Mr. Speaker, we will match our percentage of members with theirs anytime unless they cannot do the math. It is kind of obvious to anyone who has two brain cells to rub together who has the higher percentage of members here in the House.
The problem is that the committee on Bill C-20 should have made a commitment to travel. It should have made a commitment to consult widely with Canadians in Quebec and in the rest of Canada about the procedure the government intends to establish with respect to the possible secession of any province and therefore with respect to the breakup of the country. It would only make sense that this is the kind of process that should have been followed.
We have committees that travel the country asking Canadians about other things, about fishery matters, transport matters, agricultural matters. Almost every other matter has had a committee travel the country to ask Canadians what they think about that particular matter. Yet when it comes to something as important as breaking up the country or at least the procedure for doing so, or the procedure for a referendum to initiate negotiations to break up the country, the government says not only will we not travel, we will begin hearing witnesses on a Wednesday of one week and on Friday of the following week we will report the bill back to the House.
The plan in the committee is to hear the minister on Wednesday, as we did yesterday. By next Wednesday we will move into clause by clause study and in that period of time hear all the witnesses who want to appear, but not all the witnesses, just all the witnesses the committee decides to hear. That is a limited number; we are only going to hear 45 witnesses. We will be lucky if we can hear those in the little timeframe that the government has established. I predict that we will probably have to extend the life of the committee anyway because witnesses have lives. Witnesses just cannot kind of pack up their lives and say, “Oh, the Liberals need me”, or “The Bloc needs me”, or “someone else needs me and I must truck on down to Ottawa and destroy my schedule for next week because the process that the House of Commons has decided, pursuant to the will of the Liberal majority in the committee, means that I don't have any time to plan ahead. I don't have any time to write a brief. I don't have any time to gather my thoughts. I just have to get down there and present”.
It may well be that the government plan will falter to some degree on the fact that witnesses simply cannot fit themselves into the government timetable. There will be a certain amount of justice in that.
We support the motion. We feel that the committee should have travelled. The motion also includes something having to do with televising, but my understanding is that the committee is being televised. I am not sure why that is in the motion. It seems to be a bit redundant. It is like protesting something that is not there. The committee is being televised. Why protest the fact that it is not being televised or why move a motion to televise it when it is being televised. There is a certain kind of inadequacy in the motion that we will overlook because we support the spirit of the motion which is that the way the government has handled this particular bill has been sorely inadequate and in violation, I think, of the best traditions of parliament when it comes to dealing with things that are very important.
However, Canadians should not let our objections to the process obscure the fact that we do support the bill in principle, that we support the view that there is a role for parliament, pursuant to the opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada, in laying out what parliament would regard as the conditions that would create an obligation to negotiate on the part of the rest of Canada with a province of Canada having to do with secession.
The Supreme Court of Canada, in its opinion, said that there would have to be a clear question and a clear majority. It said that what constituted a clear question and a clear majority would have to be determined by the political actors; in other words, the court said that it would not determine that itself.
Surely no one would want to argue that the Parliament of Canada is not one of the political actors that the Supreme Court of Canada had in mind. Surely no one would want to say that the only political actors that the Supreme Court of Canada might have had in mind are provincial governments alone or a provincial government alone; that is to say, the provincial government of the province that brings in a referendum. I do not think that was what the court was saying. I do not think anyone could credibly argue that was what the court was saying.
The bill is saying that, yes, the Parliament of Canada has certain responsibilities, just like the provincial legislatures of provinces have certain responsibilities, and like the National Assembly of Quebec, it has responsibilities, it has rights and it has the right to ask any question it likes in any referendum it likes. That right coexists with the right of this parliament to say that only a certain kind of question, responded to by a clear majority, will create an obligation on the part of this place, the Parliament of Canada, to negotiate secession. It does not eliminate the possibility of other kinds of referendums on association, or partnership or new forms of the federation. All those kinds of things are still available and they are available in the ordinary course of politics.
A province may want to have a referendum in order to demonstrate that the people are behind its new constitutional proposal for a new division of powers or whatever. That is all part of the ordinary political process.
What the bill talks about is an extraordinary political situation in which a province would ask the Government of Canada to begin negotiations on secession. It seems to me that parliament would be shirking its duty if it said “Oh, we can't have anything to say about that because that is up to the seceding province. It has to determine that”. This is not a credible position.
We have responsibilities here in parliament as the representatives of all the people in Canada, including the people of Quebec. We have our own jurisdiction in Quebec. Quebec is not a separate country, and we hope it never will be. However, it is not yet a separate country and therefore the federal government has its own jurisdiction in Quebec. It has a right, on behalf of people in Quebec and people outside of Quebec, to determine what the conditions would be that would create the obligation to negotiation secession. That is what the bill does.
Earlier on I talked about political actors. I am not talking about what goes on during question period. I am talking about the language of the supreme court which talked about political actors, and the political actors being the ones who would have to determine a clear question and a clear majority.
What we find unfortunate in the bill, not just the process, is two things with respect to how the bill delineates who are the political actors. There are two sections in the bill in which the government lists people whose views it would have to take into account in determining whether or not a question was clear—and that would happen prior to a referendum—and in determining whether or not a majority was clear. As the bill stands now, that would happen after a referendum.
Who does the government list? It lists the Parliament of Canada, obviously, and the provinces, the territories and the Senate, which I will get to in a minute, and any other views that it might deem relevant. It has the same list with respect to a clear question and a clear majority.
We in the NDP contend that this particular list is faulty in two grievous ways. First, it includes the Senate. It includes this unappointed body and gives to it a role that we feel is unwarranted, undeserved and not necessary in any constitutional way in the determination that those sections of the bill lay out. Having given this undeserved status to the Senate, the bill then compounds the moral offence by not giving status to the aboriginal people of provinces that hold such referendums.
Here we have a situation in which provinces and territories are listed. The government has to take the views of these people into account, as well as the views of the Senate or anybody else. I guess maybe aboriginal people fall under anybody else. Yet, these are the same people, in the case of the Cree and the Inuit in Quebec, who won the last referendum for the federalist cause. These are the people whose solid block of votes for Canada made the difference between a winning referendum and a losing referendum in 1995 and the government has the unmitigated gall to ignore them and to treat them with contempt. This is the one thing that unites federalists and separatists in this country.
When we see the process that is going on with respect to Bill 99 in Quebec and in Quebec City, the aboriginal people there in that context are ignored as well and not given full recognition of their rights and status. I might add that that committee is not travelling either. It is not going to northern Quebec to get the opinion of the Cree, when we hear all the self-righteousness of the Bloc. Two wrongs do not make a right. The committee in this House should show up the committee in Quebec City and do the kind of travelling that is not being done there.
Those of us who are New Democrats find this to be a major flaw in the bill. We hope the government will see its way to amending this. I asked the minister in committee yesterday why he did not have the aboriginal leadership of a province listed in this. He said that he listed only the people who were constitutional. I told him that the native people are in the constitution. I said that I was there when they were put into the new constitution when it was patriated in 1981. He then said that it is people who are involved in the constitutional amendment process. I said that the supreme court did not say “take into account the views of constitutional political actors”. I would argue that aboriginal people are constitutional political actors, but let us leave that aside for a minute. In the government's own bill it lists the territories. The territories do not have a part in the constitutional amending process, yet their views have to be taken into account, and rightly so.
I said to the minister that since he has the territories in there, why does he not have the aboriginal people in there. The minister said that the territories are not in the bill. I told him to check the bill. He had a little huddle, came back and said that I was right, that the territories are in the bill.
