Mr. Speaker, if ever there was an occasion when one should not have been generous in allowing an extra minute, that was one. It is water under the bridge and we cannot veto it, which brings me to the whole point of the discussion today.
Any one of us in the House could have vetoed the opportunity for the member opposite to add that couple of minutes to his presentation. We could have prevented him from coming forward for a host of reasons, some of which could have been petty, some of which could have been meaningful. Any one of us would have been able to prevent that member from finishing his speech. That is the nature of a veto and that is why there is no place in a constitutional democracy for a veto for anybody.
We should compare the American constitution with what we are trying to cobble together in Canada. The very fact that a constitution has flexibility allows it to live. The ability to change and evolve over time is the lifeblood of a constitution. That is what allows it to speak to the people and the people to speak to it.
Thomas Paine, in the mid-1700s, was an adviser to Thomas Jefferson. He had a lot to do with the gist of the American constitution. In Thomas Paine's book "The Rights of Man", from which I have quoted in the House in the past, he makes the point that every generation has the right and the responsibility to govern
for its times and should no more bind future generations to today than past generations should have been able to bind today to the past.
A veto to any specific province puts our Constitution into a strait-jacket. It puts the feet of the Constitution into a bucket of cement. It also states that from this day forward future generations will be stuck with what we give them today. For all Canadians watching this debate, wondering why we are debating the Constitution when our country's economy is in such a state, that is the reason we should not have a veto in the Constitution for any province.
If we are to have an amending formula in which a super majority is required to amend the Constitution, we should stick to something like the seven out of ten provinces representing 50 per cent of the population.
Given that we will not be able to change this, because it is not a perfect world, in the Canadian barnyard we are all equal but some of us are more equal than others. It has to do with the residents of our province. We could all have a veto if we all moved to a province with a veto. That would satisfy that little problem. However, that is not likely to happen.
What is the nature of the veto we are stuck with, the effective veto? The government has stated it does not have a whole lot of meaning or effect in some parts of the country. It has stated right here in the House that the next government can simply remove this legislation. However, it states that in Quebec it is extremely meaningful.
I believe it is extremely meaningful legislation because once we have gone down that road and given the commitment of a veto to the people of Quebec, there is no going back. There is no way we will be able to go back on that ground.
The Prime Minister has cobbled this together to try to save his political skin in Quebec or perhaps to save the political skin of Daniel Johnson in Quebec. He has effectively put our Constitution in a strait-jacket, which will make it impossible to change in the future.
Why on earth would any Prime Minister give a separatist government in Quebec a constitutional veto which would prevent change of our Constitution for evermore? Surely if we must give a veto to a province we should give that veto to the people in that province, not to the government or to the legislature.
Most legislatures are elected with a minority of the votes cast. A case in point is this Chamber. The Liberals have a massive majority with 175 seats but received only 43 per cent of the popular vote. The same thing can happen because of vote splits in every legislature. Therefore a legislature with a veto could use that veto even though it has not received a plurality of the votes cast in that province to put it into power in the first place.
A legislature could be elected three or almost four years prior to the constitutional issue about which it is being required to make a decision. Here we have a situation in which a province could have the right to veto constitutional legislation. The legislature could have been elected with a minority of votes cast and have been elected three years before the question at issue came to the floor. Its election, the fact that it is there and has the ability to veto the legislation would have absolutely nothing to do with its popular right to do so.