Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Group No. 4 of amendments to Bill C-16.
I will first talk about Motion No. 9 by the member for Rosemont. He will perhaps find this a bit surprising, but I agree with much of what he is proposing, although I think that the citizenship ceremony is perhaps not the right time for these documents to be given out. This should be done long before.
In his motion, the members asks to have new citizens given:
(i) the Charter of the French Language;
(ii) the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms;
(iii) the Election Act;
(iv) the Declaration by the Government of Quebec on Ethnic and Race Relations...
These are documents it would be appropriate to give to people coming to Quebec. I would go even further and say that this would be useful for any province. However, we are talking about Quebec here. I think that people arriving in Quebec as immigrants should get all these documents. I think they already do, but they should at least be aware of them and their content.
From the time they applied for citizenship, seven years have passed, on average. This is why I think it is a bit late for them to be getting these documents at that point.
As a party, we must unfortunately vote against this motion.
The member for Rosemont also talks of having a representative of the Province of Quebec at the swearing in ceremony, but his presence must not be vital to the holding of the ceremony.
I know that a number of MPs do not attend swearing in ceremonies. I think that it should be important, even a duty. I attend these ceremonies myself at least once a year, and I then send letters of congratulations to all new citizens in my riding.
I would like to talk about Motion No. 23 presented by the hon. member for Wentworth—Burlington. I definitely have a problem with this motion. I cannot support it and our party will not support it. It is certainly not because I am or am not a monarchist, which is what I will touch on first.
If we were going to get into changing anything as significant as this, we would have to change our constitution first. The Queen is still in the constitution and until we make a major change in it we cannot remove that from the oath. The member talked about different oppressed countries where royalty is feared but it goes a lot further than royalty. It can also extend to politicians and people's fear of them. We have to be careful about how far we go on that.
He referred to a people united by God. I have no problem saying that I am a Christian and I strongly believe in God. But in this day and age, with all the different religions in Canada, I feel we are putting them totally aside by adding that type of phrase to the oath. Because of that, there is no way I can support that.
The other points the member made about the oath are very interesting. I think they are nice, but we have to stick with certain parts of this right now that are already there and a part of a constitution. Therefore, we will be voting against this motion.