Madam Speaker, this debate is a matter of concern for all Canada and not simply a dispute or discussion between Quebec and Ottawa. It is in this larger optic, because many people in western Canada are also following the debate, that I intervene.
The question itself involves a mixture, sometimes not clearly defined, of constitutional law, international law and politics. In the straight limited issue of the constitutional power I did give the opinion in 1980 as an a priori abstract legal question that the issue of holding a referendum on secession from a federal country, the issue of the nature of the referendum question, the content and the timing, was a question of plenary federal powers, not of provincial powers. In this context a federal government would have the right to disallow or bar constitutionally the holding of a referendum, or even to interpose its own referendum.
This was a statement of the law, but I also said at the time that it was a political decision whether and to what extent to use legal powers. The House remembers in the context in 1980 that the then prime minister decided not to exercise his constitutional options but to meet the challenge politically to enter the referendum debate and to win it.
With respect to the particular situation we are facing today, in 1994 I repeated the views that I had expressed in 1980. I repeated them one year before the second Quebec referendum in an article in the autumn 1994 edition of Canadian Parliamentary Review . I note simply that it was adopted by the Reform Party. The best and brightest of the Reform Party spokesmen on constitutional questions, the member for Calgary West, Stephen Harper, picked them up in interventions.