Mr. Speaker, the question makes a lot of sense and deals with sensitivity, as members will have realized.
My colleague began with a reference to our friend the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, who is plagued by constitutional matters. If he took the trouble to listen more closely to the opposition parties, I think he would see a certain light that is sadly lacking in his caucus. That having been said, on the issue of poverty, I think that it involves all parliamentarians.
Why do we want to become sovereign? Because we are a nation, but we are also a nation that believes strongly in social justice. Right now, even the best governments that have sat in the National Assembly have been unable to implement a genuine policy of resource distribution and full employment.
They have been unable to do so because monetary policy is decided in Ottawa. The major levers for regulating the labour market are in the hands of the Minister of Finance, and the Government of Quebec has tools that are very secondary but that make dialogue between the parties impossible.
Members are well aware that the countries—I am thinking of Sweden and Norway—that have come close to achieving full employment have been successful in getting employers, union representatives, representatives of community groups, educators and, of course, economic decision makers to sit down together, to agree on a certain number of objectives, and to implement them. In a federal system such as ours, this is not possible.
I will give an example. It is well known that the federal government has turned around and deprived the provinces of close to $11 billion in transfer payments. Do members think that this began with a dialogue and that the provinces were involved in these macroeconomic decisions? Of course not. This was authority speaking. It shows that federalism is incompatible with the full employment policies that Quebec will implement when it gains control of all these levers as a sovereign state.