Madam Speaker, may I say to the leader of the official opposition that calm is to my party what openmindedness is to his. This is what leads me to think that the debate will be calm.
That having been said, the Leader of the Opposition knows very well that the motion tabled in the National Assembly states very clearly that we do not recognize the Constitution Act, 1982, for a number of reasons, and with the support of a number of analysts in English Canada, who studied its impact. What did it mean to Quebeckers to have a charter of rights and freedoms? It meant that whole chunks of the only law of national redress ever to be passed by the National Assembly, Bill 101, were invalidated, as concerns display in administrative terms, and of course the Canada clause versus the Quebec clause.
That having been said, we are governed by a constitutional order and contrary to our will we must, in order to modernize our school system in Quebec, face this obligation before us to use the amending formula.
I think the Leader of the Opposition is above making simplistic links. We are democrats and here we are in a national parliament where each member was elected by the people in his or her riding.
There is a constitution, which we did not sign for all sorts of reason, but the first—and I would propose to the Leader of the Opposition that I give him for Christmas a book written by an intellectual by the name of Mandel of the University of Toronto, who proves the point clearly. He is an anglophone who is not a sovereignist. I am sure this book is in the Privy Council library. The author demonstrates in his book that the basic reason why in 1982 we adopted a charter with language rights incompatible with those of the National Assembly was to invalidate Bill 101. And he made no mistake, because, as you know, entire chunks of Bill 101 were invalidated.
That having been said, the Leader of the Opposition should never forget that we are democratic. There is a Canadian constitutional order that will apply until international law takes over. As part of the process, we are obliged to use the amending formula, a bilateral formula. To achieve our goal, we must respect this state of affairs.