Mr. Speaker, the process the final stage of which is being undertaken today started yesterday, more than a year after the introduction in this House of Bill C-18, which suspended the electoral redistribution process then under way and provided for a 24 month waiting period before starting a new debate on redistribution.
Unfortunately, the Reform Party then opposed Bill C-18 and the 24 month delay initially provided under this bill. However, the House of Commons passed the bill suspending the whole electoral redistribution process for 24 months.
Later, in considering Bill C-18, the Senate did exactly what the Reform Party wanted to do in this House. It moved an amendment to Bill C-18 providing that a new bill had to be tabled by June 1995; otherwise, the old law would apply again, reviving the commissions suspended under Bill C-18.
When the bill came back from the Senate, the government should have stood up and affirmed the will of the people represented by the hon. members in this place by approving the bill as presented and with the relevant amendments adopted in this House.
Yet, the government then chose to go along with a Senate amendment that put us in a tight squeeze by reducing the amount of time available to do our work. It was, in my opinion, an unacceptable concession, which the Reform Party managed to secure through the Senate.
Following final passage and Royal Assent of Bill C-18, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs was given the mandate to draft a bill to be submitted to the House. We worked on this for a very long time. I attended all the sessions, including those in the summer of 1994, in July 1994, in which we heard a great many witnesses, including political party representatives, hon. members of this House who came to testify, university experts and others. While working on this bill, we enjoyed the continuous collaboration of the Chief Electoral Officer and his staff.
Although we spent a lot of time on this bill, we have precious little to show for it. Of course, the bill before us, Bill C-69, contains a few sweeteners. These sweeteners are improvements compared with the present situation.
For instance, the provincial commissions will now be able to hold hearings before proceeding with their task, which is clearly an improvement on the current situation. The commissions will have to produce three maps for the regions they cover, three electoral redistribution proposals. If there is sufficient popular demand, the commissions will have to hold new hearings. Granted, the process was improved in this regard.
The bill also sets out the factors to be considered by the commissions in establishing electoral ridings.
These considerations or factors are described in subparagraph 19(2)( b ), which states that, in determining reasonable electoral district boundaries, the provincial commission shall consider the following: first, the community of interest; second, a manageable geographic size for districts in sparsely populated, rural or northern regions of the province; third, the probability that there will be a substantial increase in the population of electoral districts in the next five years. And finally, the commission shall recommend changes to existing electoral district boundaries only where the above-mentioned factors are sufficiently significant to warrant such a recommendation.
It is all fine and well to make a policy statement like that, making community of interest a guiding principle for every commission. However, we inevitably come across another provision, which sets the maximum variance from the provincial electoral quota at 25 per cent. For example, if, in Quebec, the provincial quota was 100,000 voters or a population of 100,000, the commission would be entitled to make electoral districts with up to 125,000 voters but no less than 75,000 or equivalent population.
The commission may observe a community of interest, but note that the number of voters is not significant enough. Let us not take an hypothetical case, but a real one. At present, the population of the electoral district of Bonaventure-Îles-de-la-Madeleine is 43 per cent below the provincial quota of 50,000 or 51,000, but encompasses a huge area. This district is at risk; it may actually be eliminated. While this bill allows the commissions not to apply this 25 per cent rule rigidly, the considerations are so restrictive that I wonder if they will ever be able to do so.
The only time a provincial commission can depart from this rule is when, as mentioned in paragraph 19(3), an electoral riding or district is geographically isolated from the rest of the province or is not easily accessible. Who will define "geographically isolated"? The commissions, to start with, and of course the courts. No definition was provided. I consider the Magdalen Islands geographically isolated. No one will deny that. Will the population factor apply? I suggest that the commissions consider this factor. Magdalen Islanders had their own electoral district up until 1968. Under Quebec law, they are guaranteed their own district. It is not that the hon. member for Bonaventure-Îles-de-la-Madeleine is not doing a good job at representing the district, but I think it would be highly desirable to have a member of Parliament just for the Magdalen Islands.
Magdalen Islanders will argue that they are geographically isolated, and I think that they can qualify under that factor. Then it will be a matter of satisfying the provincial commissions that the population of the islands does not vary too greatly to justify the creation of a separate district. But I can see a downside to this. While the new electoral district of Magdalen Islands gains a member of Parliament, the district of Bonaventure shrinks in terms of voters ratio. What will happen to the Gaspesian Peninsula then?
