He may know what he is talking about. I hope he does. At any rate, he raised one issue that makes me question whether he knows what he is talking about. He made allusions several times to the fact that Bill C-20 sets parameters on the events and the negotiations leading to the secession of a part of Canada or a province of Canada.
I submit to the member that if he reads the act very carefully he will see that the act exactly does not do that. It does not define the question. It does not define the number required for a majority vote, and it does not define the actual conditions of the negotiations. It precisely avoids doing that.
What it very clearly does instead—and I would ask the member to agree with me or disagree with me, and if he disagrees to please explain—is limits the power of a government, any government, a future government of this country, to negotiate with a province on secession. It says that government must first go to the House of Commons and determine whether or not the House of Commons approves of the certain events leading up to the negotiations that government might want to do, for example the question has to be clear, the House of Commons has to determine what is a clear majority, and so on and so forth.
I submit to the member that in doing so, in limiting the power of future governments in negotiating with a province that wishes to secede perhaps on an ambiguous question, what in fact the government is doing is withdrawing from the separatists in Quebec. I do not necessarily say this to members of the Bloc Quebecois because they are very good parliamentarians, but it withdraws from the separatists in Quebec of having one of their winning conditions. That winning condition would be a leader of a government side who would be willing to negotiate on an unclear question and might have a majority in the House that has such party discipline that they would follow that leader no matter what he did.
Basically the winning condition that we are trying to avoid by Bill C-20 is surely the leader of the Conservative Party who we know, if he ever did come to power, would be instantly ready to negotiate on an ambiguous question.