The Quebec working group on constitutional issues has issued its recommendations

Photo: iStockphoto The government will determine when the report’s recommendations can be made public.

The final report of the task force tasked with seeking new powers from Ottawa is complete. Federal encroachment on Quebec’s jurisdictions, power sharing in immigration, the possible creation of citizenship and a Quebec constitution: a range of topics will be addressed.

Launched with great fanfare by Premier François Legault in June, the Advisory Committee on Quebec’s Constitutional Issues within the Canadian Federation has reached the end of its mandate, which had been extended last month given “the magnitude of the task.”

“We looked at everything,” confided a source familiar with the matter when asked about the content of the report that is due to land on the desk of Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette on Tuesday.

The committee, chaired by law professor Guillaume Rousseau and former Liberal minister Sébastien Proulx, was tasked with analyzing the best measures to “protect and promote the collective rights of the Quebec nation, […] ensure respect for its distinct social values ​​and its distinct identity, […] guarantee respect for Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction and […] increase its autonomy within the federation Canadian.

Its mandate was very broad and included, in particular, the analysis of immigration powers — in Quebec as in Ottawa — the study of “encroachments by the federal government in Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction,” as well as the search for ways for Quebec to make “its own choices, particularly in matters of language, secularism, culture and in all other areas affecting its national cohesion.”

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A constitution ? A citizenship ?

In the government as well as within the committee, the watchword was discretion on Monday, so little information had filtered through on the recommendations that the six members of the working group will issue. As for the timing of the report’s release, it is up to the government to decide. Although, according to our information, several members of the committee will be at the National Assembly on Tuesday.

“This report is really an overall logic, a position. It’s really a macro work,” stressed our source, who requested confidentiality because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the committee’s recommendations. “We took everything into account.”

Beyond the mandates entrusted to it by the Quebec government, the committee was tasked with studying some forty briefs submitted by a series of experts, civil society organizations and citizens. In several of them, it is also proposed to establish a Quebec constitution or citizenship.

In his brief, political scientist and professor emeritus at Université Laval Guy Laforest recommends, for example, the formal submission to the National Assembly of “a draft of the Quebec constitutional law of 2024.” Constitutionalist and former elected official Daniel Turp proposes the “institution of a citizenship of Quebec [conferring] on all people who live in Quebec a sense of belonging to it.” A brief signed by some forty people was also submitted by the Alliance pour une constitutionnelle citoyenne du Québec.

Reached Monday, the president of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, Marie-Anne Alepin, deplored the advisory committee’s “overly limited” mandate. In its brief, the organization that promotes and defends the Quebec nation deplores the fact that the working group was unable to “extend its thinking beyond the current constitutional framework.” “We would have liked to have been able to leave the field open to analyze the future of Quebec as a Quebec-country,” said Ms. Alepin.

In addition to co-chairs Rousseau and Proulx, the advisory committee could count on the work of law professor Amélie Binette, taxation professor Luc Godbout, political science professor Catherine Mathieu and former chief of staff to Premier Lévesque and public affairs consultant Martine Tremblay.