What becomes of the ridings of Gaspé, Matapédia-Matane, Bonaventure-Îles-de-la-Madeleine and Rimouski-Témiscouata? What do we do? There is a problem in the Gaspé peninsula. Does clause 19(3) allow us to deal with it globally? I am not sure. We need more information. This is a region with a dwindling population where MPs, whatever their political allegiance, have a large area to cover. They must cope with problems that do not exist, or that take a very different form, elsewhere in the province or in the country. The Gaspé peninsula is the first thing that concerns me.
Maybe clause 19(3) will apply to the riding of Manicouagan, which is indeed geographically isolated and particularly inaccessible, as my hon. friend from Manicouagan argued so convincingly before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and again here in the House at the report stage, if memory serves.
Maybe it will also apply to the northern regions of Quebec and Ontario. Last Monday, the ridings of Cochrane-Superior and Nickel Belt in northern Ontario were mentioned.
They cover a vast area and their population, with certain exceptions, is generally on the decline. Will the division be made strictly on the basis of the numbers? Will a greater deviation be allowed?
Clause 19(3) is much too restrictive, in my opinion, for us to give it our approval.
We had suggested maintaining, in the bill before us, criteria now being used by the provincial commissions when deciding whether to waive the rules. What are these criteria?
At the present time, a provincial commission may waive the 25 per cent criterion in any case where any special community or diversity of interests of the inhabitants of various regions of the
province appears to the commission to render such waiving necessary or desirable. In other words, the provincial commissions now have a much broader criterion when looking at particular cases.
I think that a region like the Gaspé or the Magdalen Islands, even the Lower St. Lawrence, would have benefited much more under this criterion than under the extremely restrictive wording being proposed to replace it. This may not be as bad as the initial suggestion to include a schedule of the ridings in the act and freeze them, thus giving a form of statism to the act and to the list of ridings and making it extremely difficult to work with.
Consequently, the official opposition considers clause 19 to be a major obstacle and cannot support the bill.
Clause 16 is also questionable and even unacceptable, given what it says and what it does not say.
Following the representations made last summer to the Standing Committee on the Procedure and House Affairs-by the hon. member for Mégantic-Compton-Stanstead, by the president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and, previously, on June 21, by Senator Jean-Claude Rivest of the Stadacona senatorial designation-we understood that the government would be receptive to the traditional request made by Quebecers and their government for guaranteed minimum representation in the House of Commons, as is the case for some Atlantic provinces.
As you know, representation for the Atlantic provinces is guaranteed by the senatorial clause, which dates back to 1915 and which we do not question.
The senatorial clause allows a population of 120,000 people in Prince Edward Island to be represented by four members in this House. Indeed, that clause provides that a province cannot be represented by fewer members in the House of Commons than senators in the Senate. Since four Senate seats are guaranteed to Prince Edward Island in the senatorial clause, that province can also be represented by four members in this House. The same rule applies for New Brunswick, which is guaranteed ten seats in the Senate, under the Canadian Constitution.
Although the number of residents in that province does not justify such representation, New Brunswick gets ten seats and we accept that. The terms of union between Newfoundland and the Canadian federation, ratified in 1949, also contained provisions guaranteeing adequate representation of the province of Newfoundland, both in the House of Commons and in the Senate. In fact, Newfoundland was guaranteed six seats in the Canadian Senate.
So if we agree with the senatorial clause that provides guarantees for Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, why are we up against a wall when we talk about the same guarantees for the Province of Quebec, when we talk about a minimum level of representation for Quebec?
Quebec, which as a people and as a nation, is one of the two founding peoples of this country. We are told this time and time again. We learned this from our history teachers. It is part of our collective conscience as Quebecers that in 1867, Quebecers were one of the two founding peoples. I may recall that on June 30, 1867, the day before the coming into force of the British North America Act, 1867, Quebec, then known as Lower Canada, was entitled to 65 seats out of a total of 130 in the Parliament of the Province of Canada, that is, 50 per cent.
This was agreed to by the members who were elected to represent us at the time-there was no referendum to ask what the people of Quebec thought and certainly not the women of Quebec, since they did not even have the right to vote at the time and the Fathers of the Confederation were all males-but there were no constitutional provisions that provided for minimum representation for Quebec. The only guarantee Quebec obtained was those 65 seats, but 65 out of how many?
On July 1, 1867, it was 65 seats out of 181. Later, when Canada's territory was expanded with the addition of new provinces including Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and finally Newfoundland, Quebec's share of representation in the House of Commons dropped steadily, stabilizing during the past 20 or 30 years at a level slightly over one-quarter. Obviously, the Fathers of Confederation made a mistake by not including a minimum representation clause for Quebec, which at the time should have been 50 per cent.
