Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I want to take this opportunity to say that all the members of the Bloc Quebecois are very proud of all the work he does as our party's immigration critic.
Canada had its share of constitutional debates. Some people seem tired of it. They are so tired of those debates that they do not dare confront those who still think that the Constitution of Canada should be amended. At this very moment, the Prime Minister is inaugurating an exhibition on Canada's constitution. When looking at the different exhibits and stands, we realize to what extent the Constitution of Canada has been imposed upon Quebec, be it the constitution of 1840, or Union Act, or the Constitution Act, 1982, which was patriated without Quebec's consent.
One area where there was a breakthrough is immigration. An administrative arrangement was made, not thanks to the generosity of the Canadian government, but because such an administrative agreement is possible under the current constitution, since powers regarding immigration are concurrent. The federal and provincial governments and legislatures can exercise these powers concurrently if the federal government and parliament so desire. It is provided that in this regard the federal government has precedence.
Whether or not there is an agreement with the provinces, especially Quebec, and whether or not the provinces exercise certain powers in the area of immigration depends on the good will of the federal government.
The first agreements reached on this issue—the Andras-Bienvenue agreement, if I recall, followed by the Cullen-Couture agreement, and now the McDougall-Gagnon-Tremblay agreement—were the result of negotiations.
To answer my colleague's question, the status of such agreements is always precarious. If a government no longer wanted the provinces to exercise powers in the area of immigration, it could prevent them from doing so.
This is why immigration agreements were to be enshrined in the constitution under the Charlottetown accord, so they would no longer be precarious, but protected through a constitutional amendment process preventing the government from unilaterally modifying them. This is always a worry for us as the federal government, at least the Liberal government, has often acted unilaterally with regard to the constitution.
If these agreements were protected by a federal statute, the current agreements would be less precarious, even if this protection were incomplete, since the government would always be in a position to amend or repeal the supplementary protection referring to the intergovernmental agreements and working agreements between the federal and the Quebec governments.
This is why our party, which wants to defend the interests of Quebec right now, before the Quebec people democratically chooses sovereignty, believes that it would be timely to grant some protection, which will never be sufficient, since the only useful solution would be to enshrine it in the constitution.
As things now stand, it is hard to believe that we would want to enshrine in the constitution something that would be in the best interests of Quebec and all Quebecers, since it is believed that the Quebec people have enough protection as it is.
Our party does not believe this to be the case. This is why, even if we act in a constructive way in our analysis of Bill C-31, we strongly believe that if Quebec is to prosper in the international community, it has to gain control over the immigration process to guarantee that it will in the future develop into a French speaking country that will still be generous without adopting the bad habits of a government which, pretending to be very generous to refugees, is once again trying to be very hard and to crack down on refugee status claimants. This is a tendency that a sovereign Quebec will not want to adopt once the Quebec people decides that it should achieve sovereignty.