Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada has said it was very happy to sponsor the proposal submitted to us by the National Assembly and thus to help modernize the school system.
We are going to do this with full respect for the democratic values of Quebecers and of other Canadians. The official opposition, the Bloc Quebecois, keeps droning on about Alliance Quebec and The Gazette for reasons I explained earlier, but everyone disagrees with the Bloc on this issue.
Let me give a few examples. Agnès Gruda of La Presse had this to say: ``In the end, Ottawa is right. Pushing for a vote on the constitutional amendment before the federal election is completely artificial. It has taken Quebec City two years to come up with its request, which it forwarded to Ottawa only two weeks before the election call. There is no national emergency that requires us to move full steam ahead in an emotional climate that can only be detrimental to the debate''.
Michel C. Auger, of the Journal de Montréal wrote: ``It is very difficult to ask the federal government to hurry up when we know it took the Government of Quebec several months to decide on the wording of a constitutional amendment and another three weeks to put it to the National Assembly''.