Madam Speaker, I listened to the hon. member from Okanagan—Shuswap. I have had a chance to look over the bill. It seems what we have wrapped up in the bill and in the member's comments is a unique combination of all the various complaints the member and his party have about Confederation and about the nature of the country.
There are positions in the bill reflecting the Reform Party's position on the Senate and on free votes. In the member's speech we heard about land claims and about B.C. separatism. The member has made it very difficult for people to support elements of what he said and elements of the bill because it carries so much baggage with respect to a whole lot of other matters. Clearly it carries a lot of political baggage in terms of what the member had to say when he was speaking in defence of the bill.
I am not sure, having read things over, whether this is to be a referendum before the government negotiates terms of separation or whether what the government negotiates would be put to a national referendum. It appears to have elements of both. It is not clear exactly where this referendum would take place. This is one of the problems with the bill.
One does not want to speak in principle against the notion that any significant constitutional change might in certain circumstances be put to a referendum. Certainly after the experience of the Charlottetown accord where Canadians had their first experience in voting in a referendum on constitutional change it would be very hard not to have significant constitutional change in the future without Canadians participating in that way. Whether one thought that was advisable or a tradition that should have developed, this is a tradition that has developed. It would be very difficult for the government to do otherwise.
I am not sure the bill is the mechanism by which that might be achieved. It is not a votable bill. If it were it would go to committee and there would be an opportunity to do some work on this sort of thing. Clearly the member seems to be saying, and I think a lot of people would agree, there is work to be done on this.
I sense a contradiction between what the member is saying now and what I understood his party to be saying in an earlier debate in the House. They were uncritically supportive of the view that the supreme court is going to figure all these things out. The government is being more consistent, not necessarily right, in opposing the member's bill. The member to some extent speaks for his party. However, this is Private Members' Business so I cannot assume that. Maybe he is only speaking for himself in this respect. But he supported his party's position and seems to be saying this is a matter for the courts in so far as support for the supreme court reference. On the other hand he is saying we should have legislation to deal with this.
I am not sure where the referendum comes in but I find it hard to imagine a situation in which a government, having negotiated reasonable terms of separation with a separating province, would have to go to a national referendum, knowing what I know about politics. Even if a very good arrangement had been negotiated, it would be very difficult to put such an arrangement to a referendum because there would always be someone or some group of persons who might be able to point to something in the negotiated settlement that would threaten to scuttle it.
It is in that sense that I ask the member a question. In a theoretical way is he, in creating a process whereby secession or separation as he is suggesting in this bill, not guaranteeing that a separating province would eventually be driven to a unilateral declaration of independence? Would this bill not set up a process that would make it almost impossible for any agreement, not to be reached, but to be approved?
I also find it very disturbing that the member would talk about the spectre of separatism in British Columbia. It is well and good to talk about alienation, anger and legitimate grievances. Many of the things the member spoke about I can certainly understand and share his feelings.
The case needs to be made, and many people are making it, that this country needs more attention paid to what is going on in western Canada, particularly in B.C. Our media has central Canadian glasses on. This has been aggravated by the regionalism of this parliament. The fact that the government is almost entirely from central Canada does not help.
However, this is something all the political parties have to address. To the extent that as political parties we try to build our political fortunes on regional alienation, we contribute to the problem. There is a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand we want to give voice to the anger in our regions but we do not want to represent it in such a way as to contribute to the fragmentation of the country. It is part of the art of politics and something that has to be done as well as can be.
Finally, the parliamentary secretary talked about Canada being a generous federation. I agree that if Canada were a generous federation it would be more worthy of being kept unified. I also agree that Canada has been a generous federation. However, I would argue that one of the things that threatens this country now as much as any determination on the part of my Bloc Quebecois colleagues or the PQ government in Quebec or anything like that is the breakdown of the social democratic consensus that existed in this country from the 1940s through to the 1980s.
The breakdown of that by a variety of forces, circumstances and policies adopted by this government and previous governments is every bit as much a threat to Confederation as anything being put forward by separatists, although obviously they are much more clearly a threat at the political and symbolic level. I am saying that at the social and economic level there is this other threat to Canadians' sense of themselves as being part of a caring community that they feel is worth defending and that many Quebeckers might feel is worth continuing to be a part of.
I think of the cutbacks the federal government has been responsible for in terms of federal transfer payments to the provinces. The federal government is now only paying something like 15% or 20% on medicare and perhaps it is as low as 10% depending on the figures that we believe. When it comes to the cost of health care I do not know how any member on the other side has the nerve to talk about this being a generous federation.
We see what this government has done in terms of unilateral secession. We talk about unilateral secession. There is unilateral federal withdrawal from cost shared programs, from programs which in some senses were initially imposed on the provinces and certainly were initiated by the federal government. It is something which we supported and still do. But if we are going to continue to have those programs then we have to restore much fuller federal participation in those programs. Government members cannot get up day after day—