The advisory committee created in June by François Legault to seek new powers in Ottawa is bearing fruit, but it will need a little more than an additional month to present the results of its reflections to the government.
Depending on what Duty learned this week, the work of the committee made up of six experts, including former Liberal minister Sébastien Proulx and law professor Guillaume Rousseau, generated results on all of the mandates entrusted to it by the government this spring.
Faced with an “extremely tight” deadline of around four months, says a source familiar with the matter, the members of the committee nevertheless requested a slight extension of their mandate, an extension that the Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette, granted them on Wednesday, “considering the magnitude of the task”. They will have until November 25 to submit their final report.
Still according to our information, the drafting of the document is well underway. In the initial mandate tabled in June, Quebec had demanded that the committee look into “Quebec’s powers in matters of immigration”, “encroachments [du] federal government in Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction”, or even “Quebec’s ability to make its own choices, […] in matters of language, secularism, culture”.
Some ideas
However, some surprises have emerged since the start of the consultative committee’s discussions. In a brief submitted at the beginning of September, for example, constitutionalist Daniel Turp recommends, for example, “the institution of Quebec citizenship”.
“ [Celle-ci] would, in my opinion, contribute to giving all people who live in Quebec a feeling of belonging to it, including immigrants who choose Quebec as their home of adoption and wish to integrate there in a harmonious way,” says the Former PQ and Bloc MP. “Within the Canadian federation […]the new citizenship would be combined with Canadian citizenship. »
In another brief submitted to the committee, the Mouvementdemocracy and Citizenship of Quebec presents a project for a constituent assembly with the aim of creating a constitution for Quebec.
This initiative, imagined in particular by the actor Sébastien Ricard and the former deputy minister of René Lévesque’s government André Larocque, is supported by around forty people. It would materialize by drawing lots from 25 citizens responsible for consulting the Quebec population to write the said constitution and submit it to a popular referendum.
In total, more than 40 briefs were submitted to the committee, more than it expected.
Apart from M. Proulx and M.e Rousseau, who act as co-presidents, the working group mandated by the CAQ government counts on the contribution of law professor Amélie Binette, taxation professor Luc Godbout, political science professor Catherine Mathieu and former head office of Prime Minister Lévesque and public affairs consultant Martine Tremblay.