Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the proposed amendment to Bill C-53, an Act to establish the Department of Canadian Heritage. This amendment calls for the bill to be withdrawn and the subject-matter thereof referred to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
I would like to say at the outset that the fears the hon. member for Outremont wants to dispel have been reaffirmed by this bill. There is no place for Quebec or for the distinct society. It is always surprising, not to say sad, to see the illusions of timid nationalists reaffirmed after fighting in vain for 30 years.
When we look closely at the sectors, the functions and the people targeted by this new department, we quickly realize that this is a "grab bag" department, a hodge-podge of programs which clearly show either the Canadian government's inconsis-
tency or its less than transparent strategy in dividing up responsibilities, in bringing together parts of the following federal departments: Environment Canada; Multiculturalism and Citizenship; the part of Health and Welfare responsible for amateur sport; part of the Canadian Secretary of State, namely official languages, Canadian studies, Native programs and state protocol; the part of Environment Canada responsible for Parks Canada and historic sites; the part of the Department of Communications responsible for the arts, heritage, culture and broadcasting.
Later, they will add the Registrar General of Canada from the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. The new Department of Canadian Heritage, whose creation was undertaken by the Conservative government, brings together for the first time all of Ottawa's cultural policy instruments, namely the Canada Council, the CBC, the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, national parks and museums, National Archives, etc.
This department will have a budget in the order of $2.8 billion, compared with a $425 million budget for Quebec's Ministry of Culture. In addition, several responsibilities assigned to the Department of Canadian Heritage must be fulfilled in co-operation with other departments, thus reducing the heritage minister's actual power and political say in administering his own department. After this morning's statement by the minister, we can conclude that even his moral power is affected.
Moreover, responsibility for telecommunications policy and programs was transferred from the Department of Communications to the new Department of Industry. All this with little or no staff or spending reduction in sight. So what is the real purpose of this reorganization? The real powers granted to the Minister of Heritage are like jam: the less you have, the more you spread it around. In this case, the new department's responsibilities are well spread out.
The culture portfolio has undergone two major reorganizations since June 1993; things are getting more and more complicated, the number of players keeps increasing, and jurisdictional overlap is getting worse. The government must have followed an increasingly popular rule: Why simplify when you can make things more complicated and a little more expensive? A highly centralizing Canadian Heritage.
To say the least, the Canadian government has obviously decided to make this Department of Canadian Heritage the main instrument to promote Canadian values and it will also encourage the whole country to fully participate in that exercise.
But what about the distinct character of Quebec's culture and what about the sectors which are under exclusive provincial jurisdiction according to the Constitution of 1867? The bill is totally silent on that. The government is deliberately trying to hide that reality. The old centralizing reflex of the federal government is still just as strong. The government persists in
trying to fool Canadians and Quebecers. Obviously, this new department tries to bury the specific character of Quebec's culture by progressively diluting it in a hypothetical Canadian culture which is, would you believe, unique and multicultural.
Make no mistake about it: The mandate of the Department of Canadian Heritage is twofold. Indeed, it must create from scratch an artificial Canadian identity based on Canada's multi-ethnic mosaic and, consequently, that identity must be multicultural. However, that identity and that feeling of belonging based on bilingualism and multiculturalism sounds hollow to Quebecers.
That double mandate goes totally against Quebec's fundamental interests, since it rejects the distinct and specific character of Quebec's culture. The hon. member for Outremont talked about complementarity, but he should have used the word overlapping.
Such is the new federal cultural policy: A policy aimed at levelling out everything with a steamroller!
On June 21, the hon. member for Rimouski-Témiscouata said in this House, and I quote: "The concept of Canadian identity does not include the Quebec identity. In fact, its purpose is to assimilate or even deny it".
The new Canadian multicultural identity which the government is trying to impose is in fact a ploy to acculturate Quebecers. Even worse is the fact that it will not slow down the growing assimilation of French speaking people who live outside Quebec.
In the promotion of this glorious Canadian multicultural mosaic, the government is rather quick to forget the concept of two founding nations. The Liberals, both as party and government, recognize the first nations but do not recognize the Quebec nation. As I said: If there is an Acadian community, there is also a Quebec nation. In June, the current Prime Minister stated, regarding the operations of CBC, that there is an act regulating these operations and that he would ask the corporation to comply with it.
Among the requirements contained in this legislation, there is an obligation to inform people of the benefits related to our country. However, Canada is not the only one financing CBC. Quebec also pays its fair share, but has hardly any say in the administrative decisions of that federal institution.
Let us not forget that, in recent years, numerous regional TV stations in Quebec, including Rimouski, Matane and Sept-Îles, had to shut down their operations. In addition to being underprivileged in terms of resource allocation, Quebec is about to absorb more than its fair share of budget restrictions. For example, Prime Time News , the 9 p.m. TV newscast on the CBC, has an annual budget of $15 million, or $60,000 per show. By comparison, the SRC budget for Le Téléjournal and Le Point in Quebec barely exceeds $8 million.
In a brief submitted yesterday to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, Mrs. France Dauphin, from the Coalition for the Defense of the French CBC network, the raised a number of issues. For example, investment in programs per hour of broadcast time has increased by approximately $7,000 as far as the English network is concerned, but only marginally in the case of the French network. In just five years, from 1987 to 1992, investment rose from $30,500 to $37,500 at the CBC while rising from $17,500 to $18,300 at SRC. In other words, a mere five per cent increase for the French network, as compared to a 20 per cent increase for the English network. What does this mean? It will become obvious later.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has made strategic choices that favoured the English network programming over that of the French network. These choices were made in spite of the objective the CRTC had set for the CBC in February 1987, i.e. to strike a fair and equitable balance between production, distribution and the scheduling of regional and network programs, on both networks.
In addition, over $380 million were recently invested in building new headquarters in Toronto. Jean-François Lisée wrote in Le Tricheur that we can see how, in spite of Trudeau's efforts to attach a Canadian identity to Quebecers, the inclination to go the opposite way is strong and resists the hazards of election policy. In 1990, 59 per cent of the people of Quebec perceived themselves as Quebecers first, 28 per cent as French Canadians and nine per cent as Canadians.
In fact, it is normal for Canada to describe itself more and more as an English-speaking multicultural entity in an attempt to differentiate itself from its American neighbour.
At the same time, it is not considered either normal or legitimate by this centralizing administration for Quebec-a clearly defined nation, the cultural vitality of which is recognized around the world, a truly distinct nation on the basis of its specific culture and its language among other things-to promote its own culture and specificity. It does not require a constitutional amendment to do so.
Finally, the multicultural Canadian identity. The issue of multiculturalism, which is to say the least debatable, must not be overlooked.
Professor Claude Corbo, dean of the Université du Québec in Montreal, concludes it is a failure. According to Corbo, the solicitude shown by the federal government for ethnic communities is suspicious. He says that such a policy could well exacerbate the minorization or the trivialization of the Quebec identity.
The fact of the matter is that, in Quebec, the principle of ethnic diversity must center around the French dimension of our culture which is present in all of our institutions and serves as a basis for Quebec's specificity. Above all however, structures are required to facilitate the integration of immigrants into their host society.
So, I intend to support the amendment put forth by my hon. colleague from Rimouski-Témiscouata, asking for the bill to be withdrawn and deferred to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.