- Member of Parliament
- Minister of Public Services and Procurement
- Liberal
- Québec
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 62%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $98,564.48
- Government Page
- Jun/18/24 3:01:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on the contrary, for the first time in this country's history, the new Official Languages Act recognizes that French is in jeopardy in Quebec and that it must be protected across the country, but especially in Quebec. I have already answered that question. I made it clear that all Crown corporations are subject to the same treatment.
I have a few seconds left, so, on behalf of all members, I want to thank the latest cohort of pages, who will soon be leaving us, for their outstanding service over the past year.
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- Feb/26/24 2:22:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, indeed, I do not feel I can properly answer questions directed to the Bloc Québécois. I am sure our hon. colleague, the House leader of the Conservative Party, knows to whom he should be directing his questions and will find the appropriate setting to do so.
That being said, my responsibility and that of the government during the pandemic was to strive to protect the health and safety of Canadians in a dire emergency. We had not seen this type of situation since 1919. However, even in a crisis, all the rules must be followed.
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- Feb/16/24 11:44:44 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member points to the valuable public service, and he is entirely right; public servants worked extremely hard during the pandemic to protect the health and safety of millions of Canadians and millions of jobs.
That being said, it is not an excuse for a very few of them in the CBSA not to have done their job appropriately. On Monday, the Auditor General was very clear as to why that was not done. We obviously took into account her recommendations. We have implemented many of them and will implement the others in days to come.
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- Feb/16/24 11:23:33 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is quite right to talk about cost of protecting the health and safety of Canadians, including during a pandemic that cost tens of thousands of people their lives, including hundreds in his own riding. Millions of people lost their jobs, and we had to protect the integrity of our borders.
Despite how urgent and important this situation was, the Auditor General of Canada clearly indicated that it was unacceptable that public servants from the CBSA did not do their job properly.
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- Feb/15/24 2:44:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned the word responsibility. In times of crisis, a responsible government has two responsibilities. First, it must protect people's health and ensure their safety. That included the lives of tens of thousands of Quebeckers and Canadians during the pandemic. Second, it must ensure that transportation, in this case within Canada as well as across-the-border transportation, goes smoothly so that medication and personal protective equipment get through, and so that international trade, worth billions of dollars every week, can continue flowing in an efficient and useful manner.
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- Feb/13/24 2:46:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am sure my colleague can grasp, now that we have said it several times, that we thank the Auditor General for her report and we acknowledge the significant shortcomings she noted in her report. Many of her recommendations have already been implemented. Others will be implemented in the coming weeks. All of this was put in place under emergency circumstances, when the lives and jobs of millions of Canadians across the country had to be protected. Unfortunately, it was not done with the high standards expected of public servants.
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- Feb/12/24 2:55:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the Canadian government's duties at the time was to ensure that our border with the United States remained open to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who were travelling every week and to the billions of dollars in essential medicines, food and critical equipment needed to protect people's health.
That is why we implemented the ArriveCAN app, to prevent the border with the United States, under President Trump, from being completely closed to the transportation of all medicine, food and equipment that Canadians, in my riding and in that of my Conservative colleague, desperately needed to protect themselves.
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- Feb/8/24 2:28:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague once again for bringing up this very sensitive issue.
We know that freedom of choice, control over one's own life and the choice for a dignified death are options that Canadians already have access to. We also know that we need to work to protect the most vulnerable members of our society. We know that we need to work very closely with health care providers, develop case studies and, obviously, work on jurisdictions for issues that fall more under the Criminal Code and those that fall more under the delivery of health care.
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- Jan/31/23 2:57:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are all very mindful of the terrible pain, the large number of deaths and the even larger number of hospitalizations that we have seen in Canada over COVID-19. That is why our primary responsibility has been, and remains, to protect the safety and the health of Canadians, including the tens of thousands of people who had to access designated quarantine facilities. Because of these measures, and vaccinations in addition, we have saved together tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars in economic costs.
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- Nov/14/22 3:07:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would say that a government's competency and responsibility lies with ensuring the health and safety of its citizens. That is the primary responsibility of any government, certainly in times of crisis such as we experienced in early 2020.
