Mr. Speaker, I live on the other side of the country and the issue today, as the member for Broadview-Greenwood suggested, is not one on which I have had many calls. However, it is an issue of utmost importance to all Canadians for a variety of reasons which I will get into later on.
The issue before us is not an issue of quality of education. In my view education is not served well by taking decision making away from parents and moving it into 10 large school boards. That issue is also an issue of cost. Never in my 25-year career of teaching school did I ever see a school district reduce its cost through centralization and increasing the size of school boards. The exact opposite happened. As school boards were formed and increased in size, the cost increased at the same time.
The issue today is about the constitutionally guaranteed right to religious schools. It is also about the process of change, in fact the referendum which I will talk about in a few minutes.
First I will address the issue of the constitutional guarantee. The act which brought Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation contains certain paragraphs which deal with education:
In and for the province of Newfoundland, the legislature shall have exclusive authority to make laws in relation to education, but the legislature will not have authority to make laws prejudicially affecting any right or privilege with respect to denominational schools, common (amalgamated) schools, or denominational colleges, that any class or classes of persons have by law in Newfoundland at the date of union, and out of public funds of the province of Newfoundland, provided for education.
The act is saying that the people of Newfoundland have a guaranteed right to these religious schools and that guaranteed right cannot be taken away from them by a mere act of the legislature. In other words the people were to be protected against the vagaries of the majority in the legislature. In my view that guarantee is being violated.
In Newfoundland 37 per cent of the population is Roman Catholic and 7 per cent is Pentecostal. In the referendum in all 16 electoral districts where Roman Catholics or Pentecostals were in the majority, they voted no to the changes. The changes then were foisted upon those people by the majority, which is the very point that the constitutional amendment which brought Newfoundland into Confederation was trying to protect them against.
With regard to the referendum the first issue we must look at is the question. The question was: Do you support revising term 17 in the manner proposed by the government to enable reform of the denominational education system, yes or no? That is not a clear question. It is the same fuzzy type of question all of us worried about and were concerned about in the recently concluded referendum in Quebec. What we said then was that when a question is put to the people, the question should be clear and should be easily understood by all and the effect of voting either yea or nay on that question should be clear beyond any question.
That is not the case in this question. The question itself is mushy. It talks about revising term 17. What does term 17 mean? It means a variety of things to a variety of people. That in itself concerns me. It talks about "in the manner proposed by the government". Again, that is not a clear statement of intent. It says also "to enable reform". That in itself encourages someone to say yes. It talks about reforming the education system. In that regard it can be
suggested that it talks about improving the education system. Who is not for improving or for reforming the education system? That is a real violation of an obligation of the government to put a clear question to the people.
If we vote in favour of this motion, what we are saying is that the next time there is an election in Quebec if the question put is not clear, if the intent of that question is not clear, if it is not of the utmost clarity to the people on what it is they are voting for, we have nothing to say. We will simply have to stand on the sidelines and watch that event unfold.
Other concerns about the referendum process were that the House of Assembly was adjourned for the months that the issue was before the people. The issue was not debated in the House of Assembly which is something one has to regret. When issues are put before the people, the people deserve to have those issues debated by their members in the House of Assembly in order to clarify the outstanding questions and issues.
Allowing the interim between the announcement of the referendum and the actual date of the referendum to happen over the summer months limited the effect of the debate. The schools were closed. Everybody knows that schools, especially on a referendum issue like this one, are places where people would focus and would look for clarification of the issues. That did not happen.
This whole referendum process was fundamentally flawed. The question was carefully crafted to imply falsely that amendment of the Constitution was necessary in order for reform to occur as a matter of law. That simply was not the case.
I have more than a passing interest on the issue of referendum and whatnot. It is an issue which I studied as a masters student at university and is one on which I spend a considerable amount of time studying and reviewing. In all manner of ways I find that the referendum question was flawed, as was the process by which it was put to the people. It is going to lead to serious problems in the future for us as a nation when we deal with referendums put forward in the province of Quebec.
Another issue worth noting is that when this referendum result was placed before members in the House of Assembly, 31 members voted in favour and 20 members voted against. All 14 cabinet ministers were required to vote in support of the resolution regardless of where their constituents stood on the issue. There again the way the issue was put before the house of representatives, the way the question was put and the fact that the vote was forced, is opposite to everything my party stands for. It is completely unacceptable that there would be a vote which required cabinet solidarity on an issue such as this one. People should have been required to support the wishes of their constituents on this most critical issue.
Another point is most worthy of consideration. I will read from a letter written by the Most Reverend James H. MacDonald, Archbishop of St. John's:
It is of crucial importance to recognize that the denominational rights which are intended to remain under the framework agreement will under the proposed term 17 have no constitutional guarantee of protection, but will be subject to provincial legislation which can be changed by an arbitrary decision of any future government of our province.
That is exactly the situation we have in British Columbia. Denominational schools in British Columbia have no constitutional guarantees. They exist merely at the whim of the provincial government. They receive partial funding, again only at the whim of the provincial government. However, those schools are the schools of choice by parents. That has to be a key issue: Whose children are we educating, the government's or the parents'? The answer is obvious. Children belong to their parents. It should be the parents' right to choose the type of education system they wish. It should also be their right to choose a denominational system if they wish. The obligation should fall to the government to fund that system the same as it does for everyone else.
As I mentioned earlier, the question before us in some ways is much more than simply a question of the right for denominational schools to exist, although that question is of paramount importance. It has the side issue of the future of this country and the type of question we would require to be put in a referendum in Quebec on separation. We cannot vote on this issue without seriously considering the implications of our vote.
