Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to speak on a subject that is near and dear to my heart. However, I would like to take it in a slightly different direction and speak of my own riding.
My riding is at the head of Lake Ontario, near Hamilton. It is probably as anglophone a part of the country as we could possibly hope to get. Yet the first European who set foot in my riding was René Robert Cavelier de La Salle. He came there in 1682. He came by canoe through Hamilton harbour, climbed the escarpment by a stream and visited an Indian village near the present town of Waterdown.
Around my riding there are signs everywhere, vestiges of French explorers. Just two miles from my village there is a creek called Fairchild Creek. This is a reflection of the coureurs de bois who explored the Grand River and its tributaries in the 17th century.
La Salle was exceptional. I do not wonder that my Bloc colleagues are very proud of their heritage when we think of this man who in 1682 came to the Hamilton area and then for the next 10 years explored everywhere around southern Ontario. He was searching for the Ohio River, which he believed would lead to the orient. In doing so, he was the first man to build a ship for the fur trade on Lake Erie at Niagara Falls. He also became a great entrepreneur in the fur trade at Kingston, which at that time was Fort Frontenac.
I say this to point out that the early people of New France represented the most fantastic spirit of adventure we could wish to find anywhere in the world.
What of myself as an anglophone? I can parallel that. On my mother's side of the family there were United Empire Loyalists. They settled in the United States in the 17th century and after the American revolution came to my area, the same area La Salle explored, to settle when they fled the Americans. Here we have a situation of my ancestors, like the ancestors of my Bloc Quebecois colleagues and my Quebec colleagues, who have this wonderful spirit of adventure.
I could look at my own father. My father came over to the country in 1924, leaving England at the age of 17. Again we have this sense that we share. Whether we are French or English speaking, we share this very Canadian sense of adventure, the sense of reaching out and trying brave new things to do.
When I was a young man I tried to cross the Sahara Desert to visit Timbuktu. I have to say that as I crossed the Mediterranean I met another young man. We recognized one another because of our passports. He was another young Canadian from Quebec who was on the same type of adventure I was. There we were, doing what I think is one of the things that unite us as a people, whether we speak English or French, a people who have a true spirit of adventure.
I suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that if you travelled the world now you would find young Canadians, both French and English speaking, in every corner of the globe on similar missions of adventure.
I mention this because separatism, the movement we see today to withdraw Quebec from Confederation, is not in the best tradition of our ancestors. It is a defensive reaction. It is building walls. Separatism today is fear rather than bravery. That is a great shame. What has made this country the richest nation in the world and the greatest trading nation in the world, whether we speak English or French, is our spirit of adventure we have inherited from all our ancestors.
To return to my history lesson, La Salle did not find the Ohio River. A decade later, after running around in southern Ontario and making a killing on the fur trade, he crossed over to the Mississippi River and explored the entire length of the Mississippi. He arrived there in 1682 and claimed the entire territory for France. Thus, Louisiana was born.
Louisiana became a far richer colony of France than Quebec. It was on the edge of the Caribbean. In those days the resources were much richer in that region than they were in the frozen north. What happened to Louisiana? In 1803 Napoleon sold it to the Americans. The Americans did not move in and change Louisiana into an English speaking state. They were totally laissez-faire about the situation. Louisiana was left alone with its language and culture. However then, as today, there was an enormous economic boom in North America. The west was opening up, the Mississippi was opening up and there were entrepreneurs everywhere.
The net effect of the freedom that Louisiana had as a state of the United States, rather than the protection it had when it was a French colony, was that within a century it lost most of its French culture. The French language was replaced by English. Now this former French colony, which was bigger than Quebec, is merely a shadow of its French self.
I submit that is the kind of danger that is presented by the prospect of Quebec's separation today. The reason why Quebec still exists, perhaps some of my Bloc colleagues will not agree with this vision of history, is that there were accommodations reached between Britain and Quebec right at the beginning, right after the conquest. This spirit of accommodation has been a characteristic of Canadian society ever since.
The other thing that makes all of us Canadian is the fact that for centuries we have had to accommodate our differences. Our most fundamental difference was language, and not just in Quebec, but in northern Ontario and Acadia. Nevertheless, that is what has sustained Quebec all those years.
We now come to Bill C-110 and the distinct society resolution. I feel these two things are very important moves. There is the spirit for separation in Quebec which has always been with us and will always be with us. There is nothing wrong with that but right now there has been a resurgence. There are more people in Quebec now than ever before who are afraid of losing their language and culture. We in the rest of Canada cannot afford to see that happen because so long as Quebec retains its language, its culture and its traditions, then the rest of Canada has to accommodate and make room for something that is an essential difference.
It makes us a society that is truly tolerant and truly generous. That is why the rest of the world sees us as the best country in the world in which to live. It is not because we speak English, not because we speak French, but because we tolerate one another and we have a spirit of generosity that goes back through the centuries.
I hope the people in Quebec are listening to this and understand that the movement toward separation is a movement that will hurt us all. It will hurt those who speak English as well as those who speak French.
Debate is good. It is always good for us to come to Parliament or anywhere in this country, examine our differences and come to understand one another once again. However, separation is not the answer. The movement with respect to Bill C-110 and the distinct society resolution are a form of reassurance from all the people of Canada that we need to stay together and respect one another.