Mr. Speaker, congratulations on your appointment to the role of Deputy Speaker of the House. I will be sharing my time with the member for Compton—Stanstead.
I am very proud to be in the House with this new member because there are now 44 of us members from Quebec on the Liberal side. With the 11 members from Quebec on the Conservative side, there are 55 members who are able to be both proud Quebeckers and proud Canadians and to build this country together with our counterparts across the country.
Regarding the Bloc Québécois motion, we can see that there is an inconsistency that could have been fixed simply by adopting the Conservative Party's amendment, which the Bloc Québécois initially rejected but is now putting forward itself. Let me explain.
The original plan to pay the carbon rebate in the month of April to all Canadians in the eight provinces who were already receiving the carbon rebate makes logical, coherent sense. The rebate had historically gone only to those provinces that were subject to the federal backstop on the carbon pricing. Quebec, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories had their own systems and were excluded. That was the choice of Quebec, the Northwest Territories and British Columbia, to be exempt from the federal system by putting their own system in place.
That also allowed those provinces to decide where the monies went that came in from the revenues generated by their own carbon pricing system. They went to provincial programs in Quebec and British Columbia. That allowed the province the flexibility to choose where the money went. The federal government chose, in those provinces that were not part of the federal system, to give the monies back through a consumer pricing model. That was what happened in the month of April.
Earlier today, the Conservative Party looked at the motion and said that it is not coherent, because British Columbia was also not part of the federal system.
However, the Bloc Québécois's original motion only called for the money to be returned to Quebec, leaving out British Columbia, and the Bloc Québécois rejected the Conservative Party's amendment. For the sake of consistency, the Bloc Québécois ended up adding its own amendment to say that British Columbia should also get a rebate.
That is not the perspective that the Bloc normally brings to the House. Bloc members are looking at it only from the perspective of what more or what less they can get for one province. That is not the way the federal system works. In the federal system, there are equalization payments paid to provinces. Quebec is the biggest federal beneficiary of equalization payments.