Mr. Speaker, since you have done such a nice job of reading the amendments, which we introduced this morning with the help of my colleague, the member for Lotbinière, and since you have grouped the motions, including Motions No. 1, 13, 22 and 23, in Group 3, you will note that they refer essentially to the federal government's intention of interfering in an area of provincial jurisdiction. Naturally, we must condemn this vigorously throughout this 35th Parliament, since this government takes advantage of its vast spending authority to blunder into areas of jurisdiction that, in many cases, are strictly the preserve of the provinces.
I am pleased to lead off the debate at report stage of Bill C-60. Through this legislative measure, the federal government is getting ready to create the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The basic responsibility of this new parapublic agency will be to set standards for the safety, quality and manufacture of Canadian food products, as well as to develop minimum standards for imported products. This is obviously a very weighty responsibility for the government, and I am not in any way questioning the good intentions of the departments involved or their concern for public health.
However, I would like to remind the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the cabinet generally that their policies are hardly original.
I would point out that Quebec has had unified food inspection services for close to 20 years, yes, a 20-year head start on Canada. The federal government has wasted 20 years meddling in provincial jurisdictions in an attempt to get a glimpse of what they were up to so that it could then turn around and adopt the same strategies.
In terms of results, it would be hard to think of a worse approach, but then this is typical of this country: going over old ground, rewriting existing legislation, and changing the commas in order to be able to call it something new. Finally, let us return to the initial point of my speech, instead of launching into a stinging criticism of the state of this over-bureaucratized country.
As I was saying before, the purpose of Bill C-60 is to establish the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Although this agency comes under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, it will consolidate the inspection services of two other major departments: Health and Fisheries. This leads me to believe that the federal government has studied the Quebec model thoroughly, for the bill provides for essentially the same bodies as in the Quebec government's system.
But the worst is yet to come. In its bill, the government calls for the agency, once created, to take precedence over all other food inspection systems. I find this federal attitude more than a little insolent.
I would like to draw the attention of the minister and his cabinet colleagues to a concept that is very simple, but ever so hard for the federalists to grasp: interference. This is a gift possessed by certain categories of people, particularly those elected members who belong to a federalist party, to duplicate, and even to deny the existence of, Quebec's distinctiveness in administrative and other matters.
Parliamentary rules prevent me from naming these individuals who are such past masters of the art of denying Quebec its fundamental right to affirm its identity and its distinctiveness. I cannot name names, but I can assure you that there are so many of them in this House, that they take up more than one side of it.
We in the Bloc Quebecois believe that the government is showing its arrogance toward Quebec and the other provinces by attempting, in the preamble of this bill, to assume a certain legitimate right over provincial activities.
In this connection, our amendment is aimed at limiting the impact of such an element, which would have the effect of dismissing all of Quebec's demands in one fell swoop. For decades, the provinces, Quebec in particular, have been objecting to the federal government's attempts to restrict some of the provinces' vested powers, and even to grab up those powers, without any consideration of the provinces' constitutional jurisdiction in these spheres of activity.
The federal government is increasingly moving to centralize powers, while continuing to claim that it is doing the contrary, in order to downplay its illegitimate actions. Such cavalier interference into areas of provincial jurisdiction cannot help but slow down the constructive discourse that could be initiated between the provinces and the federal government. The Liberal Party, with its eye on the next election, is in the process of undermining the credibility of the agency in question. According to Liberal logic, the agency could control all food inspection services in the country by developing national standards. To us this is unacceptable, because it considerably restricts the ability of the provinces to establish and administer their own set of standards.
The provinces would otherwise be free to decide whether or not they wished to go along with certain food safety standards that are more a matter of local custom than public health. Perhaps I may recall what happened last spring, when the Bloc Quebecois protested against the decision of the Minister of Health to prohibit and indeed ban consumption of raw milk cheese.
You will recall that Quebec is by far the biggest consumer of this kind of cheese. In the other provinces where this kind of cheese is eaten, consumers are mostly former Quebecers or people who have been to Quebec and who appreciate this type of cheese. This is one example of eating habits in Quebec that are different from those in other parts of Canada.
At the Department of Health, people were thinking about all this, and probably because they had nothing else to do and had to justify their pay cheque, they said: "From now on, no more raw milk cheese will be imported or manufactured; cheese will have to be made with pasteurized milk". Of course there was a howl of protest from the official opposition, supported by consumers. I remember that someone put a question about this to the Minister of Labour, whose roots are Italian. I cannot refer to him by name, but he is a fellow citizen, formerly from Italy. When he saw he would no longer be able to get his favourite cheese, he said: "Oh dear, I will have to talk about this to my minister, because she is making a serious mistake". See, that is a good example.
In the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area, they make a kind of tourtière called cipâte, made with partridge and hare. It is a local specialty. Tomorrow morning, an inspector with the new agency might say: "Cipâte is no good; it might be dangerous to the health of the people of Lac-Saint-Jean. So there will be a nation-wide ban on making tourtières with hare and partridge".
I realize you are going to say I am exaggerating. Eighteen months ago, who would have thought that a few senior officials at the Department of health would consider banning the consumption of the best cheese in Canada? But it happened.
Without the media coverage, the government would never have backed down under pressure from the Bloc Quebecois. Not that the Bloc was incapable of doing a good job as the official opposition, but because the government, although this is a constitutional monarchy, often behaves like an autocratic and totalitarian government. It prefers to ignore the public interest and support the interests of the major lobby groups, while maintaining an illusion of power based on order and the public good.
In concluding, Bill C-60 is an important bill that will affect three departments. We in the Bloc Quebecois found a number of weak points in Bill C-60.
We intend to introduce more than 35 amendments in the course of the day, and my colleagues and I will do everything we can to try and make the Liberal majority think twice. I know that several people on the government benches think our amendments are very constructive and could improve the bill considerably. The purpose of the first group of amendments is simply to prevent the federal government from infringing on provincial jurisdictions.