We can hardly rewrite history and today insist on 50 per cent. People will say: Who do you think you are? We are not in a country that allows such deviations from the norm. Be that as it may, we are not asking for the representation that we had in 1867, in other words, 50 per cent. We asked for a minimum guarantee of 25 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. In the next general election, should Quebec participate-my good friend from Bonaventure-Îles-de-la-Madeleine will agree it is pretty doubtful that we will be able to-when the thirty-sixth Parliament is elected, Quebec, for the first time in its history, will fall below this critical mass of 25 per cent, since it will have only 75 seats out of 301.
Hence our proposal, which was akin to the Liberal 1992 proposal. I read on Monday of the pleasure of the hon. member for Papineau-Saint-Michel and Minister of Foreign Affairs at being able to guarantee Quebec minimum representation of 25 per cent, saying that this represented a significant gain for
Quebec. The hon. member for Papineau-Saint-Michel described the guarantee of 25 per cent for Quebec as an incredible step forward.
Well, as regards our motion which was voted on yesterday, once again none of the Liberal members in this House in 1992, who are still here today, voted in favour. Why did the members change their minds in the space of three years? Why deny Quebec something so minor? I would like, in passing, to recognize the very open-minded approach to the matter taken by the hon. member for Burnaby-Kingsway, who voted with the official opposition to guarantee Quebec minimum representation of 25 per cent, as did the hon. member for Beauce, as if this were perfectly natural.
It was perfectly natural, since the vast majority of members from Quebec present in this House yesterday voted in favour of this minimum guarantee of 25 per cent. We can therefore say that there is very broad consensus in Quebec, which goes beyond party lines, that Quebec should enjoy a minimum guarantee of 25 per cent. When the Progressive Conservative Party, the official opposition, the Bloc Quebecois, the hon. member for Burnaby-Kingsway and the independent member for Beauce all support the motion to include guaranteed representation of 25 per cent in Bill C-69, it is obvious that there is broad support in Quebec on this point. I need not add that Senator Rivest had given his support for this provision. Even the support of the governments of Quebec, which had called for the inclusion of this provision in the legislation, did not fail. As far as I know, as well, the present government never shied away from what had been agreed in the past.
It is strange to see the government back away from something it supported in September 1992-the vote was on September 10, 1992-without much justification. Two days ago, on Monday, I listened to the arguments which the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands and the hon. member for Scarborough-Rouge River put forward, arguments which were not convincing. I do admit, however, that under normal circumstances, these two people are extremely convincing, but, for people to be able to convince others, they themselves must be convinced.
It goes without saying that, when people rise to make representations that they are forced to make-because any old reason to vote against the amendment will do-they obviously cannot be convincing. The unconvinced cannot be convincing. This was the impression that I got the other day from the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands, the impression that he did not believe in the things that he was saying and that he was using the pretext of constitutional technicalities as a reason for refusing to support a motion which had already been allowed by the Chair and declared admissible following a procedural debate. It is a little odd that the debate swung in this direction.
You will understand therefore, that, at the end of the day, this bill will be incomplete, as I said earlier, because of its stand on the issue of allowable deviations from the boundary rules in special ridings and because of its failure to take a stand on the issue of one of the country's founding peoples. Was this an intentional omission on the part of the government?
We might have asked ourselves this question when debate began on the bill. But, after the vote yesterday on the official opposition's motion guaranteeing Quebec 25 per cent of the seats in the House, it was quite clear that the government had not simply overlooked this detail, but that it was omitted by design. The government does not want to guarantee Quebec fair representation in this House and does not want to accept as a criterion the fact that the nation of francophones in Quebec is a founding people, the cradle of francophones in America. The day we took such a decision was a very sad day indeed.
Would Canadians have been unhappy to see the government finally recognize Quebec's distinct society status, founding people status, status as a nation which built this country? I think not. Yet, yesterday, all it would have taken to recognize this was a majority vote in this House. But it was denied us. It was the most modest demand formulated in the last 50 years.
Without going back to prehistory, we can go back several decades: in the 1930s, there was the Rowell-Sirois commission in Quebec; in the 1950s, the Tremblay commission also studied constitutional issues; the Laurendeau-Dunton commission reviewed what was happening in this country in terms of the Constitution.
I invite our friends from the Reform Party, who think that Canadian history started with their election, to read about the events of that period. It would be a good idea to return to the source to understand that Canadian history started, we are not sure exactly when, with the first people to land on our shores, probably the Vikings who landed somewhere near Newfoundland at the beginning of the millennium. Then there was the arrival of Jacques Cartier in Gaspé in 1534, the founding of Quebec City by Samuel de Champlain in 1608, the founding of Trois-Rivières and Montreal in the following decades. And finally, the establishment of the first government in New France, as Canada was then called.
