Just a short one, Mr. Speaker, to thank you for your wise words.
I would like to say to the member who just addressed the House that I completely respect what she said. I feel genuine sympathy for her emotion because this debate is very much about deep and fundamental emotions.
At the same time I would like to say, if I may, that to respect the vision of someone is also to make sure that one does not impose one's vision on another. This is about democracy. It is not for me as an individual to impose anything on other people. It is not for me to make any decision for collectivity, but it is for the Quebec people to make a decision. Those things are not easy and they have been said before.
I remember very well the last debate about Meech. We had a very limited debate about Meech. I heard a few moments ago the secretary for parliamentary affairs say that the Bloc was very happy to see Meech fumbled but it was not true. I fought hard and for a long time for Meech.
I was not the champion of Meech. Prime Minister Mulroney was. I remember that during those debates at some point Prime Minister Mulroney implied that if Meech was rejected the future of Canada might be compromised. He said something like that. I noticed then there was a very strong negative reaction all over Canada that the Prime Minister was too emotional, that he was not realistic, but here we are.
We tried to get Meech through. We almost begged the rest of Canada. We are proud people but we begged anyway. We asked the rest of Canada to subscribe to five minimal conditions that Quebec proposed, to go to the table and sign this Constitution on the dotted line where there is no signature, Quebec's signature.
I spent two years of my life doing that. I even accepted the bold risk to do that. I left my sovereignist family in 1984 to work for that because I thought, like Prime Minister Mulroney and many people in Quebec, a majority of Quebecers, it was worthwhile to try to reconcile the country. The minimal requirement we could set up to save the honour; accept that something very important in Quebec politics be enshrined in the Constitution, not in the powers but in the preliminaries of the Constitution; that Quebec should be recognized as a distinct society, which is to recognize us as a people. This is the fundamental thing, people in Quebec feel like a people. We cannot change that. It is a fact of public life.