Ted McWhinney

[Speech From The Throne, March 5th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in response to the speech from the throne. Might I pick up a remark the Prime Minister made in his address in speaking of particular challenges following the referendum result in Quebec.

His comments are: "This is not a time for major constitutional change. We must continue to adapt, modernize and develop our federation, focusing on practical steps within a spirit that respects the principles of federalism". There are some profound truths in that statement and a recognition of the social limits to law and to legal change.

I wrote in a work published a number of years ago in an earlier pre-parliamentary phase of my life that not all times are ripe for Constitution making, that it is an error to attempt a fundamental revision of one's constitutional, governmental system in a period of rapid, historical change.

If one does produce a document in such a period, the likelihood is that the product will jell the process of social change. It will act as a brake arresting that change, and it will only lead to confusion and unproductive labour.

When changes occur of a fundamental, total nature in a constitutional system, they are in periods of great national euphoria when there is a consensus, however fleeting, usually after a victory in a great war or a great social revolution.

We are reminded of General de Gaulle's successful venture in 1944 which led indirectly to the adoption of the fourth French Republic Constitution, and again the exercise in 1958. Or we could go back to the origins of the American Constitution, not so much the unsatisfactory articles of Confederation but the great Constitution which is, of course, the only Constitution older than our own.

It is an important lesson to remember that in this period when quite clearly Canada is experiencing fundamental social change as a result not merely of factors common to all the world community, the revolution in infomatics, but also the impact of large scale immigration from many parts of the world on our society. I think in terms of the proportion of our existing population. The impact is far greater than earlier historical models, such as the United States after the revolution of 1848 in Europe, or other societies elsewhere in the world.

Canada in transition is really a description of the sociology of our country at the present time. But some parts are changing more quickly than others. I think, if I may say so, with some pride my own special community in British Columbia is changing much more quickly, much more radically, much more dramatically than other parts of the country.

Some have seen in this, because of the responses that it has produced to particular constitutional exercises like Charlottetown and Meech Lake before it, some opposition perhaps to other parts of the country and some inevitable antagonism. I think that would be a wrong view of an important historical process in which we participated.

It is a fact that voters in British Columbia rejected the Charlottetown accord by a majority 70 per cent to 30 per cent. Now members will be aware that under provincial law we are required to hold a provincial referendum before any future project of constitutional change at the federal level can be submitted to our legislature for ratification.

With respect to the Charlottetown accord, I am attempting a historical synthesis of obviously numbers of different opinions differently expressed. But there was an objection in some respects to a feeling of historical datedness in the approach to the Charlottetown accord. It was too particularistic an attitude, one that jelled the status quo. A good deal of this opposition focused on the attempt to jell the membership of the House of Commons with an artificial, for all time, 25 per cent quota for one province.

The opposition was not to the province as such. The opposition was to jelling the constitutional institutional framework of government in a period of emerging great historical change.

In making this point I will stress again that in the post referendum debate that has followed, no responsible British Columbia political leader, either federal or provincial has engaged in negative comments in relation to Quebec or the Quebec people. There have been no demands for sanctions from British Columbia and no talk of partition, no opposition or hostility to the Quebec fact as such. This does suggest that a larger constitutional optic is needed.

If I tell the House that the quest for fundamental constitutional vision is already proceeding in my province, it is an invitation to join in that.

It is a recognition that we have achieved a distinct society in our own right, a community of communities. It will compel substantial modernization of the constitutional governmental structures the Prime Minister spoke of in his response to the speech from the throne. It will necessarily affect all federal institutions: the Senate,

the House, cabinet and Parliament. And not least, as someone who has been a private member without any responsibilities, even as a parliamentary secretary until very recently, the necessary relations between the House of Commons and cabinet.

One thing being discussed with great interest is whether the Westminster model is out of date in terms of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Would we do better with a separation of executive and legislative power, not simply on the American model, but on the French model or more particularly the contemporary German model.

Do we need better electoral laws? If we live in a community of communities with many different national communities, we face a situation as, I succeeding you, Mr. Speaker, as president of a committee devoted to Vietnam I recognize the reality of how difficult it is for Vietnamese to be elected in my province to Ottawa under the present electoral law.

