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Decentralized Democracy

Marilène Gill

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of the Subcommittee on Review of Parliament’s involvement with associations and recognized Interparliamentary groups Deputy whip of the Bloc Québécois Member of the Joint Interparliamentary Council
  • Bloc Québécois
  • Manicouagan
  • Quebec
  • Voting Attendance: 64%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $175,049.14

  • Government Page
  • May/1/24 2:23:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, together, let us celebrate May 1, International Workers' Day. Let us celebrate the day together and united to make our voices heard. This is a time to remember the major workers' rights movements and the gains they made. It is also an opportunity to highlight the rights still left to be won, like the right to EI for everyone who has lost their job or whose work season has ended; the right to decent working conditions for everyone, including temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers; and the right to earn a living amid a soaring cost of living and housing shortages. There is also the right to feel valued in the workplace and the right to a life outside of work in an increasingly hectic society. I invite those who can come to join the big march organized by the Coalition du 1er mai in Montreal. I urge all of us to stay united in the fight for workers' rights.
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  • May/2/23 7:40:03 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, I thank my colleague for the question. Certainly, we all have stories to tell. I cannot say that everyone I have spent time with has wanted to tell these stories. Sometimes it is so painful. We need to respect each person's choice. They might not be able to tell their stories. I have several, but I have one in particular I heard from a woman. In 2015, I organized a march for missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and a woman came up to me to talk about her sister. She told me that her sister left for the city, let us say Quebec City, roughly 500 kilometres away, and she never came back. Marching is a symbolic action to call for change, but for this woman, just participating in the march helped her to talk about her sister. We did not talk about it as much as we do today. There are also a lot of taboos. She realized that she was not the only one to have gone through this, that there were other cases. Where I am from, it did not happen in an industrial area. It actually happened in an indigenous community of 5,000, where someone disappeared one day. That was one case, but there are so many more across Quebec and Canada, each under different circumstances. There are places in my riding, 1,000 km away, where children were taken away at the age or one or two and never returned to their communities. There are little girls who have gone away, never to be seen again. People are still mourning these children who never came back to their communities. There are so many stories, so many permutations, but they all boil down to the need for solidarity and concrete action to ensure this never happens again and to enable these people to grieve their loss, if not heal.
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