Madam Speaker, in the Canada social health transfers and in the debate we are having, the words distinct society do not appear. I will put that case aside for another debate.
In the history of federal-provincial relations in the country there have been many arguments by many provinces against the federal government. Some of those have been conceptual fights over the federal-provincial authority and some have been fights over money. Depending on the nature of the Quebec government at various times it has pursued aggressively some of these objectives. In the same fashion, British Columbia took the federal government to court over cutbacks in the Canada assistance program.
The constitutional debate is always on the horizon in Canada, but it is not here today and is not central to the debate today. What is before the House is an opposition motion debunking the cornerstone of the government's approach to resolving the problems of the country.
We feel we have a very pragmatic and effective way of permitting provinces to develop their own social programs. There will be programming responses from Quebec, which I am sure will be entirely different from programming responses elsewhere in the country. This facilitates the development of programs that are very responsive to the Quebecois. People in other provinces may choose to do things differently. I see this in the context of a very wide ranging series of problems we are dealing with.