44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2023 10:00AM
- May/11/23 2:42:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us talk about health transfers.
The provinces said they needed $28 billion a year. The federal government gave them only one-sixth of that amount. That was insulting enough, but that was only to provide care for the current population. That did not take into account the Century Initiative.
The Liberal target is a minimum of 500,000 people per year. What studies have they looked at to determine that Quebec and the provinces can provide health care to at least 500,000 more people every year with one-sixth of the money we already need?
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- May/11/23 4:47:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague from Jonquière may not yet have experienced how passive-aggressive the House can sometimes be—
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- May/11/23 4:47:52 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was saying that perhaps my colleague has not had that experience.
I introduced a bill on two separate occasions indicating that multiculturalism, a political ideology that undermines respect for differences and the integration model advocated by Quebec, should not apply in Quebec, and I have received a barrage of insults as a result. Some people have insinuated that I am racist or xenophobic.
I am a democrat, a separatist and a humanist. When a human community established within the same territory has a language, a culture, a history and a heritage, when it is driven by a will to survive, when it is aware of its uniqueness, when it is driven by a desire to live together, when it is articulated around a common interest, then a vision of society and a nation emerges.
Madam Speaker, could you please tell the member opposite—
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- May/11/23 4:50:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is not a good look on a party that calls itself progressive.
As I was saying, these are the objective and subjective criteria for a nation to be born. The people of Quebec form a nation.
Unfortunately, this recognition here is only symbolic. Indeed, the rest of Canada has always refused to enshrine that in the Constitution, to give it a legal effect. That is why Bill 101 was necessary and was passed in 1977, although we were told it was a Hitlerian law. The Quebec nation continues to speak French today thanks to this law.
At the end of the 1990s, I was saying that the use of French was declining. I kept saying that there would be an accelerated decline of French in Montreal. I was called a language zealot.
Today, on both sides of the House, they are trying to change the Official Languages Act while still considering the Quebec English-speaking community as a minority. We are now paying the price for what happened in 1982. What happened in 1982? Why has no Quebec premier, whether sovereignist or federalist, ever signed the Canadian Constitution since 1982? That is because, in 1982, we were deprived of our nationhood and minority status, quite simply.
Who forms the minority? According to the anglophones in Quebec, they do. If, indeed, the Canadian Constitution is built on the idea that there are 10 equal territories and that minority rights are protected, where do the rights of francophone Quebeckers fit in? Francophones are the minority in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the Maritimes. Although they are a minority on the continent and in Canada, francophones are the majority in Quebec, which means they have no rights. That is how it was presented to the UN.
What did the UN say to Howard Galganov? It said that the so-called English-speaking minority in Quebec was not a minority, but a community that was part of the Canadian and continental majority. These things need to be remembered because I feel that, from one election to the next, historical and sociological references get lost.
I would like to say to my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie that Quebec is asking to have its differences recognized and respected. As long as it is searching for recognition and respect of those differences, it cannot deny any other the same recognition and respect of its differences.
That is why, when people arrive in Quebec, we want to be able to welcome them in dignity. Dignity is not what multiculturalism has achieved over the years, by ghettoizing differences, turning these people into cheap labour, making them incapable of earning a decent living, even though some of them hold several degrees. Juxtaposing cultures is not what will allow us to live together in harmony.
I would like to highlight what Boucar Diouf, our national Boucar, has to say about this. On the subject of multiculturalism, he said, “It is impossible to live together without truly embodying the word ‘together’.”
Madam Speaker, I think members are talking a bit too loudly across the way.
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- May/11/23 4:55:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to quote Boucar Diouf, a Quebecker who considers himself a part of Quebec society and who says that our society is a close-knit one. He said, “It is impossible to live together without truly embodying the word ‘together’. Multiculturalism”—
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- May/11/23 4:57:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the NDP members obviously do not want me to read that quote, and yet it is universalist. As I was saying, “Multiculturalism is much more like living side by side and harbouring frustrations with one another, with results that fall far short of the ideal presented by politicians.”
The truth is that multiculturalism rejects the idea of a common culture, encouraging the coexistence of multiple cultures side by side. It favours cohabitation based on indifference rather than on recognition and the respect of differences, which invariably leads to the ghettoization of cultures.
That is why what we in Quebec want is an intercultural model based on three fundamental principles that form a common standard that protects Quebec's distinctiveness. Being a Quebecker has nothing to do with looking like a Quebecker. Being a Quebecker is first and foremost a political choice. A person can identify as a Canadian. I respect that. They can also identify as a Quebecker. We hope that everyone who settles in Quebec can get on board with that and identify as Quebeckers. It is up to them how they identify themselves.
We are asking for respect for what defines the soul of the nation, in other words French. We cannot welcome 500,000 people a year and not tell them that Quebec's official language is French.
Secularism is a principle that my colleagues surely agree with. It is important to Quebec, which had its Quiet Revolution and separated church and state. The other principle is equality between men and women. From there, each person, with their diversity, can indeed come build the country with us and that is what we want.
How is any of that xenophobic? How is it racist? These are values born of philosophical liberalism that are meant to be at the very core of the political foundation of every member in the House.
I am out of time. I thank the members from the NDP for sabotaging my speech.
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- May/11/23 5:01:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is a very good question.
Every year, around the same time, we have to deal with the foreign worker issue. Nothing moves any faster, yet these are housekeeping issues.
More concerning here is that the Century Initiative has in no way calculated the impact that these immigration thresholds would have on the reality of Quebec's linguistic demographics and the vitality of the French language in Quebec. At the same time, the federalist parties on both sides of the House boast about how important it is to defend the French fact in Canada. In my opinion, they are improvising. Gérard Bouchard, though a measured person, is outraged. He has vehemently criticized this plan.
