- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Bloc Québécois
- Mirabel
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $114,073.56
- Government Page
- Oct/25/23 6:31:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have turned everything off around me. For once, I am the one who is disconnected. That is a first.
I wanted to thank my colleague for moving this motion because airport safety is so important. What we read in the motion is rather shocking. It first talks about how there are significant regulatory shortfalls concerning emergency responses at our airports. That is a matter of passenger and employee safety, but it is also a matter of the country's international reputation, since Canada is known for being a safe place to fly.
Here is what the motion calls for. It says that we need to change the safety standards in Canadian airports so that airport firefighters can reach any part of the runway in less than three minutes. Those are international standards, and Canada is lagging behind in terms of International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, standards. Right now, Canada requires firefighters to be able to reach the mid-point of the runway in three minutes, rather than all points on the runway. The three-minute time frame is very important. We know that some runways are very long, particularly those at the Mirabel airport in my riding. That time frame can extend to four, five, six or even seven minutes.
We are talking about airport safety, and it can seem as though fires in and around airports never happen. Let me remind members that a tragedy took someone's life at the Mirabel airport on October 18, 2022. A vehicle caught fire at the airport. Aéroports de Montréal, the supposedly independent Crown corporation that manages the facility, decided not to send firefighters and instead waited for municipal firefighters to arrive.
A second call was made to notify the firefighters that there was a fire, and Aéroports de Montréal again decided not to send their firefighters. They have to come from far away. When Mirabel's municipal firefighters arrived, the individual had died inside his car. Municipal firefighters are not trained for that. These things happen. People often do not know that airport firefighters exist. However, when they are needed, it is a matter of life and death. They have to act quickly.
I would like to take advantage of today's debate to salute the 31 valiant firefighters who work at the two airports, located in Mirabel and Dorval. Nine are in Mirabel, and the other 22 are in Dorval. Just think, there are nine firefighters for one airport. These people risk their lives, and all they ask is to do their job; all they ask is to save lives. I salute these people, who put the safety of passengers and airport staff first.
I am thinking in particular of Philippe Gagnon, president of the Syndicat des pompiers d'Aéroports de Montréal, and of Alexandre Bertrand, vice-president of the Syndicat des pompiers d'Aéroports de Montréal. I am also thinking of Yvon Barrière and Jonathan Choquette from PSAC‑Quebec. For his bravery, I salute hero Francis Labrie, a firefighter who was suspended because he took the fire truck, went to the scene and tried to save a life. This is no laughing matter.
Aéroports de Montréal tells us that municipal firefighters are to intervene inside an aircraft. Canadian airport firefighters can hose down a plane from the outside, but they are not allowed to go inside the plane. This is against the rules of the ICAO, which is headquartered in Montreal a few kilometres from our airports. To be able to intervene in an aircraft, they need to have completed 333 hours of training. Municipal firefighters do not have this training, and they cannot get there in time. They lack the necessary resources.
In his motion, my colleague says quite rightly that firefighters need to be able to reach the mid-point of the runway in three minutes. However, under municipal standards, firefighters arrive in 25 minutes.
People inside a burning aircraft die after three minutes from the smoke. It is extremely serious. Airport firefighters who follow international rules are needed because there are inherent risks to aircraft fires.
For example, aircraft fires release toxic gases that are specific to airports. There are chemical, physical and thermal dangers, the combustion of composite materials, the oxygen and halon tanks, the sulphur, the exhaust from the running engines, engine fires, the hydraulic systems, and radioactivity.
I do not want to hear that Montreal firefighters are trained for these specific types of risks. Think of the hot brakes, tire fires, flammable synthetic oil, door openings, deployment of emergency slides that are specific to planes, batteries that produce hydrogen gas and lead to a risk of fire and explosion, radar systems, the inflatable cushions, and so on.
We need to have trained firefighters who arrive on time. In France, Great Britain and most industrialized countries, the international standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization, or the ICAO, apply. In Montreal, where the ICAO headquarters are located, these standards are not used, which is rather ridiculous. It is shameful. Our colleague is giving us an opportunity to take note of these shortcomings today.
For example, the Canadian aviation regulations, called CARs, require only three trucks. Unlike the rules at most airports around the world, personnel is not specified, and Aéroports de Montréal takes advantage of this omission to excuse its understaffing.
