Mr. Speaker, the issue is this: there is a river bed along the St. Lawrence and a seabed in the gulf. Shellfish and plant life can be found there.
Questions will be asked: to whom do the shellfish and the plant life belong? Does Fisheries and Oceans have jurisdiction? Is this a heritage issue? Should the environment minister determine whether the river bed and seabed where the plant life and the shellfish are to be found is contaminated or in good condition? All this is done on Quebec's territory.
In other words, it is as if I were at home, on my property, and someone came to tell me how things must be done. Is my lawn in good condition? Are the ants developing well? Am I taking good care of the environment? All this, without asking my permission, without talking with me, without trying to reach an agreement, without trying to have a dialogue, without trying to agree on terms and conditions, without taking my own concerns into consideration.
What we have here an invasion of territory through legislation. There is no physical invasion, just legislative invasion. This is not the first occurrence. Let us look at the millennium scholarships, an extraordinary example.
We know that, in Quebec, there has been a sound policy on scholarships for the last 35 years. This is why Quebec students have the smallest debt load in Canada, about $11,000 per person; for the rest of Canada, it is $25,000.
Quebec made some good societal choices about thirty years before Canada did. Now, Canada takes a part of our money, about $600 to $700 million from Quebec, and puts it in the millennium scholarship fund to provide us with something we already had but that the rest of Canada did not have.
We often face this situation: the federal government invades our jurisdictions, duplicates the efforts, walks all over us without any concern for what it is destroying. With an attitude such as this, I am increasingly proud to be a sovereignist and increasingly anxious for our people to say yes.