Madam Speaker, my colleague from Quebec was saying that this government has some difficulty putting its words into action. We would have expected, in the spirit of the love demonstration, in the spirit of the resolution approving Quebec as a distinct society, that the government would recognize Quebec as such and would allow it to exercise some of its powers to live up to and improve on its distinct characteristics. But we see these are words without any meaning.
I would like to quote someone. This is a little like a riddle. I would like you to guess who said these words. I will help you at the end. This is a text that goes back a while, to 1957, under Liberal Prime Minister Louis Saint-Laurent, who wanted to establish a federal fund for universities, a fund similar to the millennium fund.
The person I am quoting said “Unconscious, but nonetheless specious, paternalism. How can the central government be so hypocritical? We are entitled to suspect that the federal government's gifts are made in bad faith. This is insulting for the provinces. This is harmful to the principles of representative democracy”.
Later on, another individual responded to him, and that ended this special edition of a Quebec magazine called Cité libre . The person who was talking at the end was Pierre Laporte, a former Liberal minister. He said “The majority of supporters of federal assistance to universities say that autonomists are latecomers. Not only is the autonomists' argument defensible, but it will have to prevail if we want French Canada to be well prepared for the tasks of the future”.
Who said the first part about federalism, paternalism and all the rest? It was the great mentor, the person who inspired many policies of this government. Pierre Elliott Trudeau.