Mr. Speaker, first, let me thank you for recognizing me at this late hour. I also want to mention that what you said last week about wanting to celebrate Quebec culture as one of the great human foundations was well received by a lot of people. I encourage you to try and share that new way of seeing things with all your caucus and I wish you luck.
First, I want to commend my colleagues for Shefford and Richmond—Arthabaska as well as our leader, the hon. member for Sherbrooke, for insisting on having this debate on the serious crises we have experienced over the last year and a half, particularly the recent ice storm.
I am very happy to have been able to come back to this Parliament if only to thank all our fellow Canadians who have helped us a lot during this extremely difficult period. The people of Chicoutimi and of the beautiful Saguenay—Lac Saint-Jean region know very well how desperate and frustrated you can be when nature wreaks havoc.
You saw the pictures at the time, a year and a half ago, of the area in the heart of the city of Chicoutimi called “Le bassin”, and what they called the little white house, which survived the wild and impetuous torrent. I am telling you tonight that this is the old section of Chicoutimi, my neighbourhood, where I grew up and where I was re-elected. I am very proud of it, and that period was a very difficult one.
At the time, we were all struck by the courage and the serenity of the victims and by the extraordinary spirit of solidarity among the people, first in the region, then in Quebec and then throughout the country.
It unfortunately takes a crisis of such magnitude to eliminate political partisanship, ideologies and racial prejudice. It is kind of crazy. Sometimes it looks like nature is taking revenge. Sometimes nature appears to be setting new priorities, because when everything is going well, both individuals and countries take the lazy approach. Laziness is sometimes called the mother of all vices. So nature sometimes decides to remind us of the real priorities and the basic necessities. I hope that all we have faced in the past few years will provide some inspiration for the future.
The great floods have left an indelible mark on our collective unconscious. I am sure that the constituents represented by my colleague, the member for Brandon—Souris, and others who have lived through events as serious as ours, and neighbouring ridings in Manitoba, share these same sentiments.
Yet, throughout these great and terrible tragedies, people's noblest qualities come through. Solidarity, compassion, mutual support, sharing and the desire to serve all flourish and make us proud to belong to the great Canadian family.
In my riding, people took charge immediately, when the gravity of the situation became apparent. People met and organized the distribution of essential supplies. We saw municipal councillors, to whom I wish to pay tribute this evening, Carl Savard and Jacques Bouchard, who directed the delivery of firewood. We know that firewood is a key element for survival in the dead of winter when you have no fuel.
While on this particular topic, I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate my colleague from New Brunswick, the member for Tobique—Mactaquac, who telephoned me at the height of the crisis, having heard that we in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean had organized the collection of firewood. He called me and told me he would have a dozen truckloads of firewood. He asked me to help him direct this contribution that he wanted to send. I found that quite exceptional.
Naturally, we must take this opportunity to congratulate all the volunteers in Quebec and throughout the country who played a role, out of view of the cameras. We must also pay tribute to the work done by all our mayors, elected officials and municipal government employees. I think that the last crisis we have been through will certainly provide us with an opportunity to thank and congratulate the people who helped us survive in our region.
I am thinking of our mayors, among others. The mayor of Chicoutimi at the time; the mayor of La Baie, Claude Richard; the mayor of Ferland-et-Boileau, the municipalities that were almost destroyed, Léon Simard; the mayor of Saint-Félix, Jean-Marie Claveau; the mayor of the very tiny and now famous municipality of Anse-Saint-Jean, Laurent-Yves Simard; the mayor of Petit Saguenay, Hervé Lavoie; they all worked very hard; and the mayor of Rivière Éternité as well.
Interestingly enough, there are no sovereignists and no federalists when disaster strikes, only people who want to help one another. We should learn something from this. We witness this kind of solidarity only in times of crisis.
When there is no crisis, we go back to our collective passivity, to the same old arguments that may not always be a priority for our fellow citizens.
The lesson we should learn is this: Elected representatives should be able to present a constructive agenda to the whole country. We have been going on economic missions abroad. I have nothing against this. I am trying to find out the concrete results of this, and I may be able to come up with specifics in a few weeks. The first mandate for Canada, if we are to promote solidarity among Canadians, is to set up a Canadian economic mission.
I look forward to business people from Chicoutimi meeting with their colleagues in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. I know for a fact that good trade relations between business people in different regions will have a major cultural impact.
Since we have to deal with new natural phenomena, piecemeal emergency preparedness is not good enough. We need a Canadian plan to support the provinces. We need all the elements, federal and provincial. It is wrong that the Canadian Forces should not be officially part of the emergency preparedness scenarios in Quebec or Alberta. We have to wait for a request from the provincial government to deploy the young men and women of the Canadian Forces. In the future, they must be included in the emergency measure plans, because we are likely to be faced with other unusual weather phenomenons.
We will need different strategic plans. Our forces should also be provided with more modern equipment. I think that from now on we will be less fearful of investing in more sophisticated, more modern equipment for our forces, in order to make them more responsive and more efficient.
I think that the cooperation between the federal and provincial levels of government must also extend to unified emergency plans. Because of all the crises we had to manage during the last year and a half and the ones we can expect in the years to come, we have to opt for a more continuous type of consultation. We can no longer manage these crises at the last minute.
I think that all of the stakeholders would agree that everyone did their best. Things did not go perfectly well, and lessons have to be learned here.
For example, my area was hit a year and a half ago. Some of the smaller municipalities still have huge credit lines. I am thinking in particular of a small village. It has a credit line of $2.4 million since the flood a year and a half ago. That cost them $90,000 in interests last year and it still comes to $12,000 a month in interests for a small village that has yet to receive any compensation. So, there are still problems out there. There are problems because we are not well prepared for these types of emergencies. We have to do better.
This will give the provincial and federal governments a great opportunity to pool their resources together to further help our fellow citizens in times of need.
We cannot have gone through three crises in the space of a year and a half and still think that it will not happen again. These phenomenons are something new in our lives. We have to be better prepared.
I am pleased to give my colleague from South Shore the opportunity to talk about these new phenomenons and the extremely serious crises we have gone through these last few weeks and especially this last year and a half.