Michel Gauthier

[Distinct Society, April 17th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, on Monday in this House, the new Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs said, and I quote:

-bilingual or trilingual democracies have measures to ensure that their language communities will live together in harmony. It is what we have in Canada. We are very proud of it.

In the flurry of attempts to come up with a vocabulary more suited to Canada's constitutional reality, are we to understand that he thinks the concept of a Quebec people to be nothing more now than a language community?

[Distinct Society, April 16th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, is the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs not embarrassed to associate his name with a proposal that is already doomed to failure, and which is most certainly the biggest piece of meaningless nonsense concocted by a federal government in the past 30 years in the area of federal-provincial relations?

[Distinct Society, April 16th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, we are well aware of the Prime Minister of Canada's strategy, which has always involved dumping on Quebec to gain votes in the rest of Canada. At the time of the Liberal Party leadership convention, he trampled roughshod over the Meech Lake accord in order to gain votes in the rest of Canada. During the 1993 elections, he presented himself as the man who could put Quebec in its place, in order to gain votes in the rest of Canada.

Is the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs not in the process of adopting his leader's strategy as his own, that is to say bringing together all of Canada against Quebec, with this proposition he is defending?

[Distinct Society, April 16th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, now there is no doubt about it. Editorial writers, political cartoonists, commentators, federalist and sovereignist politicians, everyone is totally opposed to the Liberal Party of Canada's new constitutional position.

While the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs is currently on a big cross-country tour seeking a solution to Canada's constitutional impasse and finds that all of Quebec has joined forces within 24 hours to tell him no, does he intend to work toward getting the government to backtrack from this dead end path on which it has embarked?

[Distinct Society, April 15th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is not going to alter the debate. It was he, at his meeting, who reneged on the commitments he made as Prime Minister. He cannot shift people's attention today.

I will say simply that, once again, our fine Prime Minister has managed to turn all of Quebec against him.

How can he reconcile his new constitutional position with the remarks made this very morning by his referendum ally, Daniel Johnson, who said on behalf of Quebec federalists that he is totally opposed to the position the Prime Minister is now taking?

[Distinct Society, April 15th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, as a simple resolution at a meeting of the Liberal Party is enough to overturn the resolution passed in this House, of which the Prime Minister was allegedly so proud, and since a simple resolution of the meeting of the Liberal Party is enough to void the commitments made in the throne speech, are we to understand that the government and the Liberal Party consider the commitments not worth the paper they are written on?

[Distinct Society, April 15th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to see the Prime Minister in this House, because things are going badly for the government. Parallelling the unprecedented scandal in the Canadian army, which we will return to later, is the scandal involving the Prime Minister who reneges on his promises.

This weekend, at the meeting of the Liberal Party, the Prime Minister made an about-face. He changed the commitments he made in Verdun only a few days before the referendum. His

promise to recognize Quebec as a distinct society was trampled underfoot, tossed out with a wave of the hand after a night of work and the undebated passing of a resolution on the floor of the meeting.

How can the Prime Minister justify not keeping his word to the people of Quebec and once again reneging on the commitments he made in Verdun?

[Canadian Armed Forces, March 28th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I understand the government is concerned, but so are we all when the government's concerns have no effect on what is going on in the armed forces. The minister ought to be aware of that.

We want to know, because it is the public which pays for the Canadian Armed Forces, whether extremely reprehensible actions have taken place, as this is a very serious matter.

Does the Prime Minister not realize that there is a problem of credibility, the credibility of his government even, when the Minister of Defence refuses systematically to reveal any information whatsoever concerning events of this gravity, particularly when one considers that absolutely every time we have raised any question here in the House concerning DND we have just about had to hold a parliamentary inquiry to get things moving? The minister is always talking about his serious concerns, but never does

anything concrete about those concerns. There are never any real steps taken to remedy matters.

[Canadian Armed Forces, March 28th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, it is always like pulling teeth to get information in this Parliament on anything involving the armed forces. We would really like to see evidence from the government, once in a while, that it is in charge.

Now that we know documents have been falsified by Canadian army personnel to cover up the truth, what credibility can we give to the 450,000 pages of documents DND provided to the Somalia commission? What credibility indeed?

[Canadian Armed Forces, March 28th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, when we questioned the government on May 12, 1995, on the events in Somalia, the Minister of Defence stated as follows: "This government wants to make sure that all of the troubling accusations surrounding the Canadian forces deployment to Somalia are brought to light. This government has nothing to hide. This government wants the truth". Now, less than a year later, the information commissioner informs us that certain military officers deliberately falsified or eliminated information concerning this affair.

My question, a very simple one, is directed to the Minister of National Defence. What we want to know is: Who are the DND personnel who falsified documents, what are their ranks, under whose orders were they operating, and what sanctions were imposed for these actions?