Madam Speaker, I thank you for giving me this opportunity to reply to the hon. member's question.
I have travelled a lot across this country called Canada, this strange confederation that looks more like a centralizing federation than the confederation that we would expect to respect the respective powers of its members. Everywhere, I have seen the enormous weight of Ontario. I have been involved in cooperative housing and in the environment. We could show figures indicating that Ontario always gets proportionally more in subsidies than its demographic weight justifies. Conservative members often raise this issue. Indeed, western provinces also feel that the distribution pattern is unfair.
For a long time, Montreal was Canada's economic metropolis. This is no longer the case. Why? Perhaps because of policies that did not promote Montreal's development, policies that did not respect the Quebec reality and that did not support Quebec. The hon. member for Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour knows, like me, that policies that benefit Toronto at the expense of Montreal, with the result that over the years a lot of capital money has left our province, are nothing knew. We no longer want to experience this in Quebec. We have too much dignity for that.