On behalf of my colleagues and my leader I would like to wish the hon. member for Sherbrooke well in his new career as a Liberal. I wish him well more as a federalist than as a Liberal.
We all know the dilemma that he must have found himself in, but I think he did what all good people do in the end. He responded to the call. He responded to the duty that he saw was his in this historical moment. We congratulate him for that.
It must have been difficult, wondering whether or not the call was stronger to go to Quebec to fight the separatists or to stay and be a major player in the “unite the right” or whatever it is called. I have to say to him that from our perspective the right has been united in the country for along time. It has never been more united than it has under the banner of the Liberal Party since 1993.
The member for Sherbrooke has said that he needs to enter into this new time in his life and this new time in the political life in Quebec, knowing as we all should know that no one person can save the country by himself or by herself. We all need to do this together. We need to work together.
As a veteran of many constitutional debates in the House and in that context I would specifically like to add the best wishes of my colleague from Qu'Appelle, formerly the member for Yorkton—Melville, who fought alongside and debated alongside the member for Sherbrooke in many of those debates.
There was a tendency in all those debates and in all those times for political parties to hold up one member, a prime minister, a leader or someone else, as the one person who could save the country. We will never save the country if anybody is interested in getting the credit for saving the country. We need to save the country, no matter who gets the credit, and that I hope is the sense that the hon. member will take into the struggle he is about to embark upon in Quebec.
Our view is that the country cannot be saved apart from recovering the social democratic consensus that has existed for a long time. John Ralston Saul states in his most recent book that the success of the partnership between Quebec and the rest of Canada has been in part because it was always governed somewhat to the left of centre.
I would ask the hon. member for Sherbrooke, because he not I mentioned first the first trade agreement and NAFTA, to reflect on whether or not some of the policies that have been adopted over the last 10 to 15 years have not indeed worked to weaken the fabric of the country and to weaken the role of government in Canada.
It was through government that we built the partnership between French speaking Canada and English speaking Canada. It was through the power of government that we created this distinct society we call Canada, a place very different in North America where we have a different set of social and economic values.
It is in recovering those values that I think we will be able to once again invite all Quebeckers to abandon the failure of imagination that we see here among our Bloc Quebecois colleagues and to begin once again to build a great country, not just through the marketplace but through the things we do together in the public sector and through the power of government.
Godspeed.