- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Bloc Québécois
- Montcalm
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- 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 5:01:56 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 4:50:03 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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Mr. Speaker, the Official Languages Act has been around for a while. The government wanted to modernize it and, when they did, it was because it had failed. The act did not ensure the survival of French throughout Canada, from coast to coast to coast, or ensure that francophone minorities are treated in the same way as the anglophone community in Quebec.
Can my colleague tell me how he reconciles the government's desire to table Bill C‑13 to try to slow the decline of French with its introduction of an action plan that will provide $280 million in funding to the anglophone community in Quebec to ensure its survival, as though English were threatened in Quebec, in Canada and across North America?
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Madam Speaker, with all due respect to my colleague—whom I have listened to ever since 2015 when I first came to the House, where he has talked up the vitality of francophone communities on the Prairies—I do have a question. If it is true that this vitality exists, notwithstanding the considerable merits of these communities, how can it be that my colleague, who bears a French name, is a unilingual anglophone now?
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