Mr. Speaker, the Louis Riel question is a very emotional one for me. As I listened to the speech by the hon. member for the Reform Party, I wondered whether he really knows his history, because the judgment made against Louis Riel in 1885 was clearly unjust.
Louis Riel was led before a jury of six anglophones and tried by an anglophone judge in Regina, as Donald Smith drove the last spike for the transcontinental railway. In that same year, French was banned in Manitoba. Louis Riel was, in fact, the victim of a miscarriage of justice that reflected the attitude to francophones at the time. People in Quebec knew that Louis Riel's cause was just and that by the last battle of Batoche, Riel was no longer a sane man.
He was a victim of his own cause, just though it was, and Quebecers and francophones across the country were outraged by the decision made by a jury of six anglophones, negating the rights of Louis Riel. Despite the uproar this caused in Quebec, even John A. Macdonald, the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, said:
"All the dogs in Quebec can bark, but Louis Riel shall hang".
John A. Macdonald said that. It was a way to punish the French fact in the west, although the rights of francophones were supposedly guaranteed. I may also point out to my dear colleagues from
western Canada that subsequently the rights of francophones in Manitoba were abolished for one hundred years.
The conviction of Louis Riel was unjust, unacceptable and unpardonable. If people want to reconcile Canada with its francophones, let them adopt, fairly and squarely, a formula to absolve or pardon Louis Riel.