Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to participate in this debate on the Bloc motion and I will say at the outset that I fully support the Liberal Party position, specifically, that we cannot support the Bloc motion.
Yesterday I read an article in the local news section of Le Devoir by columnist Chantal Hébert. The article was in the Monday, May 10, 2010, edition on page A3, under the headline, Meech, 20 years later.
I think it would be very interesting for all members of this House, especially those who do not usually read Le Devoir newspaper, to read that article.
I intend to read it and I hope to be able to read the entire article, because I think she raises some important points. In it she says:
The leaders of the Quebec sovereignist movement judged the Meech Lake accords negotiated 23 years ago very harshly. According to them, by accepting those provisions, Quebec was negotiating its future on the cheap in a framework that was dangerously simplistic for its national aspirations.
I apologize, but I have to read with a magnifying glass, because I have poor eyesight.
During the three years of animated debate the accord set in motion, their opposition never flagged. The day the Meech proposal died, the sovereignist leaders heaved a collective sigh of relief.
At the time, few of them predicted that the idea of a Canadian solution to the issue of Quebec's political status would still be as tenacious two decades later. Against all odds, it continues to be significantly more unifying that the prospect of a sovereign Quebec.
Twenty years after the death of Meech, there is still a consensus in Quebec on its main provisions. According to a poll conducted for the Bloc Québécois and the Intellectuels pour la souveraineté, four out of five Quebeckers support entrenching Quebec's status as a nation in the Constitution. The rest of the poll results run along the same lines. But the Canadian blockage that led to the 1990 constitutional crisis is just as intact.
This blockage was the focus of much attention from sovereignist supporters who gathered around the tomb of Meech this past weekend to exorcize the ghost of a Canadian arrangement between Quebec and the rest of the federation. Nevertheless, it is not the newest or, from the sovereignist standpoint, the most disturbing aspect of the current relationship between Quebec and Canada.
The rift that scuppered the Meech proposal and, later, the Charlottetown proposal served as the backdrop for the 1995 referendum. In addition, the Bloc Québécois has just marked 20 years of calling attention to its existence from atop its very visible federal platform. Yet interest in a Canadian solution to the issue of Quebec's political status is not waning, whereas support for sovereignty is stalling.
In fact, in the 20 years since the failure of Meech, the connection between support for sovereignty and the state of Canada-Quebec relations has grown weaker. Strained relations between Quebec and the ROC [rest of Canada] are fuelling the sovereignist cause less and less.
In the most recent federal election, the debate over culture, an issue that speaks to Quebec's identity if ever there was one, did not enable the Bloc Québécois to go over the 40% mark. The Bloc's 2008 score against the [then leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, the member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville] and the [Conservative leader, who is now Prime Minister] differs by only two tenths of a percentage point from the results the [Bloc leader, the member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie] achieved after the clumsy campaign he waged as a neophyte leader in 1997.
In the past, sovereignist sentiment was generally at its highest when federalist governments were in power in Quebec. Today, however, the prevailing unpopularity of the Charest government and its indecision in matters of identity and language have no great consequential effect on sovereignty.
Twenty years after Meech Lake, the majority of Quebeckers, for whom the bar, albeit low, was set sufficiently high to justify their allegiance to Canada, seem less and less inclined to equate their grievances with Canada with their desire for sovereignty.
That is very significant.
The sponsors of the poll that stimulated debate on sovereignty this weekend were careful to avoid asking respondents where they ranked constitutional reform on their lists of priorities. It would have been interesting to see what percentage of Quebeckers would have placed an active search for new constitutional arrangements ahead of the economy, heath, education or the environment.
Given the lack of pressure on the current premiers in Canada and Quebec about this issue, it is reasonable to suppose that Quebeckers are in no more of a hurry to see their federalist leaders advance to the constitutional front again than they are to see their sovereignist leaders sound anew the call for a referendum debate.
In a weekend speech, the Bloc leader stated that Quebeckers who still believe in a Canada renewed along the lines they would like to see are deluding themselves. But, compared with their counterparts in the ROC, they are dreaming with their eyes wide open.
In the rest of Canada, people are more and more concerned about dysfunctional federal institutions and are wondering about the role of the Bloc Québécois in the succession of minority governments in Ottawa. But the circumstances that gave birth to the Bloc are largely absent from the prevailing official discourse and eyes are closed to the obvious fact that Canada in the 21st century will be continuing to work with institutions designed in the 19th century as long as there is no political will to normalize relations with Quebec.
This column is very significant, first, because Ms. Hébert very clearly shows that sovereignty is not at all a priority for a large majority of Quebeckers and, second, that four out of five Quebeckers would like to see Quebec included in the Constitution to which it is already legally linked. This shows that Quebeckers want to stay in Canada. They want to do their share as part of Canada. They want to influence Canada. I would really like the members of the Bloc, for whom I have a lot of respect and with whom I have had the pleasure to work in the 13 years I have been here, to use their creativity and their innovative ideas so that we can take a look at our federal institutions to ensure that they serve us well in the 21st century and so that Quebec can grow and develop as it should in Canada.
Let me end by saying that I do not support the Bloc Québécois motion. I think that these are ideas from the past and that Quebeckers—and I include myself among—and all other Canadians are facing greater challenges.
