Madam Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the member for Repentigny.
I am pleased to rise in the House this evening to speak on behalf of my constituents in Manicouagan. I wanted to say that because, as we all know, every time I speak in the House, I do the same thing: I think of the people of the North Shore, for they are my motivation, the reason for all my speeches in the House as the member for Manicouagan.
We should always bear in mind the fact that we are in this place to represent tens of thousands of people. In a sense, it is as though they speak through us, and so I speak on behalf of my people in this place in the hopes of securing our well-being. At the risk of sometimes seeming naive, I believe we can accomplish this by striving to live up to an ideal that I think is expected of us. I try to live up to that. What I do as an MP, I do on behalf of my constituents. I act on behalf of my people and what I do, I do for them, the Quebeckers, the people of the North Shore, the Innu and the Naskapi.
My plan is to address two aspects of Bill C-4: the underlying principle, or what it intends; and our responsibility as elected representatives. Social justice, the redistribution of wealth and de jure and de facto equality are all principles the Bloc Québécois holds especially dear. We want some degree of security for all of our people—children, workers and seniors—during these tough and uncertain times.
The duty to care for oneself and others was and seems to be the underlying principle of the Canada recovery sickness benefit, the Canada recovery caregiving benefit and the Canada recovery benefit, which picks up where the Canada emergency response benefit left off with a more flexible employment insurance regime.
The Bloc Québécois is an opposition party that makes proposals, and back in April, we were already calling for an enhanced CERB that would meet people's needs and include an incentive to work designed to support our economy. We had to strike a balance between the needs of workers and those of employers. We needed to take into account the present and the future.
Although the Bloc Québécois would have like to have seen this change to the measure five months ago, we are satisfied that now, as we enter the second wave, the government heard and understood our proposal to help workers, who can now earn more, and business owners, who can now get the human resources they need. This just goes to show that the opposition is essential, as is the necessary democratic dialectic.
This brings me to the second topic I wanted to discuss, which is the responsibility of elected officials. I believe that it was unacceptable for the government to prorogue Parliament, because a crisis is inherently urgent. At a time when there were dire needs, when the public was asked to pitch in, to make sacrifices, to set an example and to demonstrate a sense of duty, the government shut down Parliament and disappeared. Why? Why were they hiding? What were they concealing? Why did they vanish? Did they just want people to forget?
Shutting down Parliament is not pitching in. It is not making sacrifices. It is not stepping up and demonstrating a sense of duty. It is not self-sacrifice. On the contrary, it came across as an act partly—if not fully—driven by selfishness, by blind partisanship, in an attempt to make people forget what certainly appears to be nepotism.
Shutting down Parliament for several weeks in the midst of a pandemic, in the middle of an emergency, as we were coming up with ideas, is not what the public could and should have expected from its elected officials, especially when prorogation need not have lasted more than a few hours.
Just as it did with the emergency wage subsidy, the government served itself instead of serving others. Now, when we have so little time and people are still coming up with ideas, proroguing and imposing gag orders is not what people can and should expect of us. That is the sign of an arrogant and complacent government that is trying to give the impression that Canadians are its primary concern, when in reality its main concern is its own interest and getting people to forget about the WE scandal, which is still ongoing.
In closing, the Bloc Québécois is in favour of the measures set out in this bill that will support our own, the people of Manicouagan. However, we must consider not only the substance of the bill, or its meaning, but also its form. When that form involves a gag order, that has meaning as well.
The government failed in its duty by depriving elected representatives, voters, the people of Quebec, of democracy, all for what I wish were good reasons. If I were a Liberal MP, which, with all due respect, seems like science-fiction or even personal dystopia, and I had to go through the exercise that I spoke about at the beginning of my speech, namely thinking about what motivates me and the reason behind all of my speeches, I would do my job based on that motivation, which for me is the people of the North Shore. If I were a Liberal MP, I would realize how problematic my inconsistency was.