Madam Speaker, I am also pleased to speak to this motion this evening which would close the debate.
I believe the member is well intentioned in bringing this motion forward. I believe he is motivated by a sincere love for our country, and for that he is to be congratulated. It seems nowadays that any display of emotion or love or passion for Canada is to be appreciated. In that sense I appreciate the motion he has brought forward today.
In general it is fair to say that there is not enough patriotism in Canada. We can be very proud of our country. Although I am in opposition I am intensely proud of Canada and I am intensely proud of the opportunities we have and our position in relation to the rest of the world. We are very blessed with natural resources. We are very blessed with the people we have here and we have much to be proud of in Canada.
This motion about pledging allegiance to the flag is similar in some respects to the singing of our national anthem. People feel that if we do some patriotic things, if we hang up the flag, if we sing our national anthem, that is good for patriotism and it is good for Canada. It is good for enthusiasm. It binds us together and so on.
One of the reasons the member for Beaver River brought forward the motion to sing "O Canada" in the House of Commons was for its symbolic value. We said that it is good to sing the national anthem, it is good that it be sung here once in a while. There was a long procedural wrangle to make it happen. The motion was farmed off to the procedure and House affairs committee. It was debated back and forth. And now I believe the public is pleased that we do sing our national anthem in the House at least once a week. It is sung and it is heard here.
This motion may be typical of what we are experiencing, a surge of patriotic sentiment. I believe this is largely because Canada is going through again another unity crisis of sorts. It seems to never go away. It has been with us off and on for many years, I suppose 40 years. As is evidenced by the official opposition in the House, there is still an active movement to try to split Canada in two.
We seem to be going through a slow motion unity crisis, if there is such a thing as that contradiction in terms. It is a crisis which lends immediacy to the problem. It is in slow motion and just seems to go on and on and on.
This motion is a reaction to that crisis. In many ways it is like the debate and the questions on the flag program of the Minister of Canadian Heritage. The minister is sending flags out all over the country to whomever asks for one in the hope that more will be hung from the nation's flag poles and that it will somehow bind us together again with that commonality and that common thread from sea to sea. We will rally around the flag, which is a symbolic thing, and somehow our national unity crisis will go by the by.
I do not think that is going to work. If that is the extent of the federal government's national unity program, unless it can start to enunciate it better, it is not a very good answer to the separatists and to Canadians who are looking for systemic change within Canada. They are looking for something of substance, not a symbolic thing.
I would have been much happier debating a motion from the member for Carleton-Charlotte if he had proposed a motion to decentralize the government, if he had proposed a motion to downsize government, if he had proposed a motion to quit spending so much money on the flag program. I realize all of that cannot be done in one private member's motion. Perhaps the hon. member should have brought forward measures that would have addressed a plan of how we are going to keep the nation together. It would have been more useful if we were debating something of more substance than what we are debating tonight.
My fear is that we keep skirting the issue of what is wrong in Canada both constitutionally and systemically, the way we govern ourselves. We keep putting icing on the cake. We put the butter on the bread. We try to doctor it up but there are some real systemic problems. The issues that are being addressed by the government are dressed up and sold to Quebecers and to the rest of Canadians as real change. That is just not going to cut it. I wish we could be debating something of more substance.
The motion reads: "That, in the opinion of this House, the members of the House of Commons should recite the pledge of allegiance to the Canadian flag, in both official languages, each day at the opening of the House of Commons, following the opening prayer".
As I mentioned earlier, I do not object to shows of patriotism in this House; we could do with more of that in Canada. A couple of years ago during the debate on the national anthem I remember actually going out and singing the anthem on the front steps just to try to make my point that it would not hurt us to be a little more patriotic. Of course we now sing the national anthem here in the House.
The proposal of reciting some sort of pledge to a flag every day, while it is not objectionable to me in most ways, has some practical problems. I would like to run through them quickly.
First, there are a lot of time consuming rituals here in the House already. Although I realize it would only take a minute or so to do this every day, my concern is that by ritualizing it, in a sense we are taking the meaning out of it. We make it a daily occurrence. We stand up and say some words that pretty soon will mean nothing. It
takes up some time in both official languages to run through that every day and my concern is it would soon be meaningless.
The second problem is that the Americans pledge allegiance to their flag at each and every opportunity. I am not an anti-American; I think the Americans are our best friends. We are darn lucky to have them as our close neighbours geographically. We are tied to them in so many different ways and thank goodness we are. I am grateful that we have our American neighbours.
Pledging allegiance to the flag at every single occasion is an American tradition. It is really quite American to do that. In a sense, I am just enough of a Canadian to get my dander up over that because it seems to take us down that path.
My third problem is with the concept of pledging allegiance to a flag per se. I have always thought this was a little strange. I have admired the Americans' patriotism, but to pledge allegiance to the flag is not a Canadian answer to the patriotism problem.
When we pledge allegiance to a flag, we should be pledging allegiance to what the flag represents. In a sense, our flag represents our country, our values and the things that make our country great. In that case, why use the euphemisms that are described in this bill to pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth?
I have no trouble pledging allegiance to my country. I would be pleased to do that. Maybe even the oath of parliamentarians when they become members of Parliament could be changed to pledge allegiance to our country. I certainly do not mind the thought of that. But pledging allegiance to a symbol is a little strange.
Now for my fourth point. Someone pledges allegiance to a flag. As has been mentioned by our colleague from the Bloc, many people used to pledge allegiance to the Union Jack but it has changed to the flag we now enjoy. However, many people say that it is not the style of the flag, it is the country they are pledging allegiance to. A flag can be changed, we can can hang it differently, we can do lots of things but really, it is a flag.
In conclusion, I would prefer that there was a pledge of allegiance to our country rather than to our flag. If we are going to pledge allegiance to the flag, then there needs to be a lot of consultation on this. I do not think there is any unanimity on what the pledge should be and so on. I will stick to the country and we can leave the flag issue for another day.