Is the present made in Westminister electoral law necessarily the most suitable for Canada at this time? I stress this by simply saying that the answer to the particularistic problems that have been expressed in Charlottetown and Meech may better be seen in a larger constitutional vision. If I am asked, can it be done today, the answer is no. I spent the last two weeks lecturing to numbers of groups ranging from 1,300 Catholic educators assembled in my province to special ethnic communities that said: "We want to be part of the Constitution making process. Can we join it?" I said: "Yes, you're welcome".

I anticipate this work will take a number of years to achieve. I do not expect it to be ready in the present Parliament. I think by the year 2000 this generation of Canadians will have a rendezvous with the Constitution Act.

It can be done by a constituent assembly. The fatal flaw in most of these proposals is that many of the sponsors seem to think of an elitist group of people nominated by various other people. A constituent assembly has to be elected. If we follow the French model, the ultimate constituent assembly was the French Assemblée nationale, the people who drafted the fourth French Republic Constitution and the fifth. If the legislature were selected for that purpose I could see a Parliament, not the next one but the next one after that, elected to give us a new Constitution and with a one-month mandate to do so.

In the meantime the other species of change the Prime Minister spoke of are proceeding. In this House I rose a year ago in defence of a new law on self-government for the Dene and the Metis in the Northwest and Yukon territories. Members of one of the opposition parties asked me the question: "Is that subject to the charter of rights and to the Constitution?" I said: "It is not expressed in the bill but as a matter of constitutional first principles it must be so unless it is specifically excluded".

If members have read the recent Nisga'a treaty negotiated on the federal side by the same minister responsible for that bill, they will notice he has picked up the suggestion made in this Parliament during question period that the Nisga'a treaty and the institutions under it are deliberately made subject to the constitutional charter of rights and subject to the Constitution. This is the way, law in the making, the useful role that Parliament can play.

In a similar way I was involved years ago as an adviser to two provincial premiers in different provinces. I gave negative advice on the construction of the airport at Mirabel. My opinion was widely quoted and in the end was not followed by the federal government. Clearly one was on the right side of history. One gave sound technical advice. Notice that the transport minister has moved to correct, to negate the negation in Kantian terms, by allowing the carriers to transfer back to Dorval. This is the pragmatic spirit that is present in federal-provincial relations, the new federalism, which is co-operative federalism, not levels of government fighting with each other.

My message is, in this period of historical transition, when the centrifugal forces that reach their pathological outlet in Bosnia and places like that and the centrifugal forces, supranationalism, European union, these sorts of forces, are in an uneasy alliance, constitutional change goes on. I think we will have our rendezvous with the Constitution Act in its totality four or five years from now when this citizen activity comes to a head.

In the meantime constitutional change is going on. It is coming very positively and concretely from government ministers and it is an invitation to all of us to take part in the process.

[Canadian Armed Forces, December 11th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the commitment by the minister of defence of the Canadian Armed Forces to the new international force that is to maintain the just concluded truce between the three warring parties in Bosnia-Hercegovina remains within the parameters of the United Nations charter.

NATO is a regional security organization within chapter VIII of the charter. Its military commanders and political governors are thereby placed under the aegis of chapter VI of the charter on peacekeeping and on international law under the charter, including the contemporary laws of war.

[Quebec's Right To Self-Determination, December 11th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the hon. member for Hochelaga for a sparkling address which had the added advantage of reminding me that I have been there before. My colleague, the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, also brought me back to time past.

I advise the hon. member opposite to beware of experts and especially people who claim the title of expert. I was also invited and gave evidence as an expert before l'Assemblée nationale de Quebec on these and related issues. I admire and respect the five experts who have been cited very often by the Quebec government and others for their different interpretations. They are experts but I would have thought in other domains than those in which they gave their opinions which might suggest that perhaps l'Assemblée nationale did not do its homework.

I have little difficulty in returning to the point made by my colleague, the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, in international law. There is no explicit joining of the right of self-determination which is a comparatively recent principle of international law with the fission or break-up of existing states or with the outright entry into independence.

If we trace the history of this principle, it is related, as so many things in contemporary constitutionalism are, to Emperor Napoleon and the liberating ideas of the French Revolution which sometimes are put forward without necessarily the intentions of the founders.

