Mr. Speaker, I would like my colleague opposite to tell us if he would have preferred to see us refuse to help Avionnerie Val-d'Or. It is in his riding. If he did not want us to help Avionnerie Val-d'Or, I would have liked to know.
However, that is not the issue. On a serious note, I would like to talk about the issues that are regularly addressed on the other side, the duplication issues. There is a very specific and simple example. About twenty years ago now, in its effort to deal with the regional disparity problems, the federal government created the CFDCs, the Community Futures Development Corporations.
These corporations work with local organizations to launch initiatives that create jobs in the surrounding environment, based on a strategy which is developed with local groups.
Several years later, the Quebec government, which was then separatist, decided that CFDCs were working well. They work well, but there is only one problem: they are federal. Imagine. A federal body present in the community and it works well. Of course, this is unacceptable. Local development centres, or LDCs, are therefore created, along the same lines as the CFDCs, with the same mandate as the CFDCs. The LDCs, by the way, are an initiative which, in and of itself, is laudable, in my view. The problem, however, is that the LDCs must not have any trace of the federal government. There is no way there can be anything federal about them. There was a federal institution, the CFDCs. There are a total of 57 of them across the province. The LDCs have been created so that the federal government is not there.
Then, who produced an overlap? Who initiated that overlap?
Contrary to what my colleagues opposite think, there is delight, all over Quebec, at the collaboration and the complementarity that can exist between a provincial action and the federal government for the benefit of communities. I wish the member opposite and his colleagues had been on hand when we announced the Sural project in Cap-Chat, in the struggling Gaspé region. We brought hope. Indeed, along with my colleague Nathalie Normandeau, of the Quebec government, with our own institution, with local people, building on a local initiative, we created hope.
Mr. Speaker, hope for the future is much more important than the battles of the past being waged by the people opposite.