Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak today in the debate on the Speech from the Throne.
First of all, I would like to thank the voters for renewing my mandate as a Bloc MP, and for allowing me to be a member of the team of 44 sovereignist members from Quebec out of 75 Quebec ridings.
There is a majority of sovereignist members in this Parliament, people who want Quebec to become a country, who received the mandate from their public to come and tell the Canadian Parliament that Canada no longer meets the needs of Quebec when it comes to development that will ensure its autonomy and its capacity to grow.
In my opinion, the Speech from the Throne ought to be a sort of snapshot of the government's plan of action. Not of the program of the party in power, but of the government's plan of action. A government is supposed to take the election results into consideration, and this was an election in which loads of Liberals got beaten in the maritimes and vanished from eastern Quebec, because they lacked the necessary sensitivity or the necessary clout in caucus to get the government to be more humane in the way it was applying employment insurance reform.
Some of these had been good members of this House, but they had to pay the price. In its Speech from the Throne, the present government ought to take that into consideration. Because it is the government of all Canadians, it ought to have taken into consideration that a message had indeed been sent to it, a very clear message, and ought to have said that the old government of 1993-97 had been forced to behave inhumanely, perhaps because of financial constraints. But today, with the known surplus in the employment insurance fund, a surplus of $13 billion as at December 31, 1997—this program does not operate on a zero-based budget—but a $13 billion surplus—
Those billions were collected from people earning $39,000 or less. The decision was made to lower the ceiling in the legislation to $39,000. So those earning under $39,000 are financing the battle against the deficit the most.
Today in the Speech from the Throne, having heard the very clear message from the people in the maritimes, eastern Quebec and the regions hard hit by seasonal unemployment, the government acted as if the problem did not exist. This is one example, but there is another even more significant and catastrophic.
The speech says: “The Parliament of Canada is the only institution directly elected by all Canadians—”. That is true. This is one reason why I am a sovereignist. When you are a Quebecer and you give significant powers to a majority that will never be your own people, as in transport, the whole foreign affairs question, everything to do with citizenship and immigration, any people that decides to give these responsibilities to another majority sort of commits suicide, and this is what is happening little by little.
At the time of confederation, the balance was about 50:50, anglophone to francophone. Today, Quebec represents about 24 percent of the population. Francophones have less and less real weight. Significant choices were made in Canada's history. When Manitoba was created, for example, a supposedly bilingual province, French was prohibited there in order to overturn the balance that had existed in Canada.
This is the sort of historical baggage we find in the Speech from the Throne, which invites us to watch in the next millennium to see whether this fine and grand country will produce the expected results. We are the messengers of the people. We do not come out of a box of cracker jacks. The 44 sovereignist members from Quebec were elected by the people to come and tell you that there is something fundamentally wrong with Canada.
The speech also says, and I think it is hypocritical in the extreme, that “we have the values of sharing and mutual help”, but not a single word about the seasonal workers and new labour market entrants who have to work 910 hours to be eligible for employment insurance.
For the information of the newly elected Liberal members in this Parliament, before employment insurance reform, it took 300 hours to be eligible for employment insurance. Today, a first time applicant who has finished a CEGEP course in deep sea fishing or wild life management where there is a lot of seasonal work, that person will pay employment insurance premiums from the first hour worked, but he will never manage to work 910 hours during his first year. This means that more and more people are paying premiums who will never be able to benefit under the system.
Between 1990 and 1997, 60 percent of the people received benefits under a system to which they contributed one third of the funding. We would have expected this kind of behaviour from the Conservatives. They said they would do it, and they have always done that sort of thing. But we did not expect the Liberals to turn around and behave the way they did during the last Parliament.
In the throne speech they had a chance to correct this, but there is no sign they did so. It is pretty obvious this government is not listening. It is not getting the messages from the public.
Another point I would like to raise is that the government talks about making Canada a prime tourist destination. We had a very concrete example of how federalist Canada thinks that Ottawa has the solutions and that everyone else should understand that they are the right ones. A $500 million program was set up to help strong enterprises already successful in the tourism sector to develop projects. This may be worthwhile and significant, but this program—and it is the only one—does not help develop significant tourism infrastructures outside major centres that do not have as solid a financial base. In other words, people are on their own.
For regions looking at overhauling the seasonal industry, the federal program is completely inadequate and will only widen the gap between large tourist centres and those that have not yet built up significant infrastructures. Here again, we see their failure to listen.
Another example, which in my view is indicative of their contempt, is the issue of the Canadian social union. The premiers of all provinces except Quebec agreed unanimously on an approach to social programs that was never approved by Quebec. You can go back to 1971, when Mr. Bourassa, Quebec's premier at the time, refused to sign the constitutional amendments in Victoria for the very reason that the federal team wanted to interfere in Quebec's areas of jurisdiction. Since then, Quebec has never, under any of its premiers, whether federalist or sovereignist, agreed to the kinds of things which the premiers of the other nine provinces are able to accept. The premiers of those provinces all have a similar approach. But Quebec's jurisdiction under the present Constitution is completely ignored. They want Quebec to have to comply with national standards set by the federal government, and that is unacceptable to me. This must be made clear and obvious, and the members of the Bloc Quebecois are here to make that point.
I would like to raise another issue, as I feel it is important. A gesture of good faith one would expect from the government, that could be included in the amendments to the speech, concerns the whole issue of regional and local development. The federal government has set up a structure similar to the one in Quebec with the community futures development corporations.
In each of our regions, we have people working for these corporations, who are doing their best to help. But at the same time there is this other network in place in Quebec: the local development committees. The federal government, which does not have any responsibility for local development, should just accept to withdraw from that area, transferring all responsibility with full compensation to Quebec and authorize the amalgamation of community futures development corporations and local development committees.
I give these examples to show that this throne speech in no way responds to the will expressed by a large percentage of the population of Quebec and the maritimes in the last election. The government is unresponsive.
We are entering into what really is a period of transition, and if there is something that this throne speech says to me, it is that, in our vision of the future, Quebecers will inevitably have to make a choice. They have the choice of being assimilated, which would have the result we are seeing now in francophone communities in the rest of Canada. That is a choice we will not accept, and we will never be the ones to bring about our own extinction within the Canadian fold. We will not let ourselves be bulldozed in spite of what all the doomsayers might say.
I invite you all to celebrate the new millennium. Here we are invited to celebrate the third millennium, but I invite you all to come celebrate with the people of Quebec who will have given themselves a new country for the year 2000.
