Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in this debate. I will be sharing my time with the member for Ajax.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to this Bloc Québécois motion.
I will talk a bit about my history as a child of the charter. In our caucus, several newly elected members are children of the charter. I believe that is also the case across the way.
I was born to immigrant parents from Egypt and England. They arrived in Newfoundland in 1974 and then settled in New Brunswick. I am the only member of my family who was born in Canada.
I was six years old when the charter was proclaimed. A lot of us on this side of the House were not party to the debates described in this House, but we experienced the effects of it. In particular, in my case and in my family's case, we enjoyed the language protections that were afforded in the Constitution based on previous fights, in particular that of the government of Louis Robichaud, which in the 1960s established the equality of French and English in New Brunswick.
I know that some of my colleagues on this side of the House had this benefit, but being a child of the charter, I had the chance to go to an English-language school, with French-language schools fully protected later through the charter. However, there was an effect that came from the charter being in our lives. One thing that was important, combined with the official languages of New Brunswick, was that in English-language schools, there was a priority on French-language education and French immersion.
Francophone students, Acadian students in particular, had their own schools that were well protected by the charter. Where I lived, it was half anglophone, half francophone. For anglophones, there was an anglophone school, where the French language and the French fact in New Brunswick and in Canada were recognized.
Some of my other colleagues on this side of the House and I took it upon ourselves to enjoy the fruits of the charter and to see ourselves reflected in this new reality, this new set of values that was being experienced in Canada, a Canada of equal rights where the march for rights continued year after year. We experienced this despite the fights that were happening and despite the very real wounds that were experienced in the fight of 1982 and in the fights previously. A number of us on this side of the House, like my colleague who is going to be speaking, came of age around the same time and perhaps politically came of age around the same time, experiencing this in the eighties.
When we were in our twenties, we saw on television, in demonstrations or in politicians or our own leaders, that the fight was ongoing.
Whether it was the Meech Lake accord or the Charlottetown accord, we experienced decades of constitutional challenges.
I arrived in Quebec in 1993 to study art at McGill University, where a person could take courses in French and answer in English. That was where I took a course with Alain-Gustave Gagnon. We read up on the discoveries of Guy Rocher and his memoirs.
I noticed that the leader of the Bloc Québécois, the member for Beloeil—Chambly, gave a great speech on Mr. Rocher's recent death.
Those of us on this side of the House try to reach across the aisle, and at that time, I was able to get a better understanding of what this constitutional battle was about. There was Bill 101, which resulted in real gains on behalf of Quebecers, and we had the use of the notwithstanding clause, which became a serialized use of it. I remember that in my engagements with this issue, this was a surprising thing to me. As someone who understood the charter in a certain context and that the notwithstanding clause had a certain role, I was surprised that it was being used in this way.
At the same time that the notwithstanding clause was being used by the Government of Quebec—a provincial Liberal government at that—the charter continued to evolve.
The use of section 1 became one of the ways in which we could achieve a balance between parliamentary supremacy and the protection of rights. Despite the use of section 1, there was an evolution toward more and more rights protection, and there was an evolution toward the understanding of minority rights protections in particular. The equality rights under section 7, as we discovered through the charter's interpretation in a variety of courts, were about a slow expansion of rights to recognized groups that had not been previously explicitly enumerated in section 7.
I noticed that the expansion of rights at the time of this legal interpretation often followed protests and social movements that started in Quebec.
The social movements in Quebec were a key part of the way in which our understanding of the rights grew under section 7 of the Constitution. I am thinking of collective bargaining rights, gender and sexual rights, and all rights under some of the other freedoms that we understand, particularly under section 7 and under section 2. Those fights were led by Quebec social movements. Again, when we had this understanding of the charter, notwithstanding the very important historical basis on which the Bloc has raised its concerns about the original implementation of the charter, we had this dialogue among different groups in Canada that allowed us to discover and see the emergence of rights. This is something that is in a very strict space of constitutional interpretation, which the member for Québec Centre explained very well.
Where are we now? We are in a situation in which we have a constitutional issue that is before the Supreme Court, with lots of interest. There are 13 appellants, I understand, and more than 60 interveners. We have the use of the notwithstanding clause in a more aggressive fashion in a number of provinces, including pre-emptively. It does not necessarily take a lot for some members of this House, on this side of the aisle anyway, to rise to attend a protest, but the use of the notwithstanding clause on Bill 124 in Ontario, which put a severe limit on collective bargaining rights, led me to the lawn of Queen's Park to say that this was wrong. The progress we are making with respect to the rights that are guaranteed under the charter faces a risk under the serial use of the notwithstanding clause.
I will be opposing this motion because I believe that, on this side of the House, we are the party of the charter. We are the party that is for standing for Canada. If the shoe were on the other foot and the Government of Canada passed a law that tried to limit some of the rights that were felt to be in existence in Quebec, if this Parliament threatened to or used the notwithstanding clause in that process, I would hope the Government of Quebec would indeed present its litigation and not withdraw its memo as is being asked of us by the Bloc. I believe that this party on this side stands in the interest of continuing to advance rights. That is why I will be opposing this motion.