Madam Speaker, just a comment and a question to the hon. member from the Bloc who just spoke. I guess I should not be surprised that members from the Bloc Quebecois would not want to support a motion to save Canada because they are not in the business of saving Canada. In fact, they are in the business, if their highest hopes were to come true, of dismantling Canada.
Putting that aside for a minute, because that is not what the hon. member spoke to primarily, the Bloc is grasping at straws here. As far as I know, the Bloc is not against ratifying the Kyoto protocol, at least not that I have been able to detect.
Are they against strengthening the role of aboriginal, Metis and Inuit people in the Canadian family? Maybe it is the words Canadian family they object to because certainly the government of Quebec just entered into an agreement with the Cree of northern Quebec to strengthen their role as a part of Quebec which is still part of Canada.
When it comes to reaffirming Canada's international peacekeeping role, is it the word Canada is it the word peacekeeping that is the problem?
As far as rehabilitating Canada's reputation as a respected internationalist, day after day the Bloc has asked questions of the government in the House about Canada's abdication of its traditional internationalist perspective.
Is the Bloc opposed to ensuring all trade agreements include adequate protection for labour standards, human rights and the environment? This is news. We cannot hardly wait to put this on our website.
Is enabling primary producers and Canadian farm families to compete with foreign subsidies something the Bloc is against or would it had to have said Quebec farm families? Is there something wrong with it because it says Canadian farm families?
Then we have rejecting continental energy and water policies that endanger Canadian control over natural resources. Again, I would have thought that protecting Canadian or at least sovereignty over these resources would have been something that the Bloc Quebecois would have been interested in. It goes on and on.
The one thing that the member from the Bloc isolated and talked a lot about was implementing a comprehensive strategy for the eradication of child poverty. A comprehensive strategy could be a co-operative federalist strategy. There is nothing in this that precludes the kind of strategy that the hon. member talked about. To me this is a case of seeing a centralist under every bed. Just as Americans used to see a communist under every bed, the Bloc is now saying that it sees a centralist under every bed.
Even the former leader of her party, Lucien Bouchard, when he was in the House, voted for the motion to which this implicitly refers. He voted in 1989, as a minister in the Mulroney government, for a motion of the House to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Was he betraying Quebec? Was he not acting in the best interests of Quebec by voting for that motion? No. He understood, and I am sure the member would understand upon reflection, that when we talk about a comprehensive strategy, it could respect the jurisdiction of Quebec. In fact it should.
The Bloc seems to be grasping at straws. It seems that their members decided this morning not to support the NDP motion because it talks about Canada, so they have to find some kind of picky reason for not supporting it. To each his own. However the member would have been much better served to have supported our motion.