Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a pleasure to rise in this House to speak to a number of issues of great importance to Quebeckers and Canadians alike.
As I read the motion of the member for Vancouver East, I realized there was no question of the member's good faith. No indeed. However, is she indeed talking about new national standards in her motion? This goes right to the heart of the Quebec-Canada debate.
To most Quebeckers, federalists or sovereignists, the word national refers to Quebec and not Canada. Here, the reference to national standards, to most English Canadians in the rest of Canada, means Canadian standards for Canada.
As I said, this goes right to the heart of the Canada-Quebec dichotomy. It indicates an obvious lack of understanding of Quebec, its reality, its values, and the will of all Quebeckers, federalist or sovereignist, to defend certain jurisdictions awarded Quebec in 1867, the main one being education.
In Quebec, we have had our own system of loans and grants for over 30 years. This was one of the major achievements of the quiet revolution headed by the Liberal government of the time under Jean Lesage with the support of a few important ministers, including Georges-Émile Lapalme and, naturally, René Lévesque.
Quebec's system of loans and bursaries works very well, and suits everyone. I can quote a figure in support of this: the average debt load for a university graduate in Canada is $25,000, whereas it is $11,000 in Quebec. It is therefore easier for a Quebec student to graduate from a university in Quebec, find a job and repay his or her debt. It is easier when the debt is smaller than that of a student completing university in English Canada.
I speak from experience, having taken much of my higher education in Quebec, but having taken some of it in Ontario.
Finally, what the member is after, when we read between the lines to find her objective, is to have a Quebec system or equivalent throughout Canada, because the Quebec system works well. It is efficient, inexpensive, fair and equitable.
We recently had an example of national standards in education with the current Prime Minister's toy, a monument to his rule: the millennium scholarships. It was clear that in Quebec none of the stakeholders—young people, student federations, labour unions, universities and their presidents, political parties—were interested in these scholarships.
Millennium scholarships are awarded partly on merit instead of being solely based on the needs of individual students. That is unfair because we know full well that students with less privileged backgrounds find it much harder to study because they must hold one, two or even three jobs, which of course interferes with studying and getting good grades in university.
Most parties in this House, with the exception of the party opposite I believe, strive to avoid overlap. Education being a provincial jurisdiction, establishing national standards, that is federal standards applied in a provincial jurisdiction, would only result in more overlap, more spending and ultimately bureaucratic chaos that would benefit no one except the bureaucratic machine itself, which has a tendency to develop programs just to support itself and prosper.
I mentioned earlier that, in putting this motion forward, the hon. member was not showing bad faith, far from it, but rather a misunderstanding of Quebec that is unfortunately endemic in Canada, as I myself experienced in Ontario.
Finally, it always boils down to the same issue. Here we have two distinct societies sharing the same legal framework. The solution is very simple: each one should have sole jurisdiction over education and every other area in the public domain. That is what is called Quebec sovereignty.