- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Bloc Québécois
- Montcalm
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $126,025.95
- Government Page
- 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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- 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 5:04:55 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 5:03:51 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 5:01:56 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 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 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 4:50:03 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 4:47:52 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 4:47:05 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 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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