House of Commons photoLost his last election, in 2019, with 33% of the vote.
Privilege May 2nd, 2017
Mr. Speaker, it is very important to remember what the debate is about, which is access to the Hill. I was a staffer when I watched Yvon Godin get stopped from crossing the road to get to a vote a few years ago. It is really important that this gets to PROC to have a discussion and figure out how to solve the problems so this stops happening.
How important does the minister consider it to be to get this thing out of here and into the committee where we can study and resolve the problem?
Mr. Speaker, as the member for Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères knows, I represent the riding of Laurentides—Labelle, which is north of Montreal. It is a large rural riding that was represented by the Bloc Québécois for a long time and then by the NDP for a few years.
Since becoming an MP, I have noticed, when travelling around the riding, that people often say that a federal MP can really get things done. For nearly 20 years, my constituents had MPs who worked very hard to convince them that the federal government was absolutely useless, that it could not help communities, and that it was not there for people. As a result, it makes me a little bit angry to hear the member talk about the need to stand up for voters' interests, when his party worked against those people's interests for decades.
Can my colleague tell us what the purpose of the Bloc Québécois is?
Mr. Speaker, this is a quick follow-up on the question from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. I rather appreciated it. I think the point of it was after the attacks of October 2014 the rules changed to take the parliamentary protective service away from Parliament and give it to the RCMP and change the chain of command. I think that is a concern for many members. It has come up at PROC many times.
I wonder if the member is aware of that change and what he thinks of it. I think it was a very fair question from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.
Mr. Speaker, my colleague talked about the process for bringing electronic petitions, and he recognized that consensus did not exist until the end of the process. I think there is a very important point there. Consensus came at the end, at the very end, at the implementation point rather than at the discussion point. I think that is a very worthwhile point.
He also made the point that the electoral reform committee had consensus, which I think is a totally spurious argument. I do not know in what world a whole lot of members not agreeing and having four supplementary reports constitutes consensus.
I wonder if the member could tell me how he sees consensus being important and how it actually exists in the context he describes, because I do not think it does.
Innovation, Science and Economic Development April 12th, 2017
Mr. Speaker, access to reliable broadband Internet service is very important in today's economy. Rural and remote regions, like certain areas in my riding of Laurentides-Labelle, do not have the necessary infrastructure to support broadband services. I cannot wait for the “connect to innovate” program to be implemented to fix this problem.
Would the Prime Minister like to update the House on this, one of the most important issues to Canadians living in rural areas all across the country?
National Volunteer Week April 7th, 2017
Mr. Speaker, April 23 to 29 is National Volunteer Week. Thousands of Canadians in my region volunteer, and I want to thank them for their gift of self and their altruism in helping their communities.
Last Saturday, the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec awarded medals to 15 people in my riding. I was at the ceremony to express my appreciation for these young people and seniors and their continuing commitment to serving their communities.
On behalf of all my constituents, I want to congratulate Jacques Larivière and Thérèse Gobeil from Nominingue, Marie-Andrée Clermont and Gilles Pilon from Sainte-Anne-des-Lacs, Carmelle Huppé and Marguerite Paquette from Saint-Sauveur, Lucie Lanthier from my home town of Sainte-Lucie, Viviane Courte-Rathwell from Arundel, Renée Deschênes-Dubé from Mont-Laurier, Émilie Gauthier from Mont-Tremblant, Simon Gratton-Laplante from Mont-Laurier, Laurence Latour-Laitre from Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, Catherine Mainville form Lac-Saguay, Nicolas Gaudreau from Saint-Sauveur, and Guiliana Desrochers from Sainte-Anne-des-Lacs.
The development of our communities depends on volunteers, and we can never thank them enough.
The Budget April 4th, 2017
Madam Speaker, obviously, it is important to look at all of the policies surrounding tax credits. I do not fully agree with my colleague.
The Budget April 4th, 2017
It is true, Madam Speaker. Had I stayed at the end of school in the town where I grew up and which I now represent, I would not have the career that I had. I found really interesting work, on contract, working on the Internet from 2000, for almost a decade, as an editor for an online high-tech news website. With all my education, all my experiences having been the same, had I stayed at home I simply could not have done that.
The economic opportunity loss for our youth in rural areas is very serious. The Internet file is the number one issue that people speak to me about in my riding. There are so many other issues that come up, but there are none that come up more often or more firmly than the lack of Internet access in our region.
When I toured the 43 municipalities in my riding, all 43 of them, every one of them, said that their number one priority in the community was Internet. A town of 400 people spent $100,000 of their municipal budget on getting Internet access when it had a boil water advisory in its small aqueduct downtown for more than 10 years.
If that does not tell members how important this file is for us, there is no way of expressing it well enough.
The Budget April 4th, 2017
Madam Speaker, I am not sure that the public transit credit did a whole lot in my community, where public transit is essentially non-existent. We have a system that I believe uses six retired school buses on a one-off fare system with no passes, so there is nothing that worked for the actual credit. Those six buses try to service 35 communities about four times a day. It is not a realistic system, so we need to figure out ways to move this forward and to better invest in rural areas. Rural is a rather large portion of this country, as my colleagues will definitely relate to. Rural needs are really important, and I always look forward to new investment in rural areas.
The Budget April 4th, 2017
Madam Speaker, I do not remember exactly what I was saying, but I was talking about the need for Internet in rural areas. Very often I see people who come to the riding, want to buy houses or set up businesses, look at beautiful properties, look at their phones, and see the famous red X because there is no signal. They ask the real estate agent if they can get online, and the answer is that they cannot get online here unless they want to use satellite, which has high latency and low reliability. People are looking for solutions, and I am really looking to solve these issues. The billions of dollars available for Internet will help that region.
My riding in the north has the MRC county of Antoine-Labelle with a population of approximately 35,000. It has 17 municipalities. It is a large and not very wealthy region. We did a study last year to find out who had access to Internet, and fewer than one in three households had theoretical access to 10-megabit service. Even fewer than that are actually connected.
What happens is that the kids finish high school, and they want to get online. They want to participate in the modern economy. They go to to the city and they simply do not come back. Then the parents want family to come visit, but they will not even come to visit as much as they used to. The cottage owners are having their grandchildren come less often than they used to because of this very serious problem.
Related to this is cellphone service. If people do not have both Internet and cellphone service, we are not going to solve the communications issues we have.
What do we do about all this? We have to invest. The federal government, provincial government, municipalities, and the CRTC have all committed large sums of money to grow the Internet, so I am very happy with that progress. The CRTC's statement just before Christmas that broadband has to be defined as 15-megabit service with unlimited data is a critical new threshold, because, quite frankly, nobody in my riding has that access.
I am really hoping we can build on the huge progress in our budget, which moves a whole lot of things forward very well, and move this file forward as quickly as possible. Internet is critical, and I would like to make sure we get there.
Another issue is public transit funding, which I think is terrific. I spent years, when I was living in Guelph, as a transit advocate. I believe that if we invest a lot of money in our transit systems, then we can get enough people out of their cars that we do not have to expand the highways infinitely.
I always wanted to know if there is a line beyond which we do not need to pave any further. I have always been curious if we can find that line. We can build highways and roads in every direction as far we want, as long we want, as often as we want, but at some point we have to ask if we have enough, if there is a better way of getting around. Our budget and platform have committed large quantities of money over a long period of time to improving our public transit infrastructure. I really believe this is the direction we need to be going as a country.