Mr. Speaker, the member for Outremont was speaking about the great Quebec dream. I think he dreams that one day Canada will be good for us, but this is an illusion. If he would just look at the results, the consequences of the Canadian federation, maybe he would have the answer to his dreams.
I always look at the results first and, in our case, the result is that Canada now has an accumulated debt of $600 billion and that it cannot even balance its budget. That is the result, the consequence of federalism. We should stop talking about nice agreements between Canada and Quebec, we should stop saying that everything is fine and dandy. We cannot even balance the budget and the Canadian federation has turned into a fiasco over a short period of time.
It is urgent that we put our house in order. As Mr. Lévesque once said so well: "Canada is like having two scorpions in a bottle; they try to kill each other, they both want to prove that they are distinct and different, they both want to spread out, but they are stuck in the same bottle. One day they will both die". This is what is happening now. We are on the edge of the abyss, we are both dying.
Because there are two nations in this country, it is urgent that each one become a country and that we give ourselves a chance to thrive. That is the reality. That is the mandate Quebecers gave us. They sent us here to Ottawa for that purpose. They told us: "Go to Ottawa to promote sovereignty; it is essential and urgent for Quebec because we are now in death throes financially.
We hear nice stories about common projects, a million here, a million there, a dozen million elsewhere, and we try to make Quebecers believe that federalism is a way of life and that without it Quebecers could not survive.
In duplications alone, this system costs $2 to $3 billion. We are told that the administration cost of the GST, for individuals and businesses, is in the order of $2 to $3 billion. We did not need that. All the government had to do was say: "Administer the tax. Combine it with yours immediately. Hide it if you want, but administer it in a sensible way and we will return a certain percentage to you". But that is not the way the federal government does it, it returns money to Quebec as if it were a gift.
The federal government has always tried to do it this way, to make Quebecers believe that without the federal government they would, all of a sudden, become much poorer. This is not true. The government always forget to say that Quebec sends $29 billion, that is $29,000 million, to Ottawa, every year, and the federal government uses this money according to its own priorities and most of the time without due consideration to Quebec priorities. More often than not decisions are made unilaterally. The government does not care whether Quebec prospers or not, as we have seen when the government spent $2 billion of Quebec's money to promote Hibernia, when everybody knows that it will never be viable. Yet, Quebecers will continue to pay.
This was a nice dream, sure, but it is time to come back to reality. And the reality is that we are two peoples and that, if we want to move ahead, we must separate into two different countries.