moved that the first report of the Standing Committee on Transport, presented to the House on Tuesday, December 7, 1999, be concurred in.
Mr. Speaker, this speech will obviously deal first with air transport but, as you will understand, considering the bill just introduced by the government, it will be very difficult for me not to refer to this sad day for democracy in Quebec and in Canada.
Not to be accused of being out of order, I will have to deal with the first report of the transport committee. At the outset, I would like to tell the men and women who work for the Canadian transportation industry that my colleagues from the Bloc Quebecois and myself, as the transport critic for the Bloc, are very concerned with the uncertainty they now experience, a few days only before Christmas.
This has been particularly true for a number of months, more precisely since August 13 when the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Industry, by suspending the provisions of the Competition Act, created total chaos in the Canadian transportation industry. This situation recently led to the shutdown of operations at InterCanadian, and 900 workers and their families, could perhaps be forced in the very near future to go on welfare.
I think that 14 days before Christmas we, as parliamentarians, cannot remain insensitive to the gloomy situation faced by the workers of InterCanadian, a company based in Montreal.
I could talk for a long time about the content of this report, but I will of course be able to revisit it in the future. Since I am running short on time, am allowed only 20 minutes to make a speech and have already been talking for two minutes, I would like to turn immediately to the second part of my speech since I am afraid to run out of time.
For the benefit of the members in the House and of our viewers, and I know that there are quite a few of them, I would like to go back to a statement made by a person who said “No matter what, Quebec is and will always be a distinct and free society capable of assuming its own destiny and development”.