For six years now, firefighters at Mirabel airport have not received any medical training. The Canadian aviation regulations say that medical training must be up to date. However, since Mirabel no longer has the required number of passengers and is supposedly a cargo-only airport, they say medical training is not required. All they are trying to do is save money at the expense of human lives, when we know that chartered planes, flight schools and general aviation operate out of Mirabel. The situation is extremely serious.
One of the main problems we are having in my riding has to do with the airport administration structure. It is a non-profit organization that essentially leases the land the airport is on for a very long time. These folks are being asked to make money, to make their activities profitable, to open shops and to break even.
At one point, Aéroports de Montréal got a new president. The first thing he did was cut the number of firefighters, the number of trucks available to respond and firefighter training. I guess this means that if there is ever a fire with radioactive elements, the airport firefighters will respond with three trucks and three firefighters. There are even cases where there are so few firefighters that the support truck carrying the equipment cannot even get to the plane. Firefighters are then told to hose down the outside the plane, to get there in three, four, five or six minutes, but to wait for municipal firefighters before boarding the plane. Now we are relying on the municipalities.
I commend the initiative of my colleague who moved this motion. He took action instead of waiting for dozens of deaths in a crash landing or fire. He is looking ahead. The people, the passengers and the staff come first for him.
There is an urgent need to act and amend the outdated Canadian aviation regulations. There is an urgent need for greater transparency in the management of our airport facilities. These facilities belong to the taxpayers, to Quebeckers, Canadians, the people of Mirabel.
At some point, these people need to be held accountable for their actions.
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- Oct/25/23 6:30:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by taking a few seconds to thank the member for Fleetwood—Port Kells for bringing this motion forward. The member chairs the Special Committee on the Canada‑People's Republic of China Relationship. I know that he is deeply interested in issues that transcend party lines, that promote the common good, the public good. He is a man of—
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- Jun/22/22 5:40:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will not be disarmed. The Minister of Transport is not even able to sign a sheet of paper to start the construction of a seniors' residence in Mirabel, but the Liberals can come up with a motion on this subject to meddle in our affairs.
With respect to greenhouse gas emissions, the Minister of Environment is incapable of knowing that oil is brown and black and that a pipeline carries it, but we are being told what to do about health.
As was said earlier, 95% of the weapons used in the incidents we are currently seeing are illegal weapons, but the government does not want to make a list of criminal organizations.
When the Liberals do their job, they can tell the provinces to do theirs.
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- Jun/22/22 5:30:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Motion No. 47 is a very interesting motion. I read it carefully. There are many items and observations in this motion on improvements the governments of Quebec and the provinces need to make to long-term care. We know that many people suffered during the pandemic. We really need to keep their interests in mind when we legislate.
When I read the motion, my first thought was to grab my phone, open Google Maps and look at where we are, because I get the impression that the person who wrote this motion did not know that they were in Ottawa. Not only does this motion talk about Quebec and provincial jurisdictions at every turn, but, what is more, it contains factual errors.
We are told that health care is a jurisdiction the federal government shares with Quebec and the provinces. I find this motion absurd. In recent years, the federal government has suddenly become interested in health care. It has developed a passion for health care, for regulating health care and for imposing conditions on the provinces. The Liberals appointed a Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, and now they want to attach conditions to health transfers and to microtransfers.
Now, the Liberals want to tackle long-term care when they have never, ever, managed such facilities, as I said before. This is absurd, because they are so interested in health care that, when the time comes to pay, they disappear. When it comes time to reach into their pockets, they disappear. When something is likely to cost even a penny, they disappear.
According to the Liberals’ perspective in this motion, health is a shared jurisdiction. They are gravely mistaken, since they have made it somewhat of a shared jurisdiction over the years by using a loophole in the Constitution known as spending power. Health care is so not a shared jurisdiction that they have to interfere in a roundabout way.
I will explain for the umpteenth time how the spending power works. The Liberals in Ottawa wake up one morning, read the Constitution and decide to interfere in health care. Once they have read the Constitution properly, they see that they do not have the right to legislate health care. They then think about how they can interfere in the provinces’ affairs and decide to tighten the purse strings and to clamp down on the provinces so hard that, sooner or later, the provinces will do what they tell them to do. That is what is known as spending power. That it what they are doing by imposing conditions.
