Mr. Speaker, I would first like to point out to my colleague, who talks about people with clouded minds, that we should look at Quebec from another angle. I heard my colleague talk about the small country that Quebec would be.
We can compare pare Quebec to other countries in the world, Israel, in particular. Israel is a country with a population of about 3.5 million Jews, without any natural resources, and surrounded by 220 million Arabs. It is 74 times smaller than Quebec. Quebec is not small. People should stop saying that.
I take another example, Singapore. Everyone is trading with Singapore, everyone wants to do business with Singapore. Singapore has a population of about 4 million people, and a total area of 651 square kilometres. It is 2,500 times smaller than Quebec. Let us stop talking about Quebec being small and start talking about
real things. Quebec is one of the largest countries in the world in terms of its territory.
Second, some people talk about isolation. They would like to build a fence around Quebec. Every time we talk about making Quebec a sovereign country, they say we want to cut ourselves off. I would like to quote from an article published quite recently in the economic section of La Presse , on February 5, 1996. What I am going to quote was written by an American university professor, Kenneth Holland. This article appeared in Quebec Studies and was done at the University of Memphis, in Tennessee. He is not a member of the Parti Quebecois or the Bloc Quebecois.
What does he say about Quebec? He says: "The unwavering support given by Quebec to free trade with the United States at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was the catalyst that made possible the remarkable chain of events that changed forever the global trade system".
It is all very well to talk about people wanting to isolate themselves. And by the way, the comparison he makes with Ontario certainly does not reflect well on that province. Quebec has always been open to all markets, and there would be no North American Trade Agreement today if Quebec had not been on side.
I do not see a society that wants to cut itself off but a society that is as open as can be. The hon. member asked why we did not think it was worth being part of the Canadian federation? The reason is that we are a political minority. Even if all Quebecers voted to send members to this House, we would never be able to form a government. Every time the interests of Quebec clash with Canada's, as often happens, we will always be on the losing side. That is what Quebecers realized in the last election. That is why they sent the Bloc Quebecois here, to get real power, as much as they could get in this Parliament, because we cannot form the government in this Parliament. We are a minority. Which means what? It means that when Canadians decide, for a number of very good reasons that are in line with the interests of Canada, to make decisions for all Canadians that go against the interests of Quebec, they can never prevent that.
Earlier, someone mentioned political uncertainty as one of the factors responsible for the current economic decline affecting us. First of all, this political uncertainty was created in 1982 by the patriation of the Constitution. This is not an attempt to dredge up past events, it is the truth: the contract that united this country was torn up, and Quebec was excluded from the Canadian Confederation. That is where the political uncertainty started.
I think we should look at all that in the light of these new factors. Quebec is not a small territory. It is an immense territory. It is not a
closed society. It is a society that is opening up, a society that will go the full democratic route to do what all other peoples in the world have done: become a country.