Madam Speaker, I agree with the proposition that the hon. member has put forth that the courts should not become involved in politics. We need to maintain the separation between the judiciary and the political procedures in the country.
I was quoting an article by Mr. Justice Brian Dickson, retired chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. He was not talking about politics. He was talking about when the Supreme Court of Canada is called on to interpret grey areas of the Constitution; in other words, areas where the jurisdictions are not clearly aligned.
The convention now is that the Supreme Court of Canada in those grey areas takes into account the fact, not a political policy, that Quebec is the only jurisdiction in Canada which has a predominantly French speaking population. There are French speaking people in all other regions but they are not the majority. Therefore in Quebec they are different by reason of the first language of use, by reason of their culture because they are of French origin and have a different culture than the multiplicity of cultures we have in Canada and because their legal system is the Napoleonic code, le droit civil, which is an entirely different legal system which therefore leads to different institutions in that province.
He is not playing politics. He is saying that the Supreme Court of Canada takes those actual facts into consideration when it needs to interpret areas that are not black and white in the Canadian Constitution.