Pierre Brien

[C. D. Howe Institute, April 20th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.

The C. D. Howe Institute has released a study which contradicts what the federalists are always claiming, which is that the federal government is being treated by Quebec as a cash cow.

What is the Minister of Finance's reply to the C. D. Howe Institute's statement, supported by a study, that Quebec families pay $652 a year more in income tax to the federal government than they get back from it?

[Quebec's Traditional Demands, March 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, this is really not clear. The Prime Minister seems to think there is a list, but his minister says that is not the case. Perhaps they should consult each other.

After denying the existence of the Quebec culture, and now having his minister deny the existence of Quebec's traditional demands, will the Prime Minister confirm that, whoever the Quebec premier is, whether this person is a federalist or a sovereignist, and regardless of the promises made by him in the last referendum, his only vision of federalism is his own and that he will not change it one bit?

[Quebec's Traditional Demands, March 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.

Yesterday, the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs said that neither the Prime Minister nor he believed in the notion of Quebec's traditional demands.

Will the Prime Minister confirm that neither he nor his government recognize the existence of Quebec's traditional demands?

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Exactly. I hope this will be food for thought for the Liberals. They accuse us, the separatists, of being the only people to defend a position such as the one we are defending today. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, if he were here, should agree with us. We would be able to count on his support. Let us hope that his pupil, his spiritual son, will think likewise.

I would like my colleague to tell me what she thinks about the words of that distinguished politician who inspires the Liberals, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Quebec was saying that this government has some difficulty putting its words into action. We would have expected, in the spirit of the love demonstration, in the spirit of the resolution approving Quebec as a distinct society, that the government would recognize Quebec as such and would allow it to exercise some of its powers to live up to and improve on its distinct characteristics. But we see these are words without any meaning.

I would like to quote someone. This is a little like a riddle. I would like you to guess who said these words. I will help you at the end. This is a text that goes back a while, to 1957, under Liberal Prime Minister Louis Saint-Laurent, who wanted to establish a federal fund for universities, a fund similar to the millennium fund.

The person I am quoting said “Unconscious, but nonetheless specious, paternalism. How can the central government be so hypocritical? We are entitled to suspect that the federal government's gifts are made in bad faith. This is insulting for the provinces. This is harmful to the principles of representative democracy”.

Later on, another individual responded to him, and that ended this special edition of a Quebec magazine called Cité libre . The person who was talking at the end was Pierre Laporte, a former Liberal minister. He said “The majority of supporters of federal assistance to universities say that autonomists are latecomers. Not only is the autonomists' argument defensible, but it will have to prevail if we want French Canada to be well prepared for the tasks of the future”.

Who said the first part about federalism, paternalism and all the rest? It was the great mentor, the person who inspired many policies of this government. Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, before asking my question, I would simply like to correct certain remarks that were made previously in this House by the Secretary of State for Regional Development. I think his figures were wrong and I want to take this opportunity to correct them.

He said that the federal government has increased transfers to the provinces. I want people to know that, in reality, these payments were reduced by $7 billion. They were at $18 billion in 1993 and they are now at $11 billion. That money was invested in education. I wanted to make this correction so that everybody has a good understanding of the situation.

I would like the member for Rosemont to talk again—maybe I did not catch what he said—about student debt in Quebec compared to the rest of Canada. I would like to hear again the statistics he just gave, and maybe he could elaborate on that.

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Watch your back.

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, we have just heard the president of the flag committee of the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec say, in his great political wisdom, that, if it were not for the federal government, there would not be any health system or universities in Quebec. I think no one will be fooled by that statement, which makes as much sense as its author.

In conclusion, many people in Canada and Quebec tried to use the Meech Lake accord to cure the constitutional cancer I referred to with regard to the spending power, but all the efforts to limit the federal government's spending power were killed by the members across the way.

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, that question allows me to deal with another aspect of the issue. The millennium fund is nothing more than the political legacy of the prime minister, who wants to leave his name on something before retiring. He will probably sign all the cheques to students for the 10 next years to make sure that he is remembered in some way after his retirement.

But I ask the hon. member, since he seems to have missed the essence of my speech, does he really think that all the people questioned on the subject or who took position on the fund, like the vice-president of the Conference of Rectors, did so without thinking or without even looking at what was said in the budget speech? Of course they knew what they were talking about.

