Nicole Demers

[Quebec Meals on Wheels Week, March 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, March 18 to 24 marked the second annual Meals on Wheels Week in Quebec, and this year's theme was “Du coeur au ventre depuis plus de 40 ans”, or “Food from the heart, for over 40 years”.

This event serves to raise awareness about the meals on wheels program and the very important role it plays in the lives of seniors. Every day, across Quebec, hundreds of volunteers, a vast majority of whom are older women, give freely of their time to prepare hot meals and deliver them to the homes of people with disabilities, or who are going through a period of mourning, difficulty or distress.

A number of activities were held throughout the week to highlight the dedication of these volunteers. Activities included meal deliveries by local celebrities, free community meals, musical performances and an open house.

I would like to congratulate the Meals on Wheels organization in Laval and the 10 meals on wheels volunteers in the Laval area for their invaluable work and passionate commitment.

[Quarantine Act, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my remarks by mentioning the beautiful light that shines on this side of the House. This is not a coincidence. The sky is blue and God is a sovereignist. We are going to take advantage of this light to enlighten our colleagues, the members opposite, who form the government. I hope they will be wise enough to listen.

I could not help but smile when I saw that this legislation was coming back here to be amended. Let us not forget that, at the beginning of this session, a bill was rammed through the House, namely Bill C-2. We felt that this issue had not been debated long enough to ensure that this legislation would provide measures that could be implemented, and that it would be responsible and meaningful for our fellow citizens, whom we represent here.

Today, I see that we have to go back to Bill C-12, which was passed in 2005, when I was still a new member in this House. In fact, this bill was my first experience with the legislation here. I had to learn how to debate it in the Standing Committee on Health, along with my colleague, the member for Hochelaga, who was then our party critic on health issues. Even at that time we had serious reservations about the provisions that the government wanted to include in the bill, because we often felt that they were too intrusive or not logical enough to allow for concrete, easy and effective implementation.

We have to be very cautious and serious when we talk about infectious and communicable diseases, about viruses and bacteria that proliferate. We have to take our role seriously. At the time, we deplored the fact that people would be accountable to an authority designated by the Minister of Health, because we felt that this was a somewhat complex process that would prevent the bill from being an effective piece of legislation.

When I saw the bill and saw that there was a move to amend this section, that is, section 34, I thought to myself, “Two years later, people are finally seeing that, once again, the Bloc Québécois was right.” Naturally, it was members of the Bloc Québécois who were the first to oppose that part of the legislation, which called for an authority designated by the minister. We did so because we believed that the bill encroached too much on provincial jurisdictions, especially in the area of health.

In Quebec, our department of public health is very effective and takes great care to protect us against all communicable and infectious diseases. I know that this is not necessarily the case everywhere. A hospital in Vegreville had to close its doors this week. Also, in Loyds, hundreds of patients had to be informed that they had probably contracted HIV or hepatitis, because the doctor had not reported, as one must, these diseases to public health authorities.

It is not enough to simply enact legislation. That legislation must be respected, obeyed and enforced, and we must be able to use that legislation effectively to protect ourselves against what we could call barbarian invasions. Any mention of tuberculosis, west Nile virus or SARS is sure to arouse fear. I would remind the House that the original Quarantine Act was drafted around 1872, if I understood my hon. colleague from Richmond—Arthabaska correctly.

We know that diseases crossed borders with the influx of pioneers who came here to start a life for themselves and become proud citizens of what was then Lower Canada and Upper Canada, in other words, the Quebec and Canada of today.

Infectious diseases did not stop crossing our borders just because we passed this legislation in 1872. In the early 1900s, around 1910 or 1918, right here in Hull, on the other side of the river, a very serious Spanish influenza outbreak killed many people. It decimated entire families. We still see traces of those families today in the names of the hon. members sitting in this House and the people nearby, who live in Hull, in Gatineau. These people probably have in their lineage, among their ancestors, people who died from the Spanish flu. At the time, even though the legislation existed, we did not have the means to enforce or apply it.