The spirit of liberalism, the spirit of nationalism and the spirit of independence are somewhat antinomic and conflicting principles of the heritage of the 19th century, the 19th century of the French Revolution, and carried through into the 20th century in Woodrow Wilson's 14 points. I suppose the apogee of the concept of self-determination as a historical imperative, not a legal one, meaning the break-up of large multinational states, was reached in the Treaty of Versailles.

The tragedy is that it was a principle carried historically to its logical and perhaps foolish conclusion. Most historians today would trace as one of the causal factors of the conflict in World War II the creation of a vacuum in central Europe by the creation of a plethora of mini states, incapable of forming common economic policies and incapable of co-operating militarily to resist the larger threats from the east and west, from Nazi Germany and from the Soviet Union.

This is one of the reasons why in San Francisco in 1945 the principle of self-determination represented a learning from the lessons of history and less enthusiasm for the categorical imperative that some had asserted: that every time one is identify as a nation or a people-the terms in the UN have been used interchangeably and somewhat confusedly-one did not have to break up a state to assert one's right of self-determination.

The classic demonstration of this is the principle that the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce referred to, friendly relation and co-operation among states. It was a symbolic ending of the cold war. It is the last great act of east-west relations. It supplements the United Nations charter. It is a code of conduct between communist Russia and the west when the cold war is still on.

It contains this very important historical exception. It was agreed by all parties that there was nothing in the principle of self-determination put in the declaration of friendly relations requiring the break-up of existing multinational states, specifically federal states like Canada and the claimed federal state, the Soviet Union, which specifically were adverted to in the friendly relations conference agenda.

One can find it over the whole 10 years of the history of this. It was pleasant to be reminded of it. I wrote several books that I thought were persuasive on this some years ago and it is nice to have them brought back.

Let me come back to present reality. If members look at the situation in Bosnia, at Yugoslavia, I suppose some might even argue that what has happened there is worse than what existed before, a centralized authority imposing unity on a multinational society.

If self-determination led to the break away, members can see the rule of reason emerging in the current settlements. One saw immediately with the Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia 11 cantons on the Swiss model, and one said it will not work. There is no legal imperative requiring it. It historically does not make sense.

As one follows, as Secretary General Boutros-Ghali has, the trend away from Vance-Owen to Owen-Stoltenberg to what we could call the Clinton or the Dayton plan, there is the 11, now down to 3. The implicit element in it is that two of the three may rejoin their neighbouring states, their so-called mother states.

What we are really saying is we live in a period of historical transition where the main historical currents are contradictory. The trend to supra-nationalism, the imperative of larger and larger regional supra-national associations, economic, political, replacing the old military one, is accompanied by a fragmentation which most historians would regard as a pathological condition today.

The future of the world community is not a series of little Basutolands, enclaves within larger states; nor is it breaking up viable economic political units into a plethora of smaller units. It is basically in recognizing that the lesson of today is constitutional pluralism. People can work together. A state that can successfully combine several different peoples or nations, if one wants to use those terms interchangeably, is a stronger state.

The unity comes from the diversity in the original sense of the term used by the great Austro-Hungarian and late Israeli philosopher who coined the term community of communities. It is that larger concept.

To a certain extent when self-determination is preached there is the false statement that international law requires it. It does not. International law is neutral. In a certain sense it is running counter to the preferred view of how history is unfolding: an interdependent world community and larger and larger associations transcending national frontiers, rendering nationalism in its pathological sense out of date, and making Bosnia-Hercegovina and the conflicts there an absurd survival at the end of the 20th century of an anarchic past that is better left behind. The nation state has been the master institution of western European thinking for the last 300 years, but it is out of date.

This is the biggest lesson. There is no international law imperative here. There are lessons of history but there are good historical trends, trends that rest upon sound scientific evaluation of the past, and there are the bad lessons. It is for us to choose on this basis.

[Food And Drugs Act, December 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, on October 4, 1995 I rose in the House to request the Minister of Foreign Affairs to use his good offices for the Government of Vietnam on behalf of nine religious, academic and cultural leaders under imprisonment in Vietnam and waiting retrial.

I had this matter brought to my attention by members of our Vietnamese Canadian community in Vancouver and also in Ottawa and elsewhere. I had followed up with meetings with the Vietnamese ambassador in Ottawa, with communications with our Canadian ambassador in Hanoi and with written representations through our government and others.