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- May/11/23 5:03:51 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, perhaps the money had to be spent on health care, given this year's paltry health transfer.
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- May/11/23 5:04:55 p.m.
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Madam Spear, up to now, I did not really understand why my colleague talked about xenophobia in his speech. I do not believe that my speech could be deemed xenophobic.
The fact remains that what we want is to be able to welcome people in a satisfactory manner, with dignity, so they can fully participate in building the Quebec nation and ensuring its survival. We must recognize that Quebec has an additional challenge that is not shared by the rest of Canada, as Canada has a huge desire to welcome a large number of people without ensuring that it has the ability to give them a dignified life.
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- May/11/23 5:06:10 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, despite Bill 101, despite 40 years of enforcing Bill 101, and despite the fact that French is the language of work, the fact remains that English attracts five times more learners in Quebec than French. That is the reality.
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- May/11/23 5:16:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary was saying earlier that the Bloc motion is simply about stirring up trouble.
The Bloc Québécois is the only party that brings the interests of the National Assembly to the House, and the National Assembly unanimously denounced the government's immigration targets. I am quoting from this motion, in which Quebec speaks with one voice. In its motion, the National Assembly “...asks the federal government to adopt immigration thresholds based on Quebec's and Canada's integration capacity and levels that are likely to maintain the weight of French and Quebec within Canada”.
That is the reason for our motion. If the parliamentary secretary sees it as a desire to stir up trouble, that is her problem, not mine.
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Mr. Speaker, since there is no question and comment period at this time under the rules of debate in the House, some of my colleagues push the envelope and sometimes say outrageous things.
Having said that, I would first like to recall the purpose of the bill:
This enactment amends the Old Age Security Act to increase the amount of the full pension to which all pensioners aged 65 or older are entitled by 10% and to raise the exemption for a person's employment income or self-employed earnings that is taken into account in determining the amount of the guaranteed income supplement from $5,000 to $6,500.
The goal is to prevent this from having an impact on the guaranteed income supplement. Since its arrival in the House in the 1990s, the Bloc Québécois has fought hard for the guaranteed income supplement. We wanted to ensure that more and more Quebec seniors were entitled to it. We realized that people did not know they were entitled to it. We toured Quebec to raise awareness and encourage them to apply.
When we first came to the House, even though we were not a recognized party, we did a review of what was happening with the guaranteed income supplement. Once again, we found that many seniors who were entitled to it were not receiving it.
When we presented our budget expectations in 2016, my colleague from Joliette and the member for Repentigny met with the Minister of Finance at the time, Mr. Morneau. They told him that anyone entitled to the guaranteed income supplement should be automatically registered to receive it. That was the Bloc Québécois's doing. He told us that we were right and that he would implement this system in 2018.
Again, just last year, in my constituency office, I met with seniors who were entitled to it but were not receiving it. There are still people who fall through the cracks.
That said, as recently as April 6, 2023, Michel Girard, a long-time financial columnist who everyone knows, stated that 409,860 people aged 65 and over live on less than a livable income. That is incredible. That is 53% of people living alone who do not have a livable income. Over the years, seniors have become impoverished. We must fix this, especially in light of the post-pandemic inflationary context.
The underlying objective of this bill is the social autonomy of seniors. I have often had the opportunity to speak about the autonomy of seniors, but I want to remind members that seniors' autonomy is not limited to their physical autonomy. Naturally, some people lose their autonomy with the loss of mobility. That does not take away their autonomy.
Autonomy is also not limited to seniors' social autonomy. However, it is society that often impacts the social autonomy of seniors. What is social autonomy? It is the income and the place they are given so they can continue to work in society. Ageism does exist.
People approaching retirement have made an absolutely remarkable and phenomenal contribution to society, and yet the closer they get to retirement, the more they are progressively excluded from decision-making places. In fact, if it were not for advocacy groups like the FADOQ network and the Association québécoise de défense des droits des personnes retraitées et préretraitées, seniors would be in bad shape. I commend them for their work, and I also commend my colleague from Shefford, who has shown remarkable leadership on this issue. She was able to bring all the networks together to finally get the government to listen to reason. At least I hope so.
Senior's autonomy is not limited to their mental autonomy, in other words their cognitive ability. Many prejudices exist about that. It is believed that 20% of seniors may have cognitive impairments. Some studies in the literature say that among these 20%, 10% of the disorders are reversible, if the people are well cared for and if we do not reduce their capacity to act. Isolation necessarily creates long-term cognitive impairments.
Seniors who live at or below the poverty line are the most precious members of our society. The older one gets, the more one acquires that which society cannot do without, which is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy refers to a human being's capacity to make a just and fair decision while making sure that their decision-making capacity, their practical judgment, is accurate. That does not happen at 20 or 30 years of age. It is acquired over a lifetime. Society therefore needs to make room for seniors because they are the ones who can show us the way forward, if we listen to them and we do not push them aside as if they were unnecessary, and if we do not undermine their income and their livelihood.
Everyone knows that seniors living in precarious situations eventually become sick. People living with financial worries eventually become sick. From a purely economic standpoint, if we take care of our seniors, if we let them have more of what they need to live, we will inevitably have a healthier, less sickly society. In the end, that will cost much less. What is more, those people will enjoy living. There is nothing more important than to give life meaning. After all, we are all looking for happiness.
I am appealing to every member's sense of honour, justice and equity to make sure my colleague's bill, on behalf of all seniors across the country, including Quebec's seniors, can give them at least the bare necessities. Seniors are wise. That is something all the seniors' rights groups agree upon. What we are asking for is a decent bare minimum so as to give them a little breathing room.
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