Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by making a comment and thanking the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services for his question.
First of all, minority rights in Quebec have always been guaranteed and protected. You asked me to draw a comparison between francophones and anglophones. I will take only one example, that of the school system.
Anglophones have always managed their own free public school system. They even had a school system managed by English speaking protestants, so that they would not have to mix with French-speaking catholics.
Although the 1982 Constitution guarantees the right of Acadians and other French speaking Canadians to manage their own schools in every province where numbers warrant, those com-
munities had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to force their provinces to merely implement the terms of the 1982 Constitution.
So when Acadians and other French Canadians are treated the same as the anglophone minority in Quebec, I think that Canada will be entitled to sing the national anthem of its choice. In the meantime, I think that the rights of Quebec anglophones are protected by the program of the Parti Quebecois. This is not the place to list their potential rights in a sovereign Quebec. We will leave that to Quebec and Mr. Parizeau when he comes into office, as we all hope.
As far as natives are concerned, I am not the designated critic on this issue. I will leave it to the official critic on aboriginal affairs to state our views on the subject. But it is clear that our native minority has always been treated well in Quebec, too. They have not experienced nearly as many difficulties as in the rest of the country, as the courts can testify to.