I was happy to be able to inform the House in a statement made on November 22, 1995 that the Vietnamese government had acted to release two of the religious and cultural leaders and that they had already left Vietnam and were now in North America.

Canadian foreign policy in its golden era in the immediate post-war period developed and applied the skills of quiet diplomacy, involving patient but firm negotiations and never resorted to gunboat diplomacy 19th century style, which would have been beyond our military logistical capacities anyway.

In the contemporary post-cold war era, when trade and commerce have replaced political military power as the basis of the world public order system, I would ask the minister how he can best continue to promote the development of democratic constitutionalism and the advancement of basic constitutional rights in our new neighbour countries of the Pacific rim.

[Supply, December 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot comment specifically. My experience in negotiations in this general area was in situations where there were treaties in force, treaties 6, 7, 8 and 9. There the process of the negotiations was happy with all parties. If there is something at fault here it may go down to the handling of particular cases.

I just do not have the direct information. If there is a feeling of dissatisfaction, maybe that is a matter to take up directly with the commission and to be led as such. The commission would want to satisfy itself that negotiations have been properly conducted and evidence properly assessed.

I commend to the hon. member, if he has information, to bring it to the attention of the commission.

[Supply, December 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his very thoughtful series of questions.

On the first point, what we are talking about relates to what I spoke of as the ambiguity in the term "treaties". What one is really seeking is a movement from unwritten or customary law to written law. This could be done by a contract, by legislation or it could be done by something else. The ultimate aim of the process is to reduce to written uncontrovertible form what the legal rights are. The complication I referred to of overlapping claims is virtually inevitable and it has been demonstrated in jurisdictions other than our own when we do not have things written down. That was the big advantage of the treaties in whatever legal category we put them to.

On the commissions, my own experience in administrative law and public administration is that it depends a good deal on the imagination and the civil courage of the commission itself and the players in it. The players include the lawyers and others appearing before it. To a very large extent an ambitious commission establishes its own agenda. It redefines its own mandate. I encourage all parties interested in the equitable disposition of B.C. land claims to try to do that.

On municipalities, the hon. member was right in saying that the specific provision is not there. There is nothing excluding it. Since they are major players in relation to the third party claims, supervening claims, subsequent to any original title, such as it may be, municipalities are directly involved and they are important players in the political processes.

In the previous federal legislation relating to the northern territories there was an enormous amount of provision by the federal government for consultation of local interests. I think the encouragement would be to the municipal councils where they have legitimate interests that they feel they want to express to communicate them. The answer can only be no or "yes, we would love to hear you". I would think in a facultative sense a good commission tries to do just that.

It is law in the making. A good deal will depend on the good faith, good spirit but also the professional preparation that interested parties do. That would be the main message I would encourage our B.C. voters to adopt in this approach.

I thank the member for his questions. I would add that the debate we are having today constitutes in legal terms travaux préparatoires, which simply means that it may be cited as evidence for the future of what the law in this area should be and is.

[Supply, December 7th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing time with my distinguished colleague, the hon. member for Vancouver Centre.

The motion put forward is an interesting one and I respect the spirit in which it was put forward. It raises issues going to what is called the lame duck status of government. It is a principle of American constitutional law that I think sensibly could become part of Canadian constitution law, but it is limited in its potential application to actions taken by governments between the dropping of an electoral writ and the return of the electoral writ and the formation of a new government or the continuance of an old one.

Having said that, I would like to enter into discussion of some of the very interesting issues that have been raised. This is a subject, rightly said, of special concern to British Columbia. British Columbia, as we all recognize, is not a province like the others and in the area of land claims we do have elements of distinctiveness that separate us off from the other provinces of Canada.

The substantial absence of treaties is one very important consideration which has led to a proliferation of sometimes overlapping claims. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the public discussion and the lack always of full understanding of how these complications can be removed.

I leave to one side the issue of the status of treaties, which is something that has always interested me professionally. Do they have international law status, as some argue, or are they simply constitutional documents within the ambit of provincial law?

