Duly noted, Madam Speaker.
What about your Hélène Monette Boulevard?
My GPS is no use; recognition for poets, it would seem
Is harder to find than organic and fair trade cocaine
I call for poetry
From Speak White to Speak What
From Michèle Lalonde to Marco Micone
By those who blaze the trails
And those who draw tears from the page
By Rodney Saint-Éloi and all our diasporas
By Herménégilde Chiasson, Georgette Leblanc
And all of Acadia straight in the eye
Let the path of poetry stretch out
From St-Venant-de-Paquette to Wendake
Let an artist from Trois-Rivières climb Duplessis's statue
To sculpt Godin's face up there
I call for poetry
In songs, on pages, in rap bars
By Gilbert Langevin, Nicole Brossard, Sol or Manu Militari
In its noblest forms or proudly bastardized
By our inspired successors
Apathy will never recover
By its peaks and roots
Its iridescent brothers and incandescent sisters
Its promises that we will hold high
With arms open wide
I call for poetry
I call for poetry
Hoping that you will answer
I have a minute and a half left, but I do not know what I could possibly add to David Goudreault's words, what he just said, what I just read. What a magnificent poem.
Not many members in the House are artists, which is too bad. We have a lot of doctors and a lot of lawyers. We have engineers. That is fine, but it seems to me that art would help us in our debates. It would help our debates if there were more room for art, music and visual arts. There is also cinema, of course.
I could also talk about the precariousness of artists' situations. That is another debate. It is important, but we do not talk about it very much. In Quebec, 80% of artists earn less than $20,000 a year. That is the poverty line. These are the people we see on our phones, watch on television and hear on the radio. They live in precarious situations, and yet they are the spice of life in this country. They are what makes life worth living. In fact, for people who spend most of their lives on their devices, we see images, we see photos and we see videos. There are people who create them. There are people who come up with all that. There are ordinary people, and then there are artists. These people need to be paid properly, like everyone else. They have to be able to earn a living, because we need them. We need them more than ever in these difficult times.