- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Lac-Saint-Louis
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $123,581.21
- Government Page
- Feb/14/23 4:54:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am trying to understand, and maybe the member could help me by telling me how putting food on the table during a crisis, how helping Alberta get oil to tidewater, how lowering child care costs and how providing dental care to children is contributing to inflation.
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- Feb/7/23 4:17:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the policies the government implemented over the last two years did not cause the price of food to go up. They put food on the table for Canadians.
John Maynard Keynes's words of wisdom still ring true today in times of crisis. John Maynard Keynes said that the economy will adjust over the long term. An economy will always adjust if there is massive unemployment, as unemployment will be absorbed over the long term, but he said, “In the long run, we are all dead”. That is a quote from John Maynard Keynes, and it means we should not wait for the long term. If there is a crisis today, we should take the measures that are going to alleviate the crisis and alleviate human suffering today.
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- Oct/18/22 12:09:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, with Gazprom and the turbines, it has been said in the House that we did not want to give Vladimir Putin an excuse. That is as a pretext to say that we were making the situation worse.
On another point, yes, we have to take difficult decisions, but there are going to be cases where we have to make some judgments. Does creating a complete energy crisis in Germany advance the goal of peace? I am not so sure it does.
These are decisions, obviously, that the government has to make. They have to be debated around the cabinet table. I have no doubt whatsoever about the proper intent of the government, but it had to make a difficult decision and it looks like it made the right one.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to participate in this debate, which I have been following carefully for the past few hours.
Human memory is a curious thing. I am not a psychologist, but I have noticed that humans have a tendency to forget the most painful memories, the difficult and distressing moments of the past, and this can sometimes condemn us to repeat the same mistakes. I think others would agree with me.
At a certain point, people often decide to focus on the positive and forget the negative. When I say “the negative”, I am talking about the crisis we just went through, and are still going through, but it was worse in 2020-21. Life has been completely turned upside down since March 2020, including our personal, family and work lives, and our work in this Parliament, in the House of Commons.
If we go back a bit, we will recall that the House of Commons did not sit for weeks. At the very beginning of the pandemic, it was extremely important to practise social distancing. There were perhaps a few hours once every two weeks where a handful of MPs could come to the House of Commons to adopt measures for Canadians and businesses. Apart from that, we lost a tremendous amount of time before setting up the hybrid Parliament.
Some may say that it is true that we lost time, but they will also accuse us of calling an election and losing even more time. Those who say that are not providing the full picture of what happens in a Parliament with a minority government, which has a very specific dynamic.
If we look at the history of minority governments in Canada, they do not last much more than 18 months. After that, the opposition likes to spin a narrative that the government is not working very well, and it repeats that story out loud day after day during question period. The government then starts to drag its feet for real. The opposition points the finger at the government, claiming that it is not accomplishing anything, that it is getting nowhere and that a new government is needed. That is how it plays out; that is how it has always played out.
I have been an MP under several minority governments, more so than under majority governments. This is the dynamic that usually takes hold, especially after an opposition party elects a new leader and a minority government has been in place for 18 to 24 months. People start thinking about triggering an election.
Our government was operating in a crisis, and it had to go back to voters for a reset, if you will, and a renewed mandate. When the government was elected in 2019, there was no crisis. Later on, it had to implement health measures, and strengthening and extending those measures required a mandate from Canadians. We lost time because of the pandemic, and we were unable to move forward on certain files.
The House has spent a very long time on Bill C‑8, a major bill that is crucial to helping Canada recover from the pandemic crisis. The bill is supposed to implement the fall economic update, but we have not yet passed it, and summer is just around the corner.
Why is it important?
Bill C‑8 provides essential support to workers and businesses to fight COVID‑19 and will continue to support the provincial and territorial health care systems with supplies of vaccines and rapid tests. The more information Canadians have about their health, the easier it will be for them to make decisions that enable them to keep the most vulnerable people—such as seniors and immunocompromised people—healthy, to keep themselves healthy and to keep others safe in the face of this pandemic. Canadians need assurances that they will not get sick when they go to work and that they will not make their loved ones sick with COVID‑19.
Bill C‑8 will also protect children by ensuring that schools have adequate ventilation. We must do everything in our power to prevent outbreaks in schools. This bill would implement a number of tax measures, such as tax credits for businesses that purchase ventilation equipment and for teachers who buy school supplies to facilitate virtual learning.
The safe return to class fund originally provided $2 billion to the provinces and territories to help cover a variety of investments to protect students and staff. The addition of $100 million to the fund is intended to support projects with the primary objective of increasing outdoor air intake or increasing air cleaning to help reduce transmission of COVID‑19.
I would also like to take the time to recognize the great work being done by teachers across the country. They are doing the most important job: taking care of our next generation.
Bill C‑8 is very important for recovering from the pandemic and avoiding a setback. We do not need any setbacks at this point. Things are hard enough, and we are already facing enough challenges, so this is an important bill in that sense. However, it is also a bill that is dragging on. What the opposition does from time to time is drag its feet in an attempt to show that the government does not have the competence to achieve its objectives.
There are other very important bills to be passed as well. I am referring in particular to Bill C-13, which deals with official languages. I represent a community that is predominantly made up of a linguistic minority in Canada, and Bill C‑13 will help better support this linguistic minority. It will enshrine the court challenges program in law, in a way. This program helps official language minority groups defend themselves in court when they are faced with actions such as the Harris government's move to close the Montfort Hospital, or the Harper government's move to cancel the court challenges program. This is therefore a very important bill for the anglophone minority in Quebec, but also for the francophone minority outside Quebec, as well as for promoting the French language and francophone culture in Quebec and across the country.