Last week-end, the Gazette , which cannot be suspected of supporting Quebec's sovereignists, took exactly the same position as we did when it declared that Quebec's Deputy Premier, Mr. Landry, was right and that Ottawa should put the money into transfer payments instead, which could then be used to cover expenditures in education.

A foundation managed by government's chums will not change anything. They make me laugh with their speeches on flexibility. Before concluding on this point, I will quote for the hon. member Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the great federalist mentor who is a source of inspiration to him and his colleagues. This is from something he wrote in the Action nationale , before he entered federal politics.

He said this about the federal government “This government is clearly guilty of going against the principle of proportional taxation, which underlies our federal system. It collected moneys for education, which is not under its jurisdiction. That money, left to the provinces, could have been used or not to fund universities, depending on what the electorate and the government in each province wanted”.

These are the words of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Did his opinion change since then? Maybe a little. But before entering partisan politics and being subjected to all kinds of lobbying here in Ottawa, that is what he deeply felt.

I conclude on flexibility. In Quebec, we know perfectly well what it means. Flexibility means leaning always on the same side, that is toward Ottawa. We want nothing to do with that kind of flexibility.

[Supply, March 12th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, my turn to talk today about Ottawa's old fantasy of meddling in education. We have the feeling that for the federal government it is a way of correcting somewhat a mistake made at the time the constitution was drawn, that is giving provinces jurisdiction over education.

This is not something new or particular to this government. This was also in the platform of other political parties during the last election campaign. Several even wanted to go further and institute national testing. That is precisely why our motion refers to national testing. We know that this is occasionally mentioned in the corridors of power in Ottawa.

In its Speech from the Throne the government also mentioned studies to evaluate the readiness to learn of Canadian children. Why would the federal government want to gauge the readiness of our children to enter the school system if it is not to intervene in some way at some time in the future? And we are not talking about giving provinces money to do the job. The federal government wanted to do this evaluation on its own and, to my knowledge, it is still committed to it.

Why are people in Quebec and elsewhere—I will come back to that—opposed to this interference in education?

I do not want to speak for other provinces, but Quebec people are of a different culture, have a different background—a view not necessarily shared by the present Liberal government, I admit. Priorities are also different and education is a key element of a people's social and economic development. It only makes sense that the Government of Quebec, being closer to its citizens, would want to set its priorities in the field of education. It only makes sense that it be in charge.

That is precisely why the Constitution of Canada gave the provinces exclusive jurisdiction over education, although Ottawa has tried ever since to intervene in that field. Paradoxically, the very government asking the Supreme Court for an opinion on the constitutional acceptability of Quebec's separation also included in its budget new education initiatives that violate the Constitution.

Now it takes sovereignist members of Parliament from Quebec to come and ask the federal government to respect its own Constitution. It is somewhat surprising to see these great champions of the Canadian Constitution refusing to respect it.

These are the same people who, following the referendum in Quebec, adopted a resolution here in the House of Commons—a trivial motion without any authority, as we have seen in that case—recognizing Quebec's distinctiveness. We may be called “unique” in other constitutional camouflage processes, but for them, we are unique and distinct only as long as we are like the others. This is yet another blatant federalist contradiction.

No member of this government will argue today that, according to this motion, Quebec should effectively be allowed to deal with its own priorities in the area of education. One after the other, they will support the millennium scholarships program and speak highly of this nice action by the federal government.

In fact, what will be the impact of the federal government's intrusion in the area of education? It starts with millennium scholarships, but how do we know it will stop there? We do not know. But even with regard to the management of this program, Ottawa does not have any infrastructure. It will therefore have to put in place a new bureaucracy. It will try hard to cover it and to pretend the program will somewhat be managed by the private sector, by some people who will be designated by the Liberals, friends of the people in power, but the federal government will still need a network to assess student requests, to receive the forms, to develop them and to change them in order to justify their jobs. Therefore, these people will be there and the federal government will have a structure, a bureaucracy, while the provinces already have their own infrastructure, particularly in the case of Quebec, which has its own loans and scholarships program. That is the first impact.

The other impact, without going further into the debate, because this is what provincial parliaments should be doing, but is it in fact the real priority in education to give scholarships based on performance to students who are already at the post-secondary level? Does the education system not have more urgent needs and needs other than this one? Many people have talked about this in Quebec. Major reforms are being made in the areas of health and education.

