lord Durham—of unhappy memory in Quebec—came after the 1837-1838 insurrections, he said, in speaking of Quebec, referring to what was then Lower Canada following the insurrection—and I learned it from my history professor during a session on Lord Durham: “I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state”.
Lord Durham, after his report, concluded that the most urgent requirement was to turn those Canadiens into a minority. Once that was done, they could be given responsible government later. From that flowed the forced union of what is today Ontario and Quebec which later became Canada. But before giving self government to the colony, which was the seed of independence, Lord Durham said: “These Canadiens must be put into a minority”.
This Quebec nation, recognition of which is said today to be a trap, simply expresses itself and grows differently. It is. It is, not because Canada is united. It just is.
I travel a lot and there are multinational countries, countries that have more than one nation within them—Belgium recognizes that it is one. A nation like the Quebec nation, whether it forms a country or not, is a nation. So saying that it is a trap to recognize it is extremely surprising, to say the least.
It is also surprising that for all this time, from the British conquest to today, with all of the progress by Canada and the self-satisfied image that Canadians often project, they have never wanted to recognize the Quebec nation as a nation, as a group of people united by history, by language, by culture and by a body of laws. This is as true in English as it is in French. Certainly, it is not a country. That is why Quebec cannot join the United Nations.
Why, for all this time, has Canada had such difficulty recognizing it? We need only think of the epic tale that some of us, and I myself, lived through, the tale of recognition of the distinct society and the provisions of the Charlottetown accord. Why find it so difficult to recognize the characteristics of this nation, no matter where its future lies? Once again, I am astonished to hear it said that this is a trap, or a trick. To my mind, the words I have read are much more of a trick. I read those words because I was not here yesterday, for reasons I can explain outside this chamber. And so I read what the Prime Minister said:
The real question is simple: do the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada? The answer is yes. Do the Québécois form a nation independent of Canada? The answer is no, and it will always be no.
If there is a trick anywhere, it is in what “united Canada” is intended to mean. That is why the leader of the Bloc Québécois rose just now to say that he would agree with an amendment that said “currently within a united Canada”. We want to say how things are. Quebeckers are what they are in Canada today, that is true, and our motion says that.
That is why we could not understand—at least, I could not understand, myself—why this Parliament as a whole does not agree with our motion, as amended, because what we have done is precisely to make the effort to get an admission of the recognition of the Quebec nation for what it is today. We cannot accept, however, that at the same time we would be told:
Do the Québécois form a nation independent of Canada? The answer is no, and it will always be no.
In our motion, we do not want to assume what the future holds.
Why does the Prime Minister's motion, which everyone has praised, have to assume what the future holds?
We agree to recognize the Quebec nation, because we are sure of what the future holds.
No. We say that we have to recognize today—