Only the interests on the debt. So, there is not much coming back under various forms. But that is not a problem. When there is not enough to pay back, the government borrows some. That still works. But the next year, there is more money going towards the payment of interests on the debt, for instance. And the government travels around the world, especially in the G-7 bus, and it says: It is going well in Canada, everything is fine.
If it is going so well, why not respect its people? The natives in the James Bay area have received an education that is neither better nor worse than the one little Quebecers received in the same area. The teachers gave the same to both groups, who were often learning together in the same classroom.
Why would the federal government say today that it is not sure that they were taught exactly what it wanted them to learn? Why would the federal government say that it did not make a decision on the quality of teaching, the condition of buildings and school transportation and that it should have looked at all that before paying?
Considering how fast the federal government moves, little natives would be past university age and would still not have started school. The government is capable of ordering endless studies, and the more they cost, the more it orders them. What would our debt be if the Quebec government had not decided to act and had not stopped waiting so long for the federal government?
There was also the aboriginal Oka crisis in 1990. At that time, nothing was too good. Quebec was sending its provincial police officers and they were working overtime, seven days a week. They had to put out the fires. It was becoming urgent, especially since the federal government was quite involved in the situation there, because it was its fault if the natives were rising up about a territorial issue.
For almost 130 years, it had done nothing to understand them and to meet their needs. Again, when the time has come to pay the bill, it said that we should have submitted the menu served to policemen when they worked overtime-that maybe it would
have substituted an orange or a piece of carrot for the apple. The government is dodging and using delaying tactics, as the member for Saint-Léonard said, to flee through the back door.
In closing, I must say we have no lesson to learn from these people. They seem to have made it a point of honour not to respect their commitments. The few times they did were when their candidates were defeated and they promised them a safe riding the next time. These are about the only times when the Liberal Party really honoured its commitments.