Madam Speaker, the hon. member touched on many of the points I just made. I am not sure he understood very well what I said. As a matter of fact, I praised Canadian foreign policy in many areas without making any reservation or omission in that regard. I think I was fair in my remarks because I am here to speak in good faith of our foreign policy and tell the government what I think that policy should be. I will keep this same attitude for as long as I sit in this House.
There is another point on which I would like to comment. The hon. member seemed to imply that, among the very few reservations I had, I criticized the government for spending only a small percentage of our GNP for official development assistance. I was referring to a Liberal commitment in the red book saying that Canada would renew its promise to allocate 0.7 per cent of its GNP for ODA. That was the gist of my criticism: I simply said an election promise was broken. As to the rest, I feel I was very kind in my assessment of Canadian foreign policy.
As to what the hon. member labelled as the narrow nationalism of the Bloc Quebecois, I would say nationalism is not only a matter of language. He is the one who made a link between nationalism and language. I think nationalism is much more than that. It is a culture. The Leader of the Opposition was perfectly clear on that this morning. I will also point out to you that in his speech this morning, the minister of Foreign Affairs referred to nationalism, rather ultra-nationalism, which in my view is not consistent with the ideas of the Bloc.
If we look at globalization of trade and markets, despite this phenomenon of globalization, we still are confronted-the minister of Foreign Affairs said it this morning-by the nation-state, and you know that Quebec considers itself as a nation. It is in that sense that we talk about nationalism, because we consider ourselves as a nation, a nation with a culture, with a language, with a history which, from the outset, was different from that of English Canada.
It is in that sense that we feel that a nation-state may very well-and its has been clearly demonstrated recently-we feel, I repeat, that a nation-state, however small it may be, may very well survive among nations increasingly interdependent. This is, in my view, the idea that the Bloc has always been trying to defend. That does not mean a nation closed to the world, that does not mean that we are going to apply the geocentric theory which I mentioned earlier. On the contrary. In my view, Quebec has always been very open to the world, hoping to become a nation one day and to remain a nation.