Perhaps some elements should be consolidated. Perhaps there are other priorities. The drop-out rate is high at the secondary level. It is not by giving millennium scholarships to students who are doing well in university that this problem will be solved. The federal government is doing this under the guise of so-called access to equal opportunities, but that has no relation to real facts. Access to equal opportunities should mean striving to give everybody access to post-secondary education, but the federal government does not dare to go that far. It is proceeding gradually, starting with post-secondary education, an area it has already stepped in through its spending power.

The federal spending power, this constitutional plague, allows Ottawa to intrude in any area and in any way it sees fit. It has used its spending power to set up joint health and education programs, but the feeling now is it is not getting enough visibility from transfer payments to provinces. It would be better off if it sent 100,000 individual $3,000 cheques instead. The maple leaf and the federal government would be visible all over the place. After a while, it reviews its contribution, transfer payments are cut and it gives back a symbolic amount in order to achieve greater visibility. This is obviously nothing but a political game.

I would like to come back briefly to the spending power. Over the years, this spending power has become the power to get into debt. The federal government stepped in when it did not have the money to do so. It has invaded provincial jurisdictions on borrowed money. Now that we have a balanced budget, I bet things will only get worse. The federal government is raking in much more revenues that it needs for its own priorities and jurisdictions.

Provincial governments are responsible for health care, education, welfare, municipalities, and their tax capacity, in the case of Quebec anyway, is hardly higher than the federal government's. But the federal government has no qualms about taking in tax revenues in order to look after foreign affairs, national defence, things it deems less visible. So, it intrudes in provincial jurisdictions and keeps taxes at an outrageous level. Even their great mentor, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, expressed that point of view in Cité libre before becoming the leader of the Liberal Party. I will have the opportunity to come back to this later today. I do not mind quoting him to his followers among the members opposite.

Are we, in the Bloc Quebecois, the only ones to think so? Are we seen like a handful of space creatures for taking up this position? No. A lot of people in Quebec agree with us, from the most federalist among them to the most sovereignist of all. Let me start by quoting someone who certainly cannot be considered a true sovereignist. I am talking about Alain Dubuc, editorial writer of La Presse . What does he think about this? The day after the budget was tabled, in his review, there was a small paragraph on the millennium fund, where he said: “Nothing in the somewhat fuzzy and still undefined project announced yesterday justifies the decision made by Ottawa to manage this fund themselves, unless it is to become more visible and to have the maple leaf on every cheque handed out to the students”. This is what a Quebec federalist who usually supports the central government said.

Now, let us see what the people in the education area had to say. Mr. Roch Denis, president of the Fédération québécoise des professeurs d'université, said: “The federal government is sprinkling grants here and there, just to make its meddling in the education area a little more legitimate”.

Mr. Pierre Tessier, vice-chairman of the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities, said the exact same thing.

And I could go on and on and quote the president of the Centrale des enseignants du Québec, Mrs. Lorraine Pagé, Mr. Gérald Larose and many more. The harshest criticism came from Mrs. Lysiane Gagnon, who describes the whole situation quite well. She is not known as a sovereignist, at least, you cannot tell from her writings. She said: “Ottawa can praise its famous zero deficit as much as they want, the real question is how they managed to get rid of the deficit. Answer: It was easy, they did it on the backs of others. They only had to dump it onto the people below them”.

She compares the millennium scholarship fund to candy the federal government is handing out to gain maximum visibility. A direct gift to citizens brings in more in terms of votes than sending a comprehensive envelope to provinces”. For all those who would submit that the federal government has a role to play in that area, she writes “Contrary to the federal theory, it really is interference, as indirect as it might be, in the content of education”.

Here is what she says in her last paragraph “If Mr. Chrétien was in the least sincere in his desire to stimulate education, he would have helped schools through the governments that have jurisdiction over them. But of course we understand that in terms of votes it is more profitable to hand out cheques with a maple leaf on it to students, all the more so because they, unlike the children in elementary schools, have the right to vote”.

That sums up the political ploy very well. We see here a government more concerned with visibility than efficiency.

I will conclude by moving an amendment to the motion put forward by my colleague for Lac—Saint-Jean. I move:

That the motion be amended by inserting after the word “censure” the following:

“vehemently”

For this interference in the area of education has to be censured vigorously.