Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question.
Of course, given that money is held back, here in Ottawa, the Quebec government makes choices, and pushes ahead with a certain number of priorities. Generally, as he has noted himself, culture always seems to end up like the spare tire in the car. This is where cuts are the most frequent and the first to be made, on the spur of the moment.
This shows, and on this I shall not dwell much further, that once there is a shortfall of funding, culture is last in line in the Quebec government's priorities. As I said earlier, culture is a vector through which the psychological character of peoples and nations is built. We must convince ourselves that culture is at least as important as education, if not more so, given that it is more democratic.
If we do not properly care for culture, we run the risk, especially for our youth, of a copycat effect or mimetic response which can easily take on a life of its own, the tendency being in our case to copy the United States, overwhelmed as we are by television, radio and movies from that country. When models our young people can identify with and refer to are lacking because Quebeckers and Canadians generally are not providing them, they shift to those other models.
This is an important aspect to consider since we will soon be looking at the Convention on Cultural Diversity, which is now the subject of debate at UNESCO, in Paris. This convention will have a defining impact on culture in every country of the world. Given how little importance we accord to culture however, are we ready to confront the U.S. and Europe in this area?
Ready we shall be when there is funding for these artisans, these artists who create the memory and the markers through which national identities come alive.