I humbly accept this most relevant of remarks.
The government’s budget will therefore further exacerbate social inequalities. Finally, the Conservatives are continuing their attack on the rights of women by making pay equity negotiable. That is ideology over rights. No member of this House who does not share the outdated, bankrupt Conservative ideology can possibly vote for this budget, or allow it to pass, without betraying his or her convictions. Voting for this budget, or allowing it to pass, means voting against social justice. The Bloc Québécois, loyal to its convictions, will vote against this budget without a moment’s hesitation.
One of the great challenges facing us in the 21st century, as well as one of the great opportunities, is how to harmonize the economy with the environment. Quebeckers know very well that it is in our vital strategic interest to reduce our dependence on oil, first, in order to help fight climate change and second, because it is in our economic interest. Now that the U.S. administration has announced that it intends to join the countries fighting against climate change, Canada is isolated, the only country in the Western world still in the same camp as Saudi Arabia. In this regard, as in so many others, the Conservative budget is going against the flow, trying to take us backwards instead helping us move ahead into the future. Not only are the Conservatives giving the oil companies hundreds of millions of dollars but they are also ending the wind energy program.
The automobile industry will receive $2.7 billion in federal government assistance without any fuel consumption requirements being imposed. Here, too, Canada is falling behind and is starting to become the laughingstock of the Western world. Voting for this budget or allowing it to pass means voting against the economy of the future: the green economy.
The Bloc Québécois, ever faithful to the interests and values of Quebec, will vote against this budget without a second’s hesitation.
I will soon be introducing an amendment to the amendment. It basically repeats the motion passed unanimously in the National Assembly, along with a few other elements. When the time comes to vote on it, all the members from Quebec will face a very clear choice: a choice for or against Quebec. All Quebec members who vote against this amendment to the amendment and in favour of the Conservative budget will be choosing Canada over Quebec.
This budget sounds the ultimate death-knell of the Conservative Party’s so-called open federalism toward Quebec. If the Liberals vote in favour of this budget, as they apparently will, they will show that the Liberal Party of Canada has returned to its tradition of turning its back on Quebec at the first opportunity.
The new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, who declared on March 30, 2006, that Quebec “has the right to be master of its own house”, now seems to have decided to act exactly like his predecessors and to set aside his recent and fleeting convictions. I urge Quebeckers to take note of what happens in the next few hours in Ottawa. I invite them to think about the fact that no matter which party is in power in Ottawa, Liberal or Conservative, the interests and values of Canada always take precedence over the interests and values of Quebec. As it was in the past, is now and ever will be. The only party that puts Quebec first in this house is the Bloc Québécois.
It is not a coincidence that all elected Bloc members truly believe that the only valid future for Quebec is full political freedom—Quebec sovereignty.
I move, seconded by the member for Saint-Maurice—Champlain, that the amendment be amended by deleting all the words after the words “on condition that the Government” and substituting the following:
maintain the right of women to settle pay equity issues in court, and abandon its preference for tax cuts for the well off, instead redistributing this revenue to the neediest members of our society, particularly by responding to the unanimous demands of the National Assembly of Quebec as formulated in the motion adopted on January 15, 2009, to assist workers, communities and businesses hit by the economic slowdown, support at-risk sectors, particularly manufacturing and forestry, in the same way as the automobile industry, and enhance the employment insurance program by making the eligibility criteria more flexible, and on condition that it maintain the equalization program in its current form and relinquish the idea of setting up a pan-Canadian securities commission.