Madam Speaker, I am rising today to address Bill C-110, an act respecting constitutional amendments, and to state clearly our opposition to the bill as it is now drafted. I also hope to propose some things that the government will think about in terms of altering this legislation which may make it more acceptable.
I want to say that we, the members of the Reform Party, certainly oppose that bill, which gives a veto power over constitutional amendments to certain provinces, but not to others. More importantly, it denies Canadians the possibility of playing a role, by way of a referendum, in amending the Constitution.
I must admit that in the last two or three months I have been wondering what exactly it is we are doing in this place and why we are really here when it comes to the question of national unity.
I had prepared a fairly long speech to discuss the constitutional amending formula and some of the considerations in that historically. I probably will not give it today. Instead I want to concentrate on a few other comments, things that I feel about this situation which I think need to be said.
When I say I wonder why we are here, as intergovernmental affairs critic for my party I want to share some of the frustrations we have had. Monday morning the government did not even know it was making an announcement on national unity. We contacted the government and were told that by the office of the intergovernmental affairs minister. Certainly nobody in the press gallery was aware of it.
The announcement was made Monday afternoon. Even yesterday morning no copy of the bill was available. We were told it was in the extremely complex process of being drafted, after notice had been given. Then we got the bill and it is all of one page. There is no doubt that the drafting required a lot of time and a lot of complex decisions which prevented it from being shown to anybody until a few minutes before it was tabled.
We saw what happened when we tried to get a constitutional amendment at Charlottetown. We ended up with 60 clauses. It took months and they could not even produce a legal text. This is the kind of the role we see here.
What is more important is this is a bill about the amending formula. The amending formula is an important question. Frankly I do not really think this bill has much to do with an amending formula in the Constitution. I do not think much thought went into this position.
Judging from the comments of both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister when we have questioned them in question period it is very clear there are concerns other than the amending formula. We seldom get any responses that try to justify or explain why this particular formula would be a good one.
Instead, what is obviously a preoccupation in the government and in the country is the very deep denial about the nature of the events in the province of Quebec and where it is really going. The deep denial this country has been in for a long time is that there is a very simple solution to this problem, that somehow there will be some constitutional or non-constitutional concession and all we do is present it. It will address Quebec's historic demands; it will embarrass the bejeesus out of the separatists; the whole movement will collapse and then everything will be solved.
We have heard this story over and over again for 30 years. Attempts have been made to go along with that approach and frankly, they seem to have made the situation worse. The most notable was in 1982 when nine provincial governments and many people were persuaded to pass a major constitutional package against the wishes of the separatist Government of Quebec. This was done as a method of dealing with our unity crisis to fulfil the commitments of the then Prime Minister to the people of Quebec during the referendum. We know that has led to a much more profound crisis than we had to begin with.
As this crisis gets worse and worse, governments and the Liberal Party particularly seek to find enemies of Canada everywhere. Now the enemies of Canada are no longer just in Quebec among the separatist movement; we are now told there are enemies of Canada in great numbers in Alberta and in no less than the premier's office in Newfoundland. There are enemies in British Columbia. Everywhere there are enemies who will not put aside their narrow views in order to save the country.
Let me go to our position on the amending formula and make it very clear. The Reform Party will not agree to any change to the amending formula for federal ratification unless it is done by national referendum. It does not matter whether there are four regions, five regions, 10 regions, or if we make every constituency of this House a region.
It is not good enough to have 10 votes of 10 provincial premiers. We want there to be 30 million votes, the population of Canada in a national referendum to discuss federal constitutional amendments. If we get that, we can be more flexible about the nature of the federal geographic approval process. We have a constitutional amending formula for provincial approval today and that amending formula is satisfactory to us as a formula for provincial approval.
The position that the Minister of Justice has presented, I would state with respect, does not make any sense. The government says it is not a new formula for constitutional amendment. It is not a constitutional formula because it will not be in the Constitution. That is clear enough, except that it is the stated intention of the government that these proposals will be brought into the Constitution at some point.
The government is proposing a new formula for constitutional amendments involving provincial ratification. We already have a formula in the Constitution for provincial ratification, the seven and fifty formula. There are difficulties with the seven and fifty formula. The minister accurately outlined some of those difficulties.
