If I have heard correctly, the hon. member has just said that there are no differences and that both fields must be paired.
When we want to talk about human rights or, as this hon. member knows, consular affairs, what in the name of goodness could that have to do with commerce?
The reality is that in many respects we have to judge the changing and evolving world, which that party simply does not get. The reality, however, is that there are other dimensions to our foreign affairs policies, and they deal with defence, of course, and immigration, as the hon. member has just discussed. Let us not lose sight of what the bill is all about it. It formalizes a process by law, which the hon. member does not want to consider, which permits the government by order in council under a bill to proceed with the division of the department. This is the formal process in which the member can have a debate.
That member and I sit on the same committee on foreign affairs. Not once in the time he has been a member, or in the past year and a half that I have been a member, has an issue come up on the subject of trade. Indeed, that member will know this, because his colleague, who is also the critic for foreign affairs, has brought several motions forward, not one of them dealing with commerce.
I therefore will ask the hon. member this. Since this issue has already taken place and the division is already occurring, and because of the maturity of both the foreign affairs element of our department and commerce, often not inextricably linked as he suggested but just the opposite, moving in very different directions to ensure the interests of the whole country, would he not agree that it is time for the Bloc Québécois and that member to get their facts together and to modernize their thinking about the world around them as opposed to the insular politics on which they are founding those kind of comments?