As far as such epidemics are concerned, we have to think about all these soldiers we send abroad. Often we pay more attention to what is going on over there in terms of equipment, tools and armament, and not pay much attention to what they might be bringing back with them when they come home. This can be very dangerous for them. These days, a number of women take part in these missions. Many of them come back and can also spread infectious diseases to their families and children because they did not receive the necessary care when they were abroad on a peacekeeping mission or, unfortunately, at war.

It is not enough to have laws, we also need the political will to apply them. We have to start resolving the problems in our own backyard. We currently have tuberculosis epidemics in a number of our first nations communities. It is unthinkable that in 2007 there are still people suffering from tuberculosis. That is the direct responsibility of the federal government. It is a responsibility that it neglects far too often and which it has not respected because the epidemic is spreading, not stopping.

In Kashechewan, people may be forced to leave their homes and to be relocated because their water is not potable. However, they cannot do it today because there is no money. If we have billions of dollars to invest in arms, we should at least have a few million to invest in providing safe, healthy housing where individuals can live with dignity and respect. At present, this is not the case. It is much easier to adopt a laissez-faire attitude. Hundreds, even thousands of individuals will suffer from these illnesses, including tuberculosis and other diseases. They will contract them because of unhealthy living conditions. Nothing is being done about that.

The previous government ratified the Kelowna accord. We all voted in this House to honour that accord. However, the government decided otherwise and is not making any further commitments. That is most unfortunate.

First nations communities, Inuit communities, all these communities find it difficult to carve out a place for themselves in our society. It is difficult for them to have access to adequate health care, appropriate education, and affordable, healthy, safe housing. It is difficult for them, but they have been abandoned even though it is our first responsibility to help them. We abandon them, we do not invest in these societies. Why? Why is there constant encroachment, to the tune of millions of dollars, on provincial responsibilities and jurisdictions when we do not even take care of our own responsibilities?

I do not understand. And yet, some small countries who have very little do much more for their citizens. I regularly visit Cuba, because I love the island and the people. Someone will say to me that they do not have a great deal of freedom, but I sometimes wonder which one of us has more freedom. I know that they have first class health care. All Cubans can study as much and as long as they wish. Education is free. Later, the government assigns the doctors it has trained to various countries to work for humanitarian causes. These doctors are very well trained.

Whenever I go to Cuba, I am never afraid of getting sick. I know I will be taken care of. When we went to Taiwan last fall, my travelling companion got a toothache on Taiwan's national holiday. The person I was with had a toothache. We had to go to a hospital because there are no dental clinics. At the hospital, two doctors took care of us. In under 10 minutes, my companion was in a chair and personnel had administered a sedative and something to take away the pain, and all of this happened on Taiwan's national holiday. Of course, thousands of people live there and their hospitals do not have all the equipment we have here. But their government chooses to invest in human resources to provide a standard of care and services that we rarely find here.

That service standard is rare here largely because of our provincial governments. Why do our respective governments not have enough money? Because previous federal governments cut transfer payments. Beginning in 1994, cuts to provincial transfer payments, including payments to Quebec, resulted in the sorry state of our health care systems today compared to those of some small countries that have much less than we do, but that care about their citizens' health.

We support the principle underlying this bill. We are not against it. Obviously, we cannot be against what is right, but today, as we study this bill, we must ask ourselves a question. Will this bill provide enough money to train quarantine officers? Will enough money be invested in training customs agents and all of the front-line staff who meet people at the border?

That was one of the concerns expressed by the Standing Committee on Health in 2004-05. We were not certain that all steps would be taken in order to enforce Bill C-12. After two years, we see that enforcing it is very difficult indeed, and that it was not really being enforced because there were flaws in the bill. In the years to come, we will likely find other flaws in the bill, given that the Standing Committee on Health had considerable reservations about approving the bill, which was adopted on division.

If we all minded our own business, there would likely be fewer bills of this kind to review. For example, despite what the government thinks, Bill C-2 was adopted very quickly, and a number of its sections are still not in force.

Why are we asked to debate bills that seem so important to the government, only to then have it dismiss everything we determined, everything we decided, everything we wanted to be able to give to our citizens as members of Parliament here in this House? We wonder why.