The reason for that formula is that when dealing with provincial governments the provinces decided that they did not want any one government to have a veto because that was a very risky situation with the concentration of executive power there is in this country. I will get on to that more later.
The new formula obviously violates what the provinces themselves wanted in selecting the current provincial amending formula. The Minister of Justice has tried to make an argument that it is not unconstitutional for the federal government to unilaterally amend the provincial ratification formula even in a non-constitutional way. He has an argument there because the federal government can clearly delegate its powers.
Why it would want to delegate powers to the provincial governments in an area where the provincial governments already have a formula is unclear to me. We will have two rounds of provincial ratification and no real federal ratification. This is completely unclear to me. In any case, this is what they are proposing to do.
The delegation which is proposed here delegates that authority in a way that gives some provincial legislatures more authority than others.
It is on that ground that some provincial legislatures, in particular the legislature in my province of Alberta, may well attempt to take this to court and have it declared unconstitutional. Alberta may challenge that and I would encourage it if it sought to do so because in the area of governmental powers all of the provinces should be treated equally.
As well the Minister of Justice has argued, and I am a bit mystified at why he is even making this argument, that there are already plenty of vetoes in the Constitution which is true enough. There are already plenty of vetoes in the Constitution. That does not change the fact that for the areas he is proposing vetoes, he is proposing to give some provincial governments and not other provincial governments vetoes. This will be rejected by the population in large parts of the country, but particularly in western Canada. Western Canada will reject it because it reflects a vision of
the country that does not at all reflect the way westerners see the country.
I was born and raised in Toronto, so I can understand the central Canadian perspective. Unfortunately it is simply not a complete perspective of the country. It is interesting, when looking at the four regions there is Ontario and Quebec, the two original provinces before Confederation. Then there is Atlantic Canada and of course, it is a group with a small population. In the original Constitution we had recognized three regions, but then there is out there: western Canada and all of the Rockies, all of the prairies, all of the north. That is just one area.
If we were to ask a westerner what the regions were, I am sure he would say they are the prairies, the Pacific, the north and the east. That would be the formula that would be proposed.
This particular view is obviously going to be rejected even more in British Columbia than it is anywhere else. Why? Because British Columbia is obviously a distinctive and strong region with a vibrant economy, a great future regardless of what happens politically in this country. It is growing. It is larger both in terms of geography and population than all of the Atlantic provinces combined. It certainly is not going to view itself as part of some western region. Why then has it been defined this way? It is important to say something about this because it does reflect the nature and the inadequacy of the thinking behind the bill.
The Minister of Justice talked about renewal. What does this particular formula have to do with renewal? When we asked why this formula came about, we did not get an instruction about renewal; we got an instruction from the minister and from the government about history.
In 1971 the Government of British Columbia as part of a wider constitutional package that was eventually rejected, agreed to a formula that involved four regions. In 1971 Ken Dryden was a rookie playing goal for the Montreal Canadiens. The United States was still at war in Vietnam.
The premier who signed that deal- and I do not mean to besmirch his memory, the premier has long since passed away-not only is he and his government out of power, the party he represented does not even exist in the province of British Columbia. The premier is dead and we are using him now as the reason we are bringing forward a a proposal for a constitutional amending formula in 1995.
Then we got a second set of reactions. This morning the Minister of Justice seemed to concede that B.C. should have a veto or should be moving that way because of its population. I ask the House to think a little bit about this. The argument is that sooner rather than later, British Columbia will have a majority of the population in western Canada so it will have a veto.
What does this mean? This means that under the formula proposed by the government, the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba would have no say whatsoever in constitutional amendments, none whatsoever. They can be isolated in the seven and fifty formula and their consent would not even have to be requested to fulfil the requirements of Bill C-110. We would not even need to know what their position was.
This is an absolutely incredible position and explains why in Alberta there is a reaction. Some circles have called for an Alberta veto.
Across the country there is a particular concern that this gives a veto to the government of Quebec at the very time when it will be led not just by the separatists, but by the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois who will become the future premier of Quebec. He is not only committed to taking Canada out of confederation, but unlike Rene Levesque, is not willing to entertain any constitutional amendments whatsoever.
