Mr. Speaker, basically, the purpose of my speech was to show that the Quebec nation must be able to make its own budget choices, which it cannot do within the existing federal structure. This is not a competition about who got what handout to please one region of the country or another.
My colleague talked about equality among the provinces. That is not the issue. It is to be expected that members of a nation support one another. It does not make sense that the Quebec nation—which relies on its own Parliament, its own National Assembly in Quebec City—cannot make all of its own budget decisions or, at any rate, cannot make more decisions than it does now.
On the contrary, for many years, we have seen the opposite from all parties, Liberal, NDP and Conservative: an inexorable movement to centralize Canada. We have reached a point where we are asking ourselves what we need to do, as a nation, to move forward.
We must do more than vote in the House to recognize that Quebeckers form a nation. We must give them the means to make their own budget decisions. It does not look like that can happen in Canada.
I am not criticizing Canadians for making their own budget choices and their own decisions. A very interesting example came up: the government is giving parents a childcare allowance even though the Government of Quebec's priority request was to maintain the $800 compensation for the daycare program. That is a very good example of how the government does exactly the opposite of what we want. We do not want the federal government, whether it is Conservative or Liberal, to tell us about how good it is and all of the great stuff it is giving us. We want to make our own choices and we want them to be respected. It is as simple as that.