Denis Trudel

[Committees of the House, November 20th, 2024]

No, Madam Speaker, not Romeo, as my colleague says.

I would say first Hamlet, and then one of the characters from Shakespeare's comedies.

[Committees of the House, November 20th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, that is a very interesting question.

By the way, I would like to thank and congratulate the interpreters who work with me. I know it can be a challenge. Sometimes I get carried away and go off on a tangent. I am grateful to them, as I have already told them. It cannot be easy. I know it is challenging. I am infinitely grateful that they are able to convey my meaning to my unilingual English-speaking colleagues. I have said it before, but I wanted to say it again.

I started out as Hamlet, asking the deep questions: to be or not to be a parliamentarian. I started out in that direction, questioning myself the way Hamlet does. Afterwards, I would say I started leaning more towards Prospero or characters from Shakespeare's comedies like Twelfth Night—

[Committees of the House, November 20th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, that is so disingenuous. We are ready to end this circus. Our conditions have been very clear for a month now in the House. No one can deny that.

I was talking about seniors living on the streets earlier. The government had a chance to help them by increasing old age security for seniors 65 to 74. We want to help them. This week, I saw a story on LCN about workers going to help clean a woman's house. Her living situation was pitiful. I cannot get over the fact that such a thing is being tolerated in this day and age.

The government had its chance. For a month, we have been talking to it about vulnerable seniors. It had its chance to help them. If it had helped them, we would be ready to talk.

[Committees of the House, November 20th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I would appreciate not being interrupted. My colleague just broke my momentum, which is annoying. I would ask for a little respect. I am making an effort. I am performing here, unbeknownst to my agent. I should charge for this performance. The public does not usually talk. When people in the audience talk during a performance, they are kicked out, but that is another story. People have less and less respect for audience members who disrupt shows. People pay a lot of money, and they have the right to hear the performance.

Where was I? This clash of ideas should lead to brilliant, nay, incandescent bills that serve the varied interests of our constituents. That is democracy. At least, that is what it should be. As a separatist, I respect the House as an institution. However, for the past month, I have been robbed, assaulted and abused. I cannot move anything forward for my constituents in Longueuil—Saint-Hubert and for all Quebeckers.

As I was saying, I have been faced with this dilemma for the past month. One minute I was sitting here, and the next I woke up because it was my turn to speak. It has been a month and a half since I have spoken in the House. I was asked to speak about an important issue, a report by the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities on the financialization of housing. “At last”, I thought, “they want to hear from me.” At the time, I was thinking about the fact that my skills and my work as a parliamentarian were being solicited. We put people to work on this file. The Bloc Québécois research team, my colleagues and I worked on this file.

We worked on the committee's report as well as the housing crisis. We did our homework. That is what I am going to talk about. The financialization of housing is a very important element in this major housing crisis. It is one of the obstacles to solving the housing crisis. The truth is, in Quebec alone, one million housing units need to be built by 2032 or so. One million units need to be built within the next eight years. However, in 2021, a record year, 67,000 units were built.

This means that, to achieve the objectives that were set by the CMHC and the big banks, to reach market equilibrium, which is one million housing units in Quebec and nearly 3.5 million housing units in the rest of Canada, we would need to build three times more housing units than have ever been built before. Can members imagine the construction sites, the urgency, how far away we are from the target. Can they imagine all the resources that need to be deployed to face the challenge of building three times more housing units a year than we have ever built before, year after year until 2032. It is nuts. If we do not do it, then what?

I am going to talk about homelessness.

Homelessness comes up every day in the media. We recently learned that in the past five years, there has been a threefold increase in the number of deaths in the streets in Quebec. Three times more people are dying on the street. They die from overdoses or from the cold, and no one seems to care in the slightest. They are found along rivers, in tents next to sidewalks. Among those people are seniors, workers. The face of homelessness has changed and if we do not address the broader issue of the financialization of housing, which I will come back to later, homelessness will grow.

I want to talk about homelessness because there is a specific aspect of this issue that directly concerns the government. In the last budget, the government announced a $250-million envelope to put an end to encampments in Canada. Everyone was happy, everyone applauded the good news. Unfortunately, eight months later, with winter approaching, with nights already getting colder and with temperatures dipping below freezing across Quebec and Canada, the money has yet te be paid out. Quebec's share is about $60 million. Quebec is ready to match this amount and invest another $60 million to help house people.

We saw that this morning in Montreal. There are people sleeping along Notre‑Dame Street. The city does not know what to do with them any more. Even if they are removed from there, no one knows where to put them. The federal government keeps adding administrative and bureaucratic hurdles. People who want to open shelters are being asked, what colour will the walls be? How big will the beds be? Will the blankets be synthetic or wool? How many pillowcases will be required? How many pencils will be used to register the number of homeless people sleeping at their shelter? It is so dumb. They keep adding forms and hurdles. People are fed up.

When it comes time to take care of people, housing organizations in Quebec know what to do. However, these organizations are not like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, X or Elon Musk. They do not have billions of employees who can spend all their time filling out an endless number of forms. The people who work in these organizations want to help other people. They are empathetic and competent when it comes to getting people off the streets and finding them a place to live, when it comes to helping people to improve their circumstances and finding them social housing. We are talking about helping people overcome addictions. We are talking about helping them return to work. Some of these people may be just getting out of prison and they need to reintegrate into society. These organizations know how to do that. We just need to give the people with the proper know-how the means to accomplish these goals.