That is the case with the Canada Health Act and many other legislative measures. They have invented these shared jurisdictions. This is really the power to hold up the provinces. It is literally an extortion power over Quebec, over sick people, people who are suffering, people who are victims of post-COVID downloading. It is a power the federal government gave itself to hold up these people who are suffering.
The Liberals are arrogant enough to tell us that health care is a shared jurisdiction. In any case, violating Quebec’s jurisdictions is certainly the exclusive purview of the federal government. I can attest to it.
It is funny, because the provinces and Quebec, the ones that know what health is all about, the ones that manage hospitals, the ones that work in this area all year long, are asking for increased health transfers. They are asking for unconditional transfers that will cover 35% of health care system costs. That is what the people who know what they are talking about are calling for.
Other people who also know what they are talking about include the witnesses who appeared before the Standing Committee on Health, of which I am a member. They told us that the Quebec and the provinces need more funding to carry out long-term reforms, particularly in home care and long-term care. The provinces should be able to make these reforms with increasing, stable and predictable funds.
In the past few weeks, no one has appeared before the Standing Committee on Health to ask the federal government to impose more constraints on the provinces because they need them. The government is proposing new constraints for the provinces, as if they needed them. The spending power is being used very liberally.
Only this week, the hon. member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River, whom I have jokingly called “Dr. Spending Power,” suggested to the Standing Committee on Health that the federal government should hold back the funds until Quebec and the provinces have met the federal government’s immigration and medical staff targets.
I cannot make this stuff up. Quebec manages its economic immigration, and the federal government wants to reopen the agreements to interfere in our affairs. Now it is interfering in workforce training, when it cannot even run its own immigration department. IRCC cannot even bring in temporary foreign workers. The government cannot even process those applications in a timely manner, but it wants to tell us how to train our workforce. Quebec has always defended its administrative sovereignty tooth and nail with asymmetrical agreements, and the other provinces should follow our lead.
That is what the federal government’s shared jurisdiction is all about.
Over the years, the Liberals and Conservatives have cut health care funding so much that Quebeckers now believe they are the ones who can no longer manage health care. They are losing confidence in themselves and in their institutions and hospitals, because they do not realize that the problem comes from above. The problem comes from people who are interested in every aspect of health care except the aspect they are actually responsible for, namely taking the money and transferring it.
I will be honest. If the federal government were a good government and did its job like everyone else once in a while, and if the people on the other side were competent, which they definitely are not, we might be interested in hearing their advice on health care. I though they might be good at it and maybe I am prejudiced against the federal government and especially the Liberals, so I went to see the list of the federal government’s achievements in its own areas of jurisdiction.
Let us start with IRCC, which may be the worst immigration department of a G20 country. These people cannot bring in temporary foreign workers on time. Last December, our farmers were wondering whether they would get their workers, because the government was doing new labour market impact assessments, which had already been done in Quebec by the Commission des partenaires du marché du travail, Quebec's labour market partners commission. The federal government thinks that temporary foreign workers are going to steal our jobs when we are at full employment. That is how the federal government is doing in jurisdictions where it is supposed to be good.
Let us talk about passports. The federal government cannot get the printer to work, but it wants to tell Quebec and the provinces what they should do in health care.
Moreover, the government cannot even fulfill its military obligations toward its partners. It took the war in Ukraine to remind the feds that NATO exists and that normal countries take care of their army. The government does have time, however, to harass people about health care.
The Minister of Immigration is doing nothing about the airlift. We have been talking about it for weeks, and when the government finally woke up, it found three planes. We would have to put 50,000 people on each plane for that plan to work. However, the federal government has time to harass us about health care.
Let us talk about Phoenix. Some of the federal public servants whose work is being praised by the government have lost their home. Some are still refusing promotions today. They are refusing them because they are afraid that Phoenix will mess up their file. However, the government is telling Quebec what to do about health care.
Let us talk about KPMG. The minister does not even know that she is entitled to request an investigation. The Minister of National Revenue has not read her own act. However, the government is interfering in health care.
The Governor General drinks champagne while our indigenous peoples do not even have drinking water, but the government can tell us what to do about health care.
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