Elements of concern have been expressed in this debate on which perhaps we could offer some clarification. I was, I think, the first to suggest the implications for Canadian law of the International Court's judgment in Western Sahara in 1975 and the two concurring opinions which rested very strongly on the argument

made by then counsel, Mr. Bedjaoui who is now the president of the World Court. Let me say that although I think they do raise the intellectual challenge very effectively, which the court has recognized, to the concept of acquisition of territorial title and sovereignty by European colonial powers, they do not necessarily raise any implications as to the dispositions in view of that and in substitution for that. These are issues to which a body constituted on an independent basis like the treaties commission, armed with the facilities for research and the time for thinking, can offer fresh light.

Let me say that it is a misconception to assume that automatically by querying the original basis of acquisition of sovereignty over North America one automatically displaces supervening claims. In fact, in the most recent international law act, the two-by-four treaty, the treaty between the four occupation powers of Germany and the two Germanies about to be reunited, there is a specific clause that effectively saves supervening third party rights. It leaves open the issue of how one balances the claims.

What I am saying is that one anticipates in British Columbia an orderly process of claims adjustments and settlements in which the claims of everybody can be and will be considered if properly presented by counsel as is counsel's duty. As yet no definitive answer can be given, but it should bring some satisfaction to many of the people who have raised these issues with us to know that the orderly process does allow taking into full account the acquired third party rights.

In a sense the legal problems in British Columbia are sui generis. They are peculiar to British Columbia. To a large extent we get into conflicts between different cultural conceptions of law: the European concept of fixed territorial frontiers and non-European concepts which may emphasize mobility and expression of territorial interests in which land is secondary or subordinate to the notion of ethnicity. It is an interesting example of the clash of legal concepts. It is the sort of thing I expect the commission will consider because it will have to be considered in the process of the settlement of land claims.

The issue of the participation and consent of local communities has been raised. It has been asked if there was full consultation. I cannot speak of the particular cases now being cited in the debate, but on the precedent that the federal government followed in the bill which was before the House in relation to the northern territories, there was a very substantial provision for consultation with local interests. I believe there is nothing in the implementation of the commission process which prevents local interests, local municipal authorities and others from bringing forward their views and making their arguments. It is not excluded by the act. The initiative rests with those concerned.

When an independent commission is set up, it takes on a life of its own. It develops its own precedents. It is very much dependent on intelligent lawyer-manship by those people who want to bring forward their own interests and their claims. The commission is a body which has interesting people appointed to it. They are independent in their outlook. I would suggest to hon. members that they exercise to the full the process of making known to the commission the different and sometimes conflicting interests of the different people involved.

One of the great problems in British Columbia which distinguishes it from the rest of the country is that, simply because of the absence of treaties, there has not been the process of the sorting out of claims which I encountered in my previous professional work in dealing with, for example, the province of Alberta. This accounts for the overlapping and competing claims which sometimes, in the superficial extent, exceed the total amount of land involved in a region. This can be sorted out and sensibly, this is the mandate of the commission.

Problems of this sort complicate the matter in the public perception. In terms of the commission, I believe it is an excellent step forward. I am satisfied with the independence and the quality of the people concerned.

I urge hon. members to indicate to their constituents, particularly to the very thoughtful people at the municipal level that the process is not closed. The door is open for participants to bring their interests forward. The commission itself is not in the position of deciding on a dichotomous basis all here or all there. There is room for the acceptance of third party claims. There is room for apportionment of benefits. Following the international law as it has developed since the western Sahara case, international law itself is in the making. One would expect equitable settlements in which the largest possible range of participants is involved.

It is a new approach to the pluralizing of our legal system and the participation in it. This is better than doing it through the court system as such. Of course, decisions of commissions are also subject to limitation and control by the courts in respect to ultimate constitutional principles. Everything done is under the Constitution and under the charter of rights. The charter of rights as we know is a house of very many rooms.

I compliment the speakers on both sides of the House on the fervour with which they have entered into this debate. I have taken note of the points they have raised, but I believe they can be achieved within this ambitious process that the bill the minister originally introduced involves.

[Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, in a more cynical and uncaring age than our own, Bismark once quipped that the Balkan conflicts were not worth the bones of a single Prussian Grenadier.

In depositions I gave to the committee on foreign affairs of the United States house of representatives on August 12, 1992 and August 3, 1993-and these are entered and published in the congressional record of those two dates-I recommended that with the pending break-up of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was first put together as part of the World War I victors' peace settlement, it would be wise to go back to the original Versailles treaties of 1919 and specifically the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye which created Yugoslavia to achieve a peaceful, orderly succession and avoid loss of life and hardship to the civilian population of the region.