I do not know. I only hope that, in the future, we will be more careful. If it is true that Bill C-42 is crucial to the proper enforcement of Bill C-12, through the amendment of section 34, it is also true that there are several other sections of the bill that should be reviewed. In enforcing—

[Status of Women, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, what the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women is not saying is that there is group called REAL Women of Canada that the minister met with shortly before changing the funding criteria at Status of Women Canada.

Can the minister deny that this ultra-conservative group challenges women's right to abortion and their right to flourish throughout our society and that it wants to limit the role of women to domestic affairs?

[Status of Women, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, all women deserve the title “real women”; we are not inferior beings.

[Status of Women, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, when the Bloc Québécois asked the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women about the changes made to the funding criteria, the minister said, “that the government understands the difference between supporting not only organizations but real women”.

Can the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women tell us who these “real women” are that she is referring to?

[The Budget, March 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, from my perspective, the hon. member across the House is quite right to say that I am concerned. However, I would remind the House that it was not the Bloc Québécois nor the Parti Québécois that decided to put the money given to Quebec for the fiscal imbalance towards lowering taxes. Once again, it was a Liberal government that decided to do so. And they did so not to meet the needs of Quebeckers but in response to an election campaign that was very difficult for them.

I would like to tell the hon. member not to worry. I believe our colleagues in the Parti Québécois will do their work and demand that the government use the money given to Quebec to improve the lives of all Quebeckers, for things such as social housing and the programs developed by the Parti Québécois over the past 30 years.

[The Budget, March 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, how pleased I am to hear my Liberal colleague's tirade.

They should really stop treating us like fools. The Liberals were in power for 13 years and ignored even the basics of the principle of fiscal imbalance. They stopped giving money to the provinces in 1994, so they could line their pockets and do what they wanted. They stopped giving people what they needed. Under the Liberals, the CMHC raked in enormous amounts, as did the employment insurance fund. The Liberals took money from workers and kept it. And today, they would dare tell me that I am not defending Quebeckers because the Bloc will vote for the budget? We promised Quebeckers that if the government committed itself to correcting the fiscal imbalance, we would support this budget. We are probably the only party in this House that sticks to its promises, come what may.

I would ask the Liberal member to think before trying to make us out to be dishonest. He should take a look at himself, the members and the policies of his own party before trying to cast others in a bad light. We must look at ourselves before talking about others.

[The Budget, March 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for sharing his time with me.

I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to congratulate all of the people who were elected yesterday evening in our great country of Quebec, as well as those who had the courage to run in what promised to be a difficult election and who nevertheless conducted an outstanding campaign.

I would like to offer my sincere sympathy to the members of the Parti Québécois—which I support—who were not re-elected. I am sure that we will still succeed in doing what we must do for Quebec.

I have risen today to discuss the budget not because we do not support it—everyone already knows that we will support it. However, over the past few weeks, my colleague from Laurentides—Labelle and I have toured the regions in Quebec to find out what women think of the cuts to Status of Women Canada, and to better understand how women view this budget overall, how they view these cuts and how concerned they are about the rise of the right in Quebec and in Canada.

We have met with 47 groups but we have not finished. We are going to continue meeting with women's groups over the coming weeks. Those 47 groups represent more than 100,000 people in Quebec. In all of those groups, the women we met told us the same thing.

In this budget, we are solving part of the fiscal imbalance, but we are not solving all of it. There will still be a lot of things to do before that happens. We know that the government has promised us that it will continue to put a major effort into this. We hope that it will keep its word. However, we see that it is still continuing to invest in areas that are under provincial jurisdiction, and we are not all happy about this.

When the Minister for the Status of Women decided to cut her budget, she told us that she wanted to reinvest that money to meet the needs of more women. However, women have seen that the way these cuts and these reinvestments were made means that women now have to look for charity.

There is no longer a desire to give women the tools to liberate themselves and get out of the rut we have been in for many years, with families, single parent heads of household—mostly women, older women, and a large number of people in