Madam Speaker, you have handed me a golden opportunity to say hello. You know how much I appreciate you, and I am delighted to see you again. Congratulations on your election to this position. Please know that you are in my thoughts. I also congratulate all my colleagues who have been elected.
It is true in life, it is true in love, it is true in general, but it is especially true in politics: One should never take anything for granted. Over the past few months, we have learned that we cannot take democracy for granted. I am a sovereignist, a separatist here in the House. Our voices must be heard. It is a voice from Quebec. We are lucky to live in a democracy. We are lucky to be able to share these ideas and debate them. It is a great privilege.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all 82,525 voters in the riding of Mirabel for their trust. I include those who voted for another party, those who did not vote and their children, those who will be voting in a few years, those to whom we must leave a clean and healthy planet and a healthy environment. We do not count them in our voters, but they exist.
I would like to thank out supporters, because before being members of Parliament, before being elected, we are first and foremost political advocates, carriers of a cause and ideas that we hold dear. We devote a great deal of our lives to them. However, there are costs. A few minutes ago, my wife texted me to tell me that my six-month-old boy had just sat up for the first time. I was happy, but it shows how much we sacrifice to be here, for our ideas. This work must be respected. I would like to thank the campaigners, everyone who supported me and, of course, the citizens of all the municipalities in my riding and their elected officials. We have worked on many files, but some are not finished. I will continue to carry them. I carry them with me, in my heart, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I will be worthy of them. Being the member for Mirabel is one of my greatest honours in life. It is hard to find the words to express how fortunate we are to be doing this work.
There was talk of elections. Everyone knows that there was an election recently. The circumstances were unusual, with the arrival of Donald Trump, tariffs and a new Prime Minister with new polls. Under those circumstances, we were told that we needed an election quickly. What did the Liberals do? They found a new leader and formed a new cabinet, including some ministers who were around for the length of a reality TV show.
One of the ministers who had been around longer was the Minister of Finance. He was told to draft a budget because that is all he has to do. He was told to work on the budget because we were going to have a new government and a new Parliament, and we could not table estimates without a budget. Why? It is a matter of transparency. In our work as elected officials, especially in opposition, our main tool is information. The government has the information, such as the budget forecasts, the deficits, the debts, the revenue; when we are not given that information, we cannot do our job.
They are not even doing the bare minimum of what needs to be done in the first week of a sitting, yet the Liberals tell us there is a precedent. Earlier, I heard the member for Winnipeg North talk about Stephen Harper as though he were a disease in need of a cure. That is the precedent he gave for not tabling a budget. At the time, Mr. Harper's government had just arrived after years and years of Liberal governments. The senior public service had been appointed by the Liberals. There was no cabinet. These people had not sat in the House. There was no global crisis. What is more, the election was not called because a budget needed to be tabled. That is not what happened. That is the precedent we are being given for not tabling a budget. This is a 10-year-old, worn-out government, repackaged under a new name and with a new CEO. That is what we have.
The Liberals had time to table a budget, or even just a budget statement. It could be something shorter. The previous finance minister got us used to shorter updates.
I worked with the Minister of Finance and National Revenue when he was industry minister. We worked on his Bill C‑27 on artificial intelligence. He is a brilliant man and a pleasure to work with. We call him the Energizer bunny because he is super energetic, but his drawback is that he has a tendency to not finish what he starts. I think that in some drawer in his office there is a half-finished budget. He has certainly started working on it. Why will he not table it? It could be a budget statement.
Instead of doing that, the government is turning into an oil projects department. Maybe in the end, it will be all about vacuum cleaners. I guess we have to wait and see, because it changes all the time. The risk is that we are being told that, in two years, we will be able to approve all sorts of projects that will quickly save the economy. We are told that the projects are going to go ahead and that is the only way we are going to get by.
We have seen this strategy before. It was called the Canada Infrastructure Bank. That bank had the same mandate for the same projects, and the provinces were all in on it. Everyone was happy. Supposedly, many projects were going to be implemented, including public transit projects. However, things went so wrong that when the minister appeared before the committee, we asked him why he was not changing the name of the bank, since it was no longer even a bank and was not building any infrastructure. That is how badly it was working.
The Liberals say they are going to approve everything in two years. They are introducing a huge bill that could infringe on the jurisdictions of Quebec and the provinces in many ways. We will have to study it. In short, that is the Liberal plan. No budget is being presented, and no budget forecasts are being made. Bankers are not what they used to be.