Now, three years and 250,000 civilian deaths later, we seem to be reaching the same result as might have been obtained under the

orderly international law processes envisaged by the Versailles treaties, including resort to the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court afforded by the treaty in case of impasses of territorial frontiers.

Our foreign minister and later Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, fathered the concept of United Nations peacekeeping. We have since come of age in our experience with UN problem solving in the former Yugoslavia with the mission in the Bosnia-Hercegovina region being quickly transformed from classical UN peacekeeping, which is simply physically keeping apart warring rivals who have already accepted a military ceasefire, and these involving chapter VI of the charter, pacific settlement of disputes, the transformation into the new concept of an activist peacekeeping role involving chapter VII of the charter.

Having gone so far, Canada has become part of the continuing post-communist succession problem in Yugoslavia and should stay the course.

There are however steps that can be taken to offset or reduce the dangers of our continuance in the new NATO based phase of the operation and to ensure that decisions taken are compatible with and protected by international law and also rational in the political and larger geopolitical sense.

First, it should be recognized that NATO as a regional security arrangement falling within chapter VIII of the United Nations charter, derives its international law authority from the United Nations charter and cannot go beyond that. Issues such as the right of self-defence and its present day practice can be updated or redefined in contemporary international law terms by the security council and also the general assembly as glosses on classical doctrine and jurisprudence as the 1992 decision of the International Court of Justice in the Lockerbie case confirmed.

NATO itself however has no power to dispense from existing international law norms and NATO commanders and their political governors would act at legal peril if they did not refer back to the security council and general assembly when new political facts challenging the political-military settlement now reached might emerge.

One such potential problem obviously concerns future relations of the two main constituent parts of the new Bosnian entity: the Croat-Muslim Bosnian Republic and the Serbian Bosnian Republic, their relations to their adjoining mother states, Croatia and rump Yugoslavia which is Serbia-Montenegro.

The current political military settlement has an element of historical transition inherent in it and irredentist pressures for ultimate junction with the adjoining mother states can be expected.

It would be an error for NATO to view such matters, if they should arise, as purely military in character and proper for a NATO military decision alone. Political common sense and prudence counsel following what international law in any case enjoins, namely referring the high political issues back to the security council and general assembly for definitive ruling.

Likewise whatever dispositions the NATO high command might wish to make, the military decisions of NATO are referable back to the United Nations for their ultimate sanction and justification under international law.

In adhering to the new NATO force for Bosnia, the Canadian government might perhaps attach appropriate reservations confirming the primacy, as to Canadian forces, of the United Nations as through regional security organizations authorized under chapter VIII of the United Nations charter.

This being understood, we can and should support Canada's continued participation in the Bosnian peace process that after four long winters seems at last to be opening up the prospect of the rule of law and peace and elemental security for the inhabitants of that historically troubled region.

[The Balkans, December 4th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask my distinguished colleague, known for his lifetime of study of military affairs, Canada's role in them and the constructive contributions he has made, whether in his discussions with the minister concerned he might find it useful to remind people that NATO, as a regional security organization, is subject under chapter VIII of the United Nations' charter to the charter and specifically by reference back to articles 34 and 35 in section 52 of the charter that the security council's role in peacekeeping arrangements under chapter VI extends to operations of NATO and other regional military organizations.

Would it be appropriate perhaps in his discussions with the minister to remind the minister of that fact and perhaps bring forward any adhesion by Canada to the new Bosnian force that it would remain subject to the United Nations' charter, subject to international law as established under the charter whatever the nature of the military command, whether it be direct UN command, as in the past, or a particular general from one of the member countries of NATO?

[Constitutional Amendments Act, November 30th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I would to say to the hon. member that I worked as constitutional advisor to many Quebec premiers. I was a member of the commission on French language and language rights in Quebec. For my part, I always believed in the tremendous possibility and flexibility of the federal system, which can decide that bills such as premier Bourassa's Bill 22 and even Bill 101 can still be essential parts of the Government of Quebec as well as of our Canadian federal system.

The message in all of this is that the existing flexibility of our constitutional system will stay. We must have faith in the future. We are ready to give Quebec what we can under the existing Constitution, which is very flexible.