Madam Speaker, I congratulate my colleague from Quebec for her excellent presentation. I made her acquaintance when I was a journalist and she was the member for Québec. Her particular interest was poverty. She had toured Quebec, particularly the rural regions where I worked.
In the early 1990s, after the Meech Lake accord, then prime minister Jean Chrétien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, decided to eliminate the deficit on the backs of the poor and the disadvantaged. Members will remember the cuts in provincial transfers and the pillaging of the employment insurance fund. I would like to know if, in her opinion, there has been any change. Are Quebeckers now better served by the federal system than they were at that time? We still wonder about this today. Is Quebec well served by this federation, or would it be better, in order to solve the problem of poverty, among others, for it to control the levers of power and the financial levers?