Mr. Speaker, that is a disappointment that I saw coming.
I would like to come back to what the parliamentary secretary said earlier. He wanted to know what the Bloc Québécois is trying to accomplish with this bill. What we are trying to accomplish with this bill is political autonomy. Obviously, there is not a party in the House, with the exception of my own, that understands what political autonomy means.
Two days ago, on Tout le monde en parle, a fairly popular show in Quebec, we heard the Minister of Official Languages recognize that Quebec is a nation.
What does a nation require? It requires political autonomy. Back in the day, the Conservatives recognized, by means of a motion, that Quebec was a nation. Once again, what a nation requires is political autonomy.
I would like to quickly respond to the parliamentary secretary, who went so far as to give an analogy about health care, which is in a disastrous situation. I do not know whether transfer payments and fiscal imbalance mean anything to him, but this is a disaster created by the Canadian federation. He has the nerve to make a comparison with the health care system and say that we are never happy. That is beyond insulting.
The bill I introduced touched on two of Quebec's biggest concerns. I just talked about political autonomy, but there is the environmental issue too. As a young student, I learned about Quebec's social and economic development. There is an expression that has stuck with me ever since: “maîtres chez nous”, or masters in our own house.
In the 1960s, Quebec nationalized electricity, which until then had been owned by big American corporations. That was one element that drove its emancipation. My father's generation accomplished that. Today, I am convinced that my son's generation will one day liberate us from the Canadian federation, which tells us what we should do on our own land. To me, that is insulting. If the government recognizes that Quebec is a nation, it cannot also tell us that we will never have the means to liberate ourselves and grow the way we would like.
I also made note of the intervention by my colleague from Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, who talked about the Liberal government's centralization on the one hand and a kind of centralization from the Bloc on the other. I suppose that would make us the centralists of the province of Quebec.
That is just the same old empty rhetoric. Let me repeat that no one in the House, except for the people in my party, understands what political autonomy entails. It is deeply disappointing.
Every nation, whether it is an indigenous nation or the Quebec nation, is calling for this political autonomy. What I am seeing this evening is a kind of contempt. The government should just be honest and say that it is not prepared to grant Quebec political autonomy. Enough with the pretences and excuses.
This was a missed opportunity, but Quebec is used to that. We saw it with the development of multiculturalism. At first, there was talk of biculturalism and bilingualism. The federal parties got scared. They were scared to give Quebec any power or autonomy by acknowledging that this country was formed by two nations. They threw us aside, and biculturalism was rejected in favour of multiculturalism.
The same thing happened with the Clarity Act. We were not allowed to decide our political future for ourselves; it was up to them. Time and again, the federalist parties have tried to crush us to validate a political system that has been imposed on us. I would like to point out that we never signed the Canadian Constitution.
Huge problems with oil and gas are now going to emerge, and we will never get to have our say because the government is not prepared to give even one iota of credence to this important principle of political autonomy.