In the beginning, we had a government of companies. As you probably remember, the King of France entrusted private companies like the Company of One Hundred Associates and the Dutch West India Company with the administration of the territory. The King of England, for his part, gave the Hudson's Bay Company the English part of the territory that later became British North America. Territories throughout the continent were administered by private companies.
Our first institutions, not democratic but public, were granted in 1663 by the King of France through the establishment of the Sovereign Council of New France. These institutions reflected the values of the time: a governor, an intendant, the Bishop of Quebec City and those co-opted by them for a total of seven people, near the end of colonial times, but without any democratic guarantees.
We, francophones, had a hard time achieving our democratic rights on the American continent. Our motherland never gave them to us.
They tried to exercise in New France the same absolute domination as in Old France. Gradually, we stopped being French while, of course, maintaining good relations with what was then our mother or home country and became a more and more distinct nation.
At first, we called ourselves Canadiens or, as we used say, "Canayens". So, on one side, there was us Canadiens and, on the other, the English who occupied part of the land.
From 1663 to 1759, we operated with these institutions. Then, in 1759, the battle that took place on the Plains of Abraham was a victory for some, but for us it was a defeat. It brought about constitutional changes, again, military government in 1759, a royal proclamation in 1763 which ceded the colony of New France to England in exchange for Guadeloupe and Martinique. It is clear that errors of judgment were made somewhere along the way because, while anglophones had won here, in America, when, on the Old Continent, the British won the war against the French and the Treaty of Paris was signed, they got New France, but France kept Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Those are great travel destinations, but in terms of the relative value of the two, I think it was a sucker deal at the time.
Still no democratic institutions. In 1774, the Quebec Act that was handed to us-because we got whatever was left over-nonetheless restored civil law in Quebec, which allowed us to have a legislative council, but not an elected one. They were afraid to give francophones, so peace-loving, democratic institutions in which Quebecers could be represented by the people of their choice. Instead, we were given a legislative council appointed by the governor.
But the Quebecers, Canadiens of those days had certainly demonstrated great pacifism and great open-mindedness because there were 63,000 francophones in Quebec at the time of the conquest and only 3,000 to 4,000 survivors of Wolfe's regiment. With that kind of power relationship, had we been even slightly vindictive, the slightest bit vindictive, we would not have had to go into overtime to decide the fate of these 3,000 or so people. We went along with a de facto situation and, guided by the elites who governed us in those days, whether we liked it or not-we will not rewrite history-we tolerated this situation.
Finally, in 1791, the Constitutional Act gave us for the very first time the right to have elected representatives and the first House of Assembly in Quebec. Naturally, we did not take any chances. It is like in a car: there is an accelerator, but there is also a brake pedal. The Westminster government allowed us to have a house of assembly made up of elected members, but it also maintained a legislative council, which was appointed by the governor and which could oppose the decisions of the assembly.
In 1791, we gained control over some institutions. The situation evolved rather rapidly and the country was divided into two parts: Upper Canada and Lower Canada. The assembly elected in Lower Canada had no extra-territorial jurisdiction. Consequently, it could not legislate for Upper Canada, nor could Upper Canada legislate for Lower Canada. We then move on to the 1830s with the Patriotes' rebellion and the infamous Durham report, which recommended unifying the two Canadas to finally assimilate and anglicize the French-speaking nation in America, something which was not to happen.
For eight years, while English was the only official language in the house of assembly of the Parliament of the Province of Canada, French Canadians fought, in their own language, to have French recognized as an official language. Thanks to their tenacity, justice was finally done in 1848, when they obtained the right to use French, which also became the language used in the legislation. I will end with 1867 and the emergence of new institutions.
You will understand, Mr. Speaker, why I simply cannot agree when I hear simplistic comments such as those made by the Reform Party, to the effect that Canada started to exist in October 1993. Canada has existed for a long time. As a member of one of the founding nations which forged Canada's Constitution, I respectfully submit that, given our long common history, this critical mass of 25 per cent is the breath of life which Quebec needs if it remains, but I hope it will not, part of the Canadian federation.
In any case, it is better to be safe than sorry; it is better to buckle up, even if you do not wish to have an accident. It is from that perspective that I wanted to discuss the 25 per cent rule. This rule is so fundamental that, even though Bill C-69 includes some improvements, the fact that Quebec is not guaranteed a minimum of 25 per cent of the total representation in the House of Commons is reason enough, in fact the only reason, for the Bloc not to support this bill at third reading. Consequently, we will oppose this legislation.
