Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for his question, which gives me an opportunity to clarify my position. It is true that this bill is not satisfactory to us, because in the section that applies here, the provinces must satisfy the minister that their plan, in relation to the matter in question, will substantially have the same effect as the federal plan. Previously, this requirement only concerned the effects of the plan.
So there is a big difference between the two. Previously, they said: "What are the objectives of your plan for Quebec?" And the federal minister said they were in line with the federal objectives, and it was all right. However, as the bill stands now, it says that the plan will have to have the same effect in relation to the matter in question, which means that the provinces have lost the flexibility they had before in this respect, and everything will depend far more on the individual minister.
The person who is Minister of Human Resources Development today may not be there a few years from now. And we can expect bureaucratic inflation because when a bureaucracy is allowed to check the details of a program, you may be sure that this will make a lot of jobs for public servants.
Previously, the emphasis was more on political objectives, and so it was more up to the politicians to make a general evaluation. In fact, there have been no major problems with Quebec's opting out in this area for the past thirty years, but there were no reforms during the past thirty years either. We do not want the provisions of the new legislation, as it stands now, to add to bureaucratic constraints, at a time when we should be doing the exact opposite and giving the provinces as much leeway as possible.
I think this is a time for general legislation which allows for defining objectives and clearly identifying these objectives and not a time for setting up audit teams in Ottawa to audit Quebec and the territories concerned who have the same kind of situation and fighting about whether our plans have substantially the same effect. In this respect, the new legislation is not satisfactory to us, and that is one of the reasons why we object to the bill.