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Gérard Deltell

Member of Parliament
Conservative

Louis-Saint-Laurent
Quebec
Voting Attendance: 61%
Expenses Last Quarter: $128,105.00

Government Page

Context: House Hansard - 317 - May/24/24

Mr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC)

May/24/24 11:23:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, their plan is working so well that I have to describe what is happening in my community of Loretteville. It is an unusual situation, something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. Someone from Loretteville posted the following message online: “I was wondering if someone could trade me two or three home-cooked meals for some work. I can fix pretty much anything”. After nine years of this government, a man has to ask his neighbours for food. Does the government realize that we are in this situation because it has racked up deficit after deficit, doubled the debt and raised taxes?

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Context: House Hansard - 75 - May/19/22

Mr. Gérard Deltell

May/19/22 10:21:31 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, soon I will have been living in Loretteville for 58 years. I am turning 58 soon. I know the area like the back of my hand. I have had close, personal friends there from childhood, and I can say one thing: Wendake did not become urban overnight. Wendake has always been embedded in an urban area. In 2022, Canada Post is unable to recognize that Wendake is in an urban area. This penalizes the Wendat by forcing them to pay a 30% surcharge to ship goods through Canada Post. This also has an impact on the price of insurance, because insurance is based on postal codes. The consequences are significant. It is not true that Wendake has suddenly become urban. Wendake has always been surrounded by Quebec City neighbourhoods. We are calling on the minister to act immediately. With the stroke of a pen, this situation could be resolved.

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Context: House Hansard - 75 - May/19/22

Mr. Gérard Deltell

May/19/22 10:19:30 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, I would like to thank the minister for her answer. I can see that she has worked on this file over the past few days, which is a good thing. That said, we are not seeing results. Right now, it costs 30% more to send something from Wendake than to send it from my home in Loretteville, even though I live less than a kilometre from Wendake. That is totally unfair, unacceptable and wrong, especially for a government that prides itself and boasts about its lofty principles with respect to the first nations. Three weeks ago, on April 29, during a meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, when she was answering a question from my colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, the minister said that they were aware of the situation and were looking into it. They need to do more than just look into it. This situation needs to be fixed. When does the minister plan to fix this situation, which is completely unfair to the Wendat people?

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Context: House Hansard - 64 - May/4/22

Mr. Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent, CPC)

May/4/22 10:39:58 p.m.
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Madam Chair, as we say in my riding of Louis‑Saint‑Laurent and in Wendake, kwe. Like most of my colleagues here this evening, I am participating in this very important debate about what the government and Canadians must do to address violence against indigenous women and about the measures that are needed to break this despicable, vicious circle for the country and more specifically for indigenous women. These kinds of debates are necessary. My riding is home to the Huron-Wendat community. It always makes me smile to think about how lucky I am, because we cannot choose our family or our birthplace, as everyone knows, but I was very fortunate on both counts. My parents came to Canada in 1958, and in 1962 they moved to what was then known as Château‑d'Eau, which then became Loretteville and is now part of Quebec City. It was less than a mile away from the indigenous community of Wendake. I grew up and still live in Loretteville, so I have some very good, very close Wendat friends. These friends are and will always be lifelong friends. I therefore grew up with an awareness of the first nations. We should all have this awareness of the first nations, but it will never be deep enough. It is not easy to fix 400 years' worth of damage, yet that is the reality of indigenous relations with the federal and provincial governments. It has been 400 years of misunderstandings, of battles, of totally unacceptable domination and, in many cases, that is what we are facing now, in the 21st century. We must understand that we can never do enough to erase, or at the very least lessen, the pain caused over the centuries. The reality is that we must take action but, more importantly, we must reflect and understand what happened. At the start of the 21st century, there was an awareness that dawned. It has always been there in Canada. No matter who held the title of prime minister, there was always a gesture or a thought, sometimes positive, sometimes abhorrent, but there was also a desire to be honest with first nations at times. We must recognize that it was the late Jack Layton, the former leader of the NDP, whose passing we all lament, who took the first concrete step that led to today's recognition of the tragedy of indigenous women who have fallen victim to appalling violence. In the early 2000s, Jack Layton suggested that the Canadian government should formally apologize for the tragedy of residential schools and the crimes that took place there, which led to the totally unacceptable abuse that was most recently condemned by the Holy Father himself. Canada's prime minister at the time, the Right Hon. Stephen Harper, listened to Jack Layton. For the first time in Canada's history, the federal government offered a formal and sincere apology to first nations. It was the first and only time that a grand chief of the Canadian first nations ever addressed the members of the House of Commons, and it happened right here in Ottawa on June 11, 2008. There was an apology, and there was action. The government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission because there can be no reconciliation without facts and truth. That is why, over a long period of six years, Canadians travelled the country listening to first nations. When I first entered politics as a member of Quebec's National Assembly, I clearly remember being at the meeting in Wendake. It lasted several days, but I was only there for a day. I should maybe have stayed longer. The participants could see and understand the pain these people were carrying. In 2015, the commission released its report, which contained almost 100 recommendations and suggestions. One of them, call to action 41, was for the Canadian government to take action on the tragedy of indigenous women who were beaten, raped, assaulted or killed. We all know what happened next. The government waited two years before coming up with a plan. As I said in my introduction, we can never do enough because fixing 400 years' worth of damage is almost impossible. We have to start by accepting that unfortunate reality.

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Gérard Deltell