Mr. Speaker, I have a great deal of respect for my colleague, with whom I often chat at the gym, but I must state that, in my opinion, the comments he has just made are most unfortunate. First, when the day comes that Quebeckers decide to become sovereign, it will be as a result of a democratic movement advanced by a referendum.
Second, when the Bloc Québécois arrived in this House in 1993, Lucien Bouchard worked with the former member for Rimouski-Neigette-et-la Mitis on the matter of francophones living outside of Quebec. We had proposed a sort of oversight body. Even René Lévesque had done so at the time of the St. Andrews initiatives. We proposed a parity structure. We would look at how francophone minorities outside Quebec are treated and you would look into how anglophones are treated in Quebec, anglophones who have the right to services in their language, from kindergarten to university.
We have never been ashamed of the way in which we have treated the founding minority of Quebec, that is the anglophone minority. The fact that we will become sovereign through a democratic process must not be interpreted in any way as an indication that we intend to abandon francophones outside Quebec. That is not the intention of the sovereignist movement, nor of the National Assembly, and I urge my colleague to validate and to verify the documents that we have presented on these issues since 1995. That was done by Mr. Bouchard through our heritage critic at the time, Mrs. Suzanne Tremblay.