During and since the referendum when the Prime Minister has been asked him about his speech in Verdun, he talked about trusting the people. He told us we had to trust the people in the referendum. The people defeated the proposal by Mr. Parizeau. Now the Prime Minister does not trust them. Now he is prepared to trust the Leader of the Opposition. This position contradicts his previous statements on constitutional reform. It contradicts resolutions the Liberal Party passed in 1992. It contradicts his statement about trusting the people and giving the Constitution to the people. It even contradicts statements he made recently in the House.
We have to ask why would the Prime Minister do this? I want to try and be fair to him. The Prime Minister has been in politics for 30 years. He has had a very successful political career. None of us would debate that. He has shown from time to time some very clever political judgment, regardless of what anyone says.
He said he would trust the people. He said he would give the people a say. He said he would give the people of Quebec a veto. Now he is doing the opposite. He is giving the legislature of Quebec a say and not the people. In fact, a couple of days ago when I asked about this, he said this was even more democratic. This was really democracy. The people of Quebec chose this legislature and that is who we are trusting.
I have pointed out on more than one occasion in the past that if we had left the decision on the separation of Quebec to the legislature of Quebec, it would already be a separate country if that is where the decision is to be taken. It is the people of Quebec who have decided repeatedly not to separate.
Why is the Prime Minister doing this? I suggest he is doing this for the very reason that it is being criticized. He is doing this precisely because it gives a veto to the leader of the official opposition, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois. The Prime Minister can stand and say: "I gave you a veto. I gave the people of Quebec something through you and you turned it down. You are the bad guy". That is what he wants to say.
Why does that matter? It matters because for 30 years the Prime Minister has been a fighter for Canada in Quebec against the Quebec nationalist movement. It is a fight that looks more and more in jeopardy as there has been a long term rise in support of this movement through the decades.
As with all nationalism, this movement says that anybody who has a sense of wider loyalties is a traitor. The Prime Minister, because he sees himself as a Canadian, believes it is some kind of a sell-out.
It reached a pinnacle in the last couple of years when the Prime Minister became the first Quebecer in our history to be elected Prime Minister without substantial support from the French speaking areas of Quebec. He also was aggravated, when in the referendum campaign, his interventions did not seem to have a particular affect on the population.
The Prime Minister has decided to strike back. It is a perfectly understandable response for somebody who has been in the position he has been in, for somebody who must feel the way he feels, given the way events have gone and given the way he has been treated from time to time, particularly in his own province. From his perspective it may also be a response that is necessary politically as a federalist Quebecer.
I suggest it will not work. The Leader of the Opposition, as we all know, is a smart enough fellow, which he demonstrated again today. He is not going to have any problem playing around with this argument. That is what he will do. Whether his arguments are right or wrong he will be able to deliver an effective argument against this motion.
The Prime Minister should also know from his own history that success in politics is about being able to see that one's own feelings or one's own reactions should not interfere with one's own judgment or with the broader interests that are at stake.
Canada needs an approach in looking for a new constitutional formula. That is what we should be looking at here. Canada needs an approach that is good for the country and good for Canadians. I suggest there are many things wrong with this bill. In particular a veto for the premier of Quebec is not in the interests of all Canadians. It is not in the interests of this country.
What is in the interests of this country at the federal level is what we have: a provincial ratification formula which I believe is as good as it is going to get. At the federal level we need a national referendum for the people of Canada. We should be trusting the people of Quebec who have voted against separation. We should be trusting the people who went to the Montreal rally who were not there to endorse some bills and resolutions which they had not seen. We should be trusting their judgment. We should also be trusting the people who did not go to the Montreal rally. They were millions of Canadians, many of whom I suspect considered they would go but had second thoughts because they said: "If I go there am I going to find that my name is being used to back some agenda by some group of politicians that I had never endorsed?"
Those people in Quebec and outside of Quebec need a say in constitutional amendments. It is only by trusting the people that we are going to get anywhere. We will certainly vote against this bill the way it is. I ask the government to seriously consider looking at this proposal again to give the people a say over constitutional change at the federal level.