What immediate action do we need to take to protect our economy? We must fully protect supply management through legislation. That is what we need to do. There has been progress, but the Liberal discourse has me worried. We know that, in the beginning, the Prime Minister was new to this, that he was taking one step forward and one step back. He was being advised and sometimes he listened to the adviser and sometimes he did not. We are not sure what happened, but in the beginning, he said he would protect supply management. I believe that is his intention. I want to believe it. He told us that we do not need a bill. Then he realized that Parliament exists, even though it is not always obvious that he knows that. He realized that a bill had already been drafted, that a bill was already ready to go and that it was two senators short of being passed.
During the leaders' debate, he said that the Liberals would vote for the bill. Now, the Liberals are back in the House saying that they will protect supply management, but not through legislation. They came up with new reasons. Yesterday in the House, the Liberals gave us new reasons not to fully protect supply management through legislation.
The first reason they gave us is that there is no point in doing this through a bill, because bills can be undone. Someone can introduce another bill and undo the first one. Imagine if I took my car to a mechanic, and the mechanic refused to repair it on the grounds that it would break again eventually. That is pretty much the same thing. While we are at it, we might as well stop regulating firearms and stop amending the Criminal Code. What are we here for as legislators if not to pass legislation? This is what they tell us every time. The Bloc Québécois has introduced this bill 13 times. If the government had said yes the first time, we would have the bill by now.
The second reason they gave us for not protecting supply management is that it would take time to get through the House and that, by the time the bill received royal assent two years from now, the negotiations would be over. Still, the government claims that in just two years, it can build an energy corridor in a country the size of a continent, make major infrastructure investments, build a port way up at Hudson Bay and launch a major federal project office, while consulting all indigenous peoples.
It says that, yet it seems that two years is not enough time for this same government to move fast enough to pass a bill that has already been drafted, introduced, put on notice and passed. Apparently, the government lacks faith in its senators. The Americans will respect this legislative approach because U.S. negotiators are appointed by Congress. The bulk of negotiations are handled not by politicians, but by professional negotiators within the departments.
That is a good thing, considering that the last time Liberal politicians went down to Mar-a-Lago to negotiate with President Donald Trump, they were treated to a T-bone steak with ketchup followed by threats of annexation. The task needs to be entrusted to non-elected professionals who are required to perform their work transparently and appointed by Parliament. The Americans will respect that. The matter is urgent.
No matter what their reason is for not supporting a bill to protect supply management, it is basically an admission of failure. After all, the Canadian government is not going to be the one deciding what is on the table. When two people negotiate, if someone puts something on the table, it stays on the table. Now they are telling us that if supply management is on the table, they will hold out. However, the last three times they told us they were going to hold out, they did not, and nearly 20% of our market was sold to the Americans for compensation. Having a business' list of customers sold off in exchange for a cheque, which is what they did to our dairy farmers, is not a career plan; it is a retirement plan. We need to protect our supply management system.
They talk about creating one economy out of 13. As we know, that is the Liberal line they keep repeating. The Prime Minister's cabinet prints that in bold and underlined and they repeat it. What problem do we have with that? What problem does the National Assembly of Quebec have with that? That rhetoric suggests to Quebeckers and people from the other provinces that if the provinces and Quebec do not give up their jurisdictions and do not allow Ottawa to walk all over them, then they are rejecting the others and engaging in protectionism. The Liberal government makes it sound like there is a guard at the Quebec border with a fleur-de-lis on his face and a blue cape at his back monitoring the containers, examining them gun in hand and sending them back to Manitoba. I have the data in front of me. Quebec's biggest trading partner is Ontario. Our imports and exports are higher with the rest of Canada than they are with the rest of the world, including the United States. There is free trade, but let us not forget that even the Supreme Court, in Comeau, said that if we had perfect free trade within Canada, that would prevent the provinces from regulating in a way that protects the public. Saying that it takes just one economy is just cheap rhetoric to tell people to give up their jurisdictions, allow pipelines through, or they will be seen as Trumpists and just as bad as the orange man to the south. That is what we are being accused of. If they want us to work together, then this sort of rhetoric needs to stop. They cannot tell us that they want everyone in Canada to sit at the same table and work together and celebrate the good times all while they keep up the rhetoric of creating one economy out of 13.
What do we need to do to address the crisis? We have been saying it for a long time: We need to be competitive. We need to be more productive. We need to invest in training. We need to invest in education, modernization, automation, home automation and artificial intelligence. We need to invest in our universities, our CEGEPs, our vocational training programs. We need to do all kinds of things to make Quebeckers and Canadians produce more per hour worked. That is what we need to do. It is also the solution to the labour shortage. That is the job of Quebec and the provinces, but there is a specific agreement with Quebec on workforce training.
