Mr. Speaker, I think from the committee my colleagues opposite know I am never going to be satisfied with a PBS style public broadcaster.
I find it appalling that at regular occasions what are probably fine upstanding citizens have to stand up with a tin cup and beg for donations. I find it appalling that our neighbour to the south does not value the PBS programs, which indeed many of us and many of its own citizens enjoy, sufficiently to fund it without having the tin cup approach. I would certainly fight against that to the death. You can count on it.
I cannot let the hon member's comments go unchallenged from the point of view of the identity issue. My colleague says there is no single Canadian identity but rather, there is a francophone one, an anglophone one, and an aboriginal one. She says that is why she wants to leave.
The thing is, the government does not want to allow that to happen because when my colleague says they want to leave, she is referring to those of her people with a francophone identity who live within the confines of the province of Quebec, which after all is only a geographic designation.
There are many other Canadians who see themselves with a francophone identity and live outside the borders of Quebec. I ask my colleague why she would want to abandon those who share her sense of identity by leaving them and creating a new country from which they would be excluded.
I have just one other point. The fact is that all identities and all nations evolve and emerge with time. While we all have the identity of our roots, there is such a wonderful opportunity here for me to try to understand my colleague's identity, the identity of her birth and for her to try to understand mine and for all of us together to try to understand the identity of the aboriginal people and indeed of our newcomers. It is as we understand each other that perhaps that search for understanding becomes the foundation of what is truly a Canadian identity for all of us.