Mr. Speaker, my colleague is very kind, and we thank him for all his generosity, but it is absolutely abhorrent to hear such a speech, particularly his comparisons of how things are in other places in the world, how we have a decent share of the decisions that have to be made. What we want is not a share, but 100% of decision-making, shaped by the needs of Quebeckers and not by the needs of Toronto and the rest of Canada. We will not have anything to do with that. That is what sovereignty is all about.
How is it that Canadian sovereignty is so important, yet when we raise the issue of Quebec sovereignty, we hear “You know, there are arrangements”. That is not true. Any time a consensus was reached in Quebec, it has been a real grind to obtain anything. Things never change.
We do not want just part of the decision; we want to make the entire decision. Take the example of our faculty of veterinary medicine. How is it that all four other faculties of veterinary medicine in Canada are fully accredited, and the only one with just partial accreditation is the one in Saint-Hyacinthe. The only francophone veterinary medicine faculty in North America is in Quebec, in Saint-Hyacinthe, and the Liberal government is still thinking about whether or not to give it the $25 million it needs to get full accreditation back.
And what about parental leave, how long has that been under discussion? How long have the discussions been going on with the federal government to find arrangements that are not hard to find, because the Employment Insurance Act allows us, for comparable programs such as parental leave, to transfer some hundreds of millions of dollars to Quebec to allow it to develop its own parental leave program?
Yet it was simple enough to invest $500 million into the Ontario automotive industry. They did not even have to make demands or to negotiate. In the full flush of the election campaign, the Ontario automotive industry gets given $500 million. We ask for similar treatment for the aerospace industry, concentrated mainly in Quebec. But no. We get peanuts. We get equalization payments.
All the structural spending goes to Ontario, while Quebec gets equalization payments. What a shameful thing to say. We have heard it from the lips of the Liberal MPs from Quebec, “You have equalization and Ontario has investments and jobs”. That is the current reality.
If Quebec had that $40 billion in taxes, we would use it to create more wealth, more wealth for Quebec and the regions of Quebec. I never said it would be the best country in the world. We are not making that claim. It is shameful, in fact, that successive prime ministers here, in Canada, could tell the world to its face that Canada was the best country in the world. That is an incredible diplomatic insult. We have never made such a claim.
Still, making 100% of the decisions on 100% of our matters of consensus; choosing what we think is good for us, ourselves; and not being dictated to by Ottawa about what would be good for all of Quebec—that is sovereignty. If it is important for Canada, it is important for Quebec, too.
I am convinced that, next time, Quebeckers will decide to leave this system, because we have things to build. It is not because we want to be acrimonious. We have things to build in Quebec. For some time now, we have been putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to build Quebec: regional Quebec, agricultural Quebec, industrial Quebec—