The same goes for taxation. If we want to attract investment, we need a competitive tax system, we need to be able to offer export assistance programs, and Quebec has a role to play in that. Quebec knows what it is doing. It is a geographic reality. Canada is a big country, and Ottawa is far away. It is a geographic reality. How can we ensure that the provinces and Quebec can do their job so that we can move on to the economy of tomorrow? They need to have the means. The reality is that in Quebec's public finances today, health care eats up approximately half of the Government of Quebec's program spending. Technology is costing more and more, the population is aging, infrastructure is failing and, as health care takes up more and more room in the Government of Quebec's program spending, there is less and less money for the children I mentioned at the beginning of my speech. They are the ones who cannot vote yet, the ones who are going to work, study and grow in the most competitive economy in the history of humanity. There is no more money for universities, for CEGEPs, for vocational training, for assistance to businesses, for support, for adjusting our tax system. It is a tragedy.
When we say that we need higher health transfers and that the deal with the federal government is that 35% of health costs should be paid for through unconditional transfers, that is what the funds are for. The government tells us that health transfers have increased. Granted, an agreement was entered into with the federal government, but the amount is not enough. When the Prime Minister met behind closed doors with the provincial premiers in Saskatoon, was he aware that each and every one of them has called on the federal government to increase those health transfers to 35%? That could be done over several years if the government budgeted for it. It can be done, preparations can be made, but evidently the government does not budget. That is what it is for. It is for the economy of tomorrow.
What is the government doing instead? It is talking to us about pipelines, oil and gas, when our energy security is already taken care of. As for the plan for one economy instead of 13, the economic benefits were calculated by the Montreal Economic Institute, or MEI, though they were not verified. Between 1999 and 2019, the MEI defended the oil and gas industry 97.5% of the time during its media appearances. This information comes from a doctoral thesis. I am one of those people who reads them. The MEI said that climate science was mafia science. While we do not know who funds this institute, some people assume that it is backed by oil companies. Here is why: At the time of the energy east pipeline, the CEO, who is one of the highest-paid non-profit CEOs in Canada, complained that TransCanada was not giving him money. Perhaps he held off complaining about the others because they were giving him money.
The other study that was held up as proof that this plan will have infinite benefits was done by the International Monetary Fund. It is an econometric, statistical study. It was very intelligent, a well-crafted academic document that was summarized by the National Bank of Canada and published widely during the election campaign. It made the rounds. Those folks engaged in a thought experiment and asked themselves what Canada's GDP would be if there were no more provinces and no more geographic borders. According to HEC Montréal's Centre for Productivity and Prosperity, the main reason people in Newfoundland do not do business with people in British Columbia is not because we have 13 economies instead of one. It is because those two places are as far apart as Quebec is from Venezuela, which is something to consider if they want to build a pipeline. That is the situation.
There is one last thing I would like to address. We have to promote Quebec's businesses and business sectors. Why does the auto sector get $4 billion the moment they say “ouch”? Why has oil become a “nation-building project” when we do not have a national aerospace strategy? Why are we one of the only countries in the world capable of manufacturing an aircraft or a helicopter from A to Z, in a long-cycle, high-value-added industry, where more than half of the research and development jobs are in Quebec, and yet we have no government strategy? Why is Bombardier is able to produce reconnaissance planes that are purchased by a number of countries, but Canada chooses to pay more to buy from Boeing? That is what it did a few months ago, without going through a call for tenders, to buy aircraft that were about to become obsolete. The other countries that are buying this military equipment from Bombardier are asking us why our own country is not buying it. Why is there no strategy? We asked the then minister of industry, but he did not know. The Liberals will not tell us. There is no strategy for this long-cycle industry. Do they realize how privileged we are to have such an industry here? This industry is present in my riding, Mirabel, and in Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, whose member is playing on his phone. Do the Liberals realize what a privilege it is to have such an industry in a country the size of Canada, which, given its GDP, should not even be part of the G7?
I believe there is a lot of work to be done. There are intelligent people with good ideas on both sides of the House. That is a good thing because the government is a minority. I, personally, am all in favour of cross-party collaboration. However, we are going to have to share ideas. We will need to go beyond rhetoric, pipelines, “one economy out of 13” and other things that, frankly, make no economic sense. I think I am qualified to speak on that.
I am now ready and more than willing to take questions.