That is why we invested where we needed to invest because we knew that people were going to go through some tough times. We knew that we needed to protect their ability to afford the goods and services they would need, but we also knew that we needed to protect their health in the event they caught COVID-19.
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- Oct/24/22 2:53:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank not only my colleague, but also every organization in Quebec and elsewhere that is fighting to ensure that people can live a healthy life in an environment that is protected.
We acknowledge that there are obstacles to accessing this information because of confidentiality laws.
We also know that the Canadian government announced last year that the law would be reviewed in order to ensure, as the member was saying, greater transparency, better access to reliable scientific information and more openness on such important issues.
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- May/30/22 2:35:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am always happy to talk science when it comes to such an important topic.
Take the number 130,000. That is the number of hospitalizations that the United Kingdom was able to prevent in recent weeks because it has a high third-dose vaccination rate. Because so many people have gotten vaccinated, they are better protected individually and are also helping to protect their communities and families.
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- May/30/22 2:34:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is no secret. The data are available. The experts have been very clear.
Consider this example. During the omicron wave, a total of 163,000 deaths could have been prevented in the United States alone if the U.S. had had a higher vaccination rate like we have in Canada.
That said, Canada still has a lot more work to do. We need to keep increasing our third-dose vaccination rate to protect ourselves against the pandemic.
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- May/10/22 2:47:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me say what everyone knows, which is that vaccination is not punishment. Vaccination is protection. When we vaccinate ourselves not only do we protect ourselves against a disease that can be very serious, but we also protect those around us whom we like and we love. Therefore, we protect them and their community. With respect to vaccination, just in the past few months, the rate of boosters in Britain has avoided about 130,000 hospitalizations just during omicron.
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- Apr/4/22 2:26:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Canadian government has invested a total of $63 billion over the past two years to support all of the amazing work that my dear colleague just spoke about.
This $63 billion was invested to protect the health and safety of workers and residents, and the outcomes we have seen have been extraordinary, especially compared to what might have happened under another government or in another country. We are very proud of the results. We also look forward to continuing to work together in the coming months and years.
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- Mar/24/22 2:54:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, compassion is the key word. We need to have each other's backs. We need to protect each other's health. That is best done by following public health measures, as most of us are doing today, but not all of us. It is also done by being vaccinated, which protects our health and that of those we love.
It also protects against long COVID. By the way, long COVID affects all vital organs with hundreds of symptoms through the brain, heart, lungs and liver. This is serious and demands responsibility on the part of the government.
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- Mar/24/22 2:52:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will speak to something I think is extremely important for us to understand, which is long COVID. Among all those infected by COVID, whether it be severe or mild, the estimate is that between 10% and 30% will suffer from long COVID.
This has dramatic impacts on their lives in the short and longer term. Thirty percent of them will need to consult more than 10 times after that. Thirty percent of them will need to stop working. This has very significant health, personal and economic costs. The way to protect against that is to protect against transmission and to do that through vaccination.
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- Mar/24/22 2:47:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Conservatives have to choose between vaccination, which is not punishment but protection, and lockdown. We cannot have no vaccination and no lockdown.
The fact that the Conservatives do not seem to believe in vaccination, in March 2022, is very serious. If we did not have vaccination, and if we did not keep insisting on vaccination, we would be closing schools, shops, stores and factories and we would be overloading hospitals with patients. We would not be meeting in this room today.
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- Mar/4/22 11:57:23 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to answer that question.
As the member may know, I come from the wonderful Quebec City. I am very proud of the strong workers, people and partners working for my tourism industry. I understand it is also an important industry for the member. I look forward to further measures, but I would also point out that on Monday, just a few days ago, we announced important measures that are going to protect workers and travellers and invest in our tourism industry.
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- Mar/3/22 3:01:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member is entirely right to talk about responsibility, both individual and collective responsibility. Individually speaking, I think most members of the House have been vaccinated and many of them with a booster shot. This is exactly the right thing to do. Collectively, we had, at least on this side of the House and I think we worked collaboratively with opposition parties, the responsibility to protect everyone's health and safety. We ended up with large vaccination rates across the country, which is, in fact, the reason we are able to put lockdowns away and turn to more sustainability and affordability when it comes to moving through the crisis.
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