Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague from Matapédia-Matane for an excellent speech, and especially for talking about Quebec and Canada's rural communities.
I had the privilege and the opportunity to be associated with a great event held in February, 1990, in Quebec, which was called the États généraux du monde rural. What came out of this general assembly for rural communities, which lasted for over three days, but took more than a year to prepare, is that we do not do enough for rural areas in Quebec and in Canada. We always tend to consider government programs, taxation and even the Constitution in terms of the needs of the cities rather than the needs of rural areas.
I would like to congratulate him for that, and to build on his arguments about federalism versus rural communities. Nowadays, we hear about a concept called subsidiarity, which goes a bit like this: if you expect good results from government policies, you would not be needing extremely centralized measures undertaken by a cumbersome bureaucracy, or a paralysed government, but rather massive decentralization. During the debate on Quebec sovereignty, and where Quebec attains its sovereignty, we might also have to talk about subsidiarity, to draw the people, especially the rural population, closer to power.