Mr. Speaker, in case I forgot to mention it, I will be sharing my time with the member for Hochelaga—Maisonneuve.
When are we going to stop talking about sovereignty? Never. So long as it is not a fact, we will keep talking about it. He had better hold on to his hat, as my colleague from Roberval would say, because in the coming months we are going to be talking sovereignty more than ever. He has not understood that Quebecers constitute a people and that the throne speech contains no reference to the existence of a people and a nation in Quebec.
Quebecers are a people. Although people readily speak of a Canadian people, we are not among them. Let him make no mistake. The sovereignty option had climbed in this morning's poll, without anyone talking about it. Does the member know what the percentage was prior to the latest referendum, in 1995, six months before the referendum? There was no talk of sovereignty. It was 37% or 38% tops. After the referendum campaign, it rose to about 50%. We lost by 50,000 votes in the latest referendum. We are at 45% now, and there is no talk of it. Give that a little thought.
Quebecers are proud. They are not crazy. They can see how Canada is being built. They can see that Quebec is being left on the fringe in this building activity. They can also see how incredibly arrogant the government is, that it marches right into Quebec's jurisdictions and that it is destabilizing Quebec's public finances.
People should not imagine, and I think it is important to point this out, that it is easy to manage Quebec's finances when the federal government first slashes transfer payments and then leaves us in a state of perpetual uncertainty. We do not know what it is going to do in the coming years. Now we are looking at a throne speech and upcoming bills that show not a shred of respect for provincial jurisdiction.
How is it possible for two independent bodies to run the same sector effectively? Do we want to sit still while the federal government takes Quebecers for a ride in sectors such as education? Are we going to allow three-quarters of the Canadian population, which lives outside Quebec and is primarily English-speaking, to decide the kind of exams French-speaking students from Quebec should have to write to get into elementary school?
There is a problem somewhere. Over the years we defined the separation of powers and the jurisdictions to be respected. However the federal government is not keeping to its part of the bargain. It is more arrogant than ever. The member is asking me what it will take to shut Quebec up? We are not going to beg the federal government for anything.
The day that Quebecers decide to become a sovereign nation, we will stop handing over the $33 billion in taxes we now pay to the federal government. We will manage this money ourselves and will not get down on our knees to ask the federal government for anything.