Mr. Speaker, I feel obliged to answer the member quite comprehensively but I will take your advice on the matter.
With respect to what the hon. member said about an NDP member of Parliament being the one who destroyed the Meech Lake accord, of course that is not true. There were no NDPs who did that. I presume the member is referring to former NDP MLA in the Manitoba legislature, Elijah Harper, who has since become a Liberal member and who now sits in the House.
With respect to Meech maybe that is not a coincidence because if memory serves, it was the Liberal Party which either talked out of both sides of its mouth on Meech or had people in both camps or had people who were responsible for starting the brush fires that eventually consumed the accord. I am thinking of the leader of the Liberal Party in Manitoba, the Liberal premier of New Brunswick and a number of other people who were first to jump on the anti-Meech bandwagon which then grew.
When the Meech Lake accord was originally arrived at in 1987 there was a great deal of consensus about the importance of the achievement that it represented on all sides of the House. The hon. member should know because he was here that the NDP caucus did not waiver in its support of Meech. From time to time it sought amendments as the pressure grew and might have saved it but certainly does not deserve any way the accusation the member made.
With respect to the status of the Cree in northern Quebec, that is a matter which the PQ government, the new premier and the Bloc Quebecois have to take very seriously. To some extent this whole thing about Quebec has been a bit of a parlour game in this country for a long time but it is not a parlour game anymore.
There is a reality called the aboriginal people in Quebec who inhabit a territory that was not always part of Quebec. They have a case to be made, a case that runs counter to the consensus that
exists in a lot of parties over a lot of time about the nature of Quebec's self-determination.
Aboriginal people have also made the case for their self-determination in the last 10 or 20 years. If push does come to shove and we do have a Quebec that seeks to separate that will be a very ugly situation. Anybody who pretends that is not so is not doing a service to either the Canadian people or to the voters of Quebec.