It is unacceptable that this $50 million is just sitting around in Ottawa when it could be helping single mothers who are sleeping in their cars in Rivière‑du‑Loup or Saint‑Jean‑de‑Dieu, a small village not far from Kamouraska. I know this is true because I went there. People are living in tents all over the place. In recent years, some women have even given birth on Quebec sidewalks. How can we allow such a thing to happen in a G7 country? How can we allow this money to sit idle in Ottawa, for some demented administrative reason, when it could be making a difference on the ground?

My time is almost up. I wanted to talk about the financialization of housing, but I am happy that I was able to talk about something that is important to my constituents.

[Committees of the House, November 20th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased that you are here. In fact, I want to open up to you, and I hope that you will have some answers for me.

Over the past month and a half, I have been going through a deeply serious parliamentary crisis, both on a personal and a professional level. It has been troubling me and keeping me awake at night. I am not sleeping well and my relationship with my friends and family is suffering. I no longer see my friends. I have been keeping to myself. My colleagues find me to be difficult and irritable. I am really having a hard time. I wanted to talk about it in the House because this concerns all members of the House.

Quite honestly, I would say that I was naive and a bit ingenuous when I was elected. I put my face on some posters and told myself that I was going to improve the lives of my fellow citizens, that I was going to come to the House to work every day to improve their lives, particularly the lives of Quebeckers.

People are concerned about all sorts of issues, such as the climate crisis, flooding, drought and the housing crisis, which we will talk about later. We are talking about a report from the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities that focuses on the housing crisis. That is quite serious, and people are grappling with this problem every day. The homelessness crisis is critical.

There is the language crisis too. French is disappearing. It has practically vanished from the rest of Canada and is dying in Quebec. Luckily, in a few years, we will have our independence and we will save the French language. In the meantime, however, we have to work within Canada and within our institutions. We have to work every day to improve the lives of our constituents.

What has been going on for the last month and a half? I come here every day and sit in my seat. I am no stranger to rehearsals. In the theatre, we rehearse a lot. I have acted in the same show 200 or 250 times. There is a big difference, however, between performing Molière 250 times and listening to 110 speeches on a privilege motion. A lot of the time, these speeches are delivered at a snail's pace to emphasize every word and really waste the House's time. The goal is to make absolutely sure that people get fed up, that they fall asleep, and that Parliament grinds to a complete halt. There is a big difference between Molière or Shakespeare and the stuff that we hear in this place. It is a far cry from Shakespeare or Molière.

I hope everyone understands my dilemma. When I arrived here, I was hoping that we would have debates, that we would put our ideas up against those of the Liberals, the Conservatives and the NDP. I thought there would be a clash of ideas and debates, that members would launch ideas back and forth, with each idea brighter than the last. I thought this verbal and intellectual clash of ideas would lead to—

[Privilege, November 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, today is like a nightmare. For a month, we were unable to debate issues, to fix the problems Canada is facing, including the housing crisis, the climate crisis and the language crisis. For a month, we did not talk about those things. Then, after spending a week in my riding, I drove back here thinking that now we would fix the problems in this country, that now we would get to debate. I must say that I am disappointed. One privilege motion has just ended, but another has been introduced. I agree that it is an important motion, but I sense that once again, we are going to waste hours and hours on it.

I would like to talk to my colleague about a very serious problem confronting us right now, namely encampments and homelessness. This is extremely important in Quebec. Before the last budget, the federal government announced a $250‑million fund to end encampments across the country. The Government of Quebec already has a plan to address homelessness in Quebec. Therefore, the federal government should give these funds to Quebec so that it can use them to end this major problem. However, the negotiations are getting bogged down. The federal government wants accountability. It wants to set conditions, and the negotiations are dragging on. Winter is around the corner. I would like to ask my colleague if he can put pressure on his friends in the Liberal government to bring the negotiations to a close and pay the money to Quebec so we can end the encampments before winter arrives.

[Privilege, October 31st, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I would say that he is a liar. Okay, fine, I will withdraw the words “hypocrite” and “liar”. We will see where I am going with that. For 20 minutes, the member gave a seemingly endless speech in which he insulted everyone in the House and said that the Conservatives were ready to form the government, except that they are not. They are not really ready to do that. They like that the Liberals are in power. They really like that.

We are asking them to move a non-confidence motion. We are now ready to vote in favour of such a motion. They are not ready at all. They have been doing nothing but talk for a month. They are wasting our time. We are not taking care of Canadians' problems. We are wasting time because of them. When will they decide to let this motion go and move a non-confidence motion? We are ready to bring down this government.

[Privilege, October 31st, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, I am forced to say that I sincerely think my colleague is a hypocrite. He gave a 20-minute speech in which he accused the Liberals of being responsible for all the world's ills, and we agree. We, the Bloc, and the NDP—

[Privilege, October 31st, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

For a month now, the House has been studying a motion of privilege that we are sick of hearing about. However, my colleague is not talking about it at all. He has been talking about the NDP, the Bloc Québécois, the Liberals, about this and that. He is not talking at all about the question of privilege raised by his party. I understand that he too is sick of hearing about it. It has been a month and he can no longer stand to hear his colleagues talk about it, but—

[Privilege, October 31st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, it has been Groundhog Day for three weeks. We are starting the same debate over again. In fact, we are scraping the barrel for relevant questions. I am going to ask my colleague a question that does not really have anything to do with the debate. I asked one of his colleagues the same question a week or two ago.

Does my colleague believe, in his heart of hearts, that independence is a legitimate option for Quebeckers?