Bill C-11 is just as vital to promoting Canadian culture, including Quebec culture and French-Canadian culture. Let us take a look back and think about Bill C-10 in the previous Parliament. That was another bill on which the opposition was dragging its feet and filibustering in committee and in the House. They seemed to support the bill initially, but once the Conservatives saw the winds changing, especially among certain segments of the voting public, they changed their tune. This example illustrates how the official opposition decided to drag its feet and create obstacles. Let us get rid of those obstacles and move forward.
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- Mar/24/22 4:17:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will share my time with the member for London North Centre.
There is no overstating the fact that the past two years have not been easy. As individuals and as a society, we are all worn out. The pandemic truly was a tragedy, and it had many and varied impacts on all aspects of society. Businesses had to close their doors either temporarily or, in some cases, permanently because they went bankrupt. Seniors were affected. In some residences, the death rate was utterly unacceptable. Some residents could not leave their rooms for weeks. They were totally isolated. We also know the pandemic had a terrible impact on everyone's mental health, especially those in isolation, such as seniors who had to stay in their rooms, as well as frontline workers who were so brave and did such amazing work to keep us safe. It also harmed young people, students who could not get the kind of educational experience they normally would. Basically, it was very hard for everyone.
The fact is that Canada chose a more careful approach. We were much more careful than many other countries. That is why we had a lower mortality rate than many other countries, including our neighbour to the south. Our mortality rate was roughly one-third of that in the United States. I think we should be proud of that. The Minister of Health has repeated many times that if the vaccination rate in the United States had been the same as in Canada, they would have saved 135,000 lives. That is a lot. We do not think about that so much these days. We no longer think about the lives that were saved. We only think about making life a bit easier by lifting all sorts of restrictions and mandates, even though we have lifted many so far and life has returned more or less to normal.
Our success in saving lives is a result of the wisdom and sacrifices of Canadians who have shown exemplary solidarity by following the health rules. It is also the result of the leadership shown by the federal and provincial governments. That leadership was crucial. In this crisis, the governments had to lead by example by working together. In other words, the governments were able to get on the same page.
The same cannot be said for the United States, where each state followed its own course. Sometimes the states worked against the current. In Florida, they wanted nothing to do with masks or vaccines. I even heard that in Florida, if someone went into a restaurant wearing a mask, they were kicked out for scaring the customers. California's approach, however, was similar to Canada's and the governor was nearly thrown out of office.
In a crisis, we cannot underestimate the vital importance of Canadians maintaining faith in their institutions. That is when it is most important for citizens to have faith in their institutions.
Institutions, in order to keep that faith, have to be consistent. They have to be judicious in the decisions that they are making. Any signs of inconsistency or arbitrariness can be fatal in terms of creating a loss of faith and confidence on the part of the people. If that happens, then no one is going to follow anything the government is suggesting. If that had happened in Canada, we would have had many more deaths than we experienced.
It is important also for governments to show leadership. That is why we have a vaccination mandate for federal employees. We are showing leadership. We got the support of the Canadian people to do that in an election where the Canadian people gave the Government of Canada a mandate to show the example across the country. That was very important in terms of saving lives and helping us to get out of the worst of the crisis sooner rather than later.
Canadians responded to the leadership that their governments showed. They obliged and the proof is in the fact that as of March 13, if we are looking at people five years old and older, 85% of the population has been fully vaccinated. If we look at the age group 18 and over, 56% have been fully vaccinated plus have obtained a booster.
An hon. member: One of the best in the world.
Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia: Yes.
Why is it important for the most people possible to be vaccinated? As André Picard said in The Globe and Mail, the pandemic playing field is not level. What did Mr. Picard mean by that? An 85-year-old is 340 times more likely to die from COVID than a 20-year-old. A 75-year-old is 140 times more likely to die from COVID than a 20-year-old. A 65-year-old is 65 times more likely.
André Picard is an expert in public health. His columns are consistently dealing with that issue. To quote him in The Globe and Mail recently, he wrote, “Now, by abandoning all mitigation measures at once...we’re shifting the pandemic burden entirely [to older Canadians] onto the immunocompromised, the unboosted”. That is very important to keep in mind. When we argue that we should just drop everything, we are doing harm to the most vulnerable in our society.
The other point I would like to make is that all pandemic-related decisions are extremely complex. Not only are they a function of many factors, but these factors are dynamic and constantly changing. The Minister of Health mentioned some of these factors in question period in his wonderful responses to the questions he received. Here are some of the factors that public health has to consider and the government has to consider when deciding when to remove restrictions: the vaccination rate, hospital capacity, domestic epidemiology, international epidemiology and social impacts. This is a very long list of complicated factors that have to be looked at.
We are making comparisons that are a little too facile. We say that if the provinces do this then the federal government should do this. This seems to be the rhetoric that is coming from the other side, creating this kind of equivalency that is confusing if one is not listening closely. However, it is important to distinguish between the federal and provincial contexts. Federal measures focus on international transmissions. Provincial restrictions do not. There is a big difference between a crowded conveyance like an airplane or a train and movie theatres, gyms, shopping malls, grocery stores and the like. We have to use our wisdom to make distinctions that are important, especially in times of crisis.
I will conclude by quoting Mr. Picard one more time. He says, “We should not, after two years of solid effort and no small amount of sacrifice, be so foolish as to abandon prevention.” We must remain vigilant, responsible and wise.
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