Mr. Speaker, this feels wrong to me. It felt wrong when the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party passed its resolution and it felt wrong when passionate worried debate rose up across the country.
It felt even worse last week when the Bloc tabled its motion.
It did not feel less wrong but it felt more hopeful, as if the worst might pass, when the government then presented its counter motion.
However, the disease reached its incurable, treacherous peak when the Bloc announced that it would support the government motion—
--saying that Canada will become the first country to officially recognize the Quebec nation and that there will be many other countries that will recognize the nation of Quebec and the country of Quebec.
My country is more than this. Canada is centuries and centuries of aboriginal peoples, their respectful relationship to the land, their culture and history.
Canada is the French and the English struggling to survive in a new world filled with difficulties in order to build new lives for themselves. They were different in their languages, their cultures, their religions and their legal systems, but they were committed to the same struggle, to live together; and they succeeded in doing that.
Canada has people from almost everywhere coming here, changing us and themselves in ways exciting and unknown. Canada has immense resources and unimaginable possibilities. Our future is still in the making and still in the becoming.
Canada is a great global experiment, a true global society that works in the only way our global world of the future can work. Canada matters. It matters to me. It matters to us. It matters to the world. Therefore, when we deal with constitutional change, with things that lay out what we are and shape our future, it matters and it matters a lot.
Meech Lake and Charlottetown, agree with them or not, we examined, we debated and we took time. Meech Lake and Charlottetown felt serious.
This feels wrong because it does not feel as serious as it must be. It feels like games, bad, manipulative, opportunistic games, political games. Box somebody into a corner so they say or do something they do not want to say or do just to get out of the corner, just to save face, for them to box the other guy into say and doing just the same. We all save face and all get into a bigger box, a bigger box called the future, except that box belongs to someone else.
All these games and manipulations are not for us. They only create a slippery slope for later on.
The public has learned to accept most things political but not this. The stakes are too high. The public is saying that this is their country. The government got itself into this but why should they join it. Canadians want to know why they should let the government do this to them when this is their country.
This is pure politics. All this started with the ludicrous concept of having a debate fundamental to the country based on understanding different understandings of the word “nation”. In the last few days it has deteriorated into the ludicrous reality of such a debate in practice.
For those who want to engage in the debate honestly, seeking definitional clarity, they can forget it. Other parties to the debate want none of it. They want to say “nation” means whatever they want it to mean now and to change definitions whenever they decide they want it to mean something different. They can then go to the public and argue, spin and try to achieve by misunderstanding what they cannot by understanding.
When I first arrived in Montreal, what impressed me most was the pride of Quebeckers. The English language and American culture had invaded the whole world. The Quebeckers had no chance of survival. However, they said “No; not us, not here”. They know who they are and who they will be, forever.
Quebeckers know who they are. They have had to. They could not have made it if they had not. They do not need any official definers to tell them who they are. Some day all Canadians will get down on paper what Canada really is, what Quebec really is and what together we have made ourselves to be. However, it will not happen this way. It cannot happen this way.
Does the Bloc really want to convince Canadians outside Quebec to accept Quebec as a nation.? Not at all.
The Bloc wants the process to be so inappropriate that all such Canadians will reject the question. It wants to grease that slippery slope so that Canadians inside Quebec will reject those outside Quebec and the Bloc's cause of independence will be advanced.
The pawn in this game is the public. As Canadians, we feel deeply about our country. Politicians and political advocates for decades have been playing games with our emotions, manipulating them for their/our own purposes. They/we have completely poisoned the well of discussion and debate on this question. No side trusts the other and no citizen trusts any politician.
Though it does not seem this way, the problem is not really the languages of French and English. It is the language of spin, manipulation and bigger agendas. Neither the government's motion nor the resolution of the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party will do anything except create greater division and distrust.
My country Canada is more than this. For me, the motion has no precise language, no precise depth of understanding, no time and mechanism to work this through, no clarity and no support. The government motion should be defeated.