Mr. Speaker, it was refreshing to hear the hon. member for Louis-Hébert give us this historical reminder of what we always accepted in Quebec. The hon. member mentioned the rights of English-speaking Quebecers, rights that we respected to the point that, at one time, there were three English universities in Quebec: Sir George Williams, McGill and Bishop's, in Lennoxville, and only one French university, Laval, which had a campus in Montreal. This does not go very far back in the collective memory of Quebecers. We have to repeat it, over and over again, to show the degree of tolerance we exhibited in the area of education. Of course, we have caught up. The Montreal campus became the Université de Montréal, a university was created in Sherbrooke and then, in the mid 1960s, we had the creation and expansion of the Université du Québec network.
This being said, the rights of English-speaking Quebecers are well protected, and a sovereign Quebec would guarantee these rights in its constitution.
The bill in front of us questions the concept of opting out in the historical meaning of the term, in its constitutional meaning, a concept which was introduced at the time of the first agreements, the so-called Sauvé-Diefenbaker agreements at the end of the 1950s. Quebec could opt out, because at that time it was the only province to ask for the right to withdraw from a federal program in exchange for full compensation. That way, Quebec was not subject to what we call federal standards, and what others call national standards. The opting out provisions were always maintained. We had the Lesage-Diefenbaker, Lesage-Pearson and Johnson-Pearson formulas, and finally the Bourassa-Trudeau formula, although the agreements were scarcer at that time.
Essentially, what Quebec Premiers Sauvé, Lesage and Johnson have obtained is the right to opt out with full compensation without having to justify their decision. Finally, we are back to the concept advocated by Sir John A. Macdonald of a legislative union in Canada. They want to legislate here for all of the provinces while leaving them a small way out. Ottawa tells them: If you want to opt out, you will be able to do so provided you can convince us, the federal government, that your provincial legislation meets federal or national standards. In the end, the one giving that power, the federal government, under conditions precedent, is reserving the right to say: No, you have not convinced us and so we are keeping that power and we are going to continue to administer the program or else you will receive no transfer payments.
Misrepresentation of Canadian federalism did not start with Bill C-28. In fact, federal attempts to do so go back to 1867, but they increased at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s and have been growing steadily.
Quite possibly there may not be a single sector that has not been touched by federal legislation. To my knowledge, according to the research that I have done, the one area in which the federal government has really not been able to venture is the administration of provincial public servants. That was the gist of a Supreme Court ruling when the Trudeau government imposed wage and price controls. This government had succeeded in getting elected on the promise that it would not freeze prices and wages. However, once elected, it proceeded to do exactly the opposite, like any good Liberal government worth its salt.
I agree with my colleague from Kingston and the Islands who followed the events of the Trudeau era closely and who noted this massive incursion into fields of provincial jurisdiction, this disdain for provincial legislatures who are treated as junior level governments, whereas the senior level government for our friends across the way is the federal Parliament of Canada.
Why must we remind the member for Kingston and the Islands and our colleagues opposite, who are fully aware of the situation, that they conducted the same studies we did, that they have lived and will continue to live for the next few months in the same country as us and that they should know that provincial legislatures have as much sovereignty over their respective areas of jurisdiction as the federal Parliament has over its own?
We have to constantly remind them that this struggle for the recognition of provincial sovereignty dates back to our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. We hope that our generation will be able to complete the task undertaken by those who came before us in the House and in the Quebec National Assembly and who participated in all the struggles for the survival of the Quebec nation. Well, we are tired of merely surviving. We have now decided to start living. We will live as Quebecers under the authority that we will freely delegate to the Quebec National Assembly when we have freed ourselves once and for all from an institution that has more to do with feudalism than with modern democracy. We will rally Quebecers to a collective plan for Quebec's sovereignty and take back our powers so that we no longer have to beg and convince anyone of the legitimacy of our demands. We will quite simply make our own decisions as people who have full political maturity, and that is coming soon.
People in English Canada and elsewhere in the world are already waiting to see a new country emerge and take its place in the international community. The decision for independence is coming soon and we must prepare for it. And we must prepare even more when we see the kind of highly centralizing legislation presented to us by the present Government of Canada which is not so different from its predecessors.
The Gordian knot that has been strangling us for decades in Canada, the fact that there is a country missing in this country-we will have to make a decision on it in Quebec and then of course negotiate with our friends in English Canada on the consequences of our decision. But if we think about it carefully, historically, I believe that both sides can benefit from the decision that we will make in Quebec so that each of us can have our own decision-making bodies and instead of arguing bitterly over bills on which we can have extremely divergent views, we can each make our own decisions in our own legislature and then discuss what unites us as friends and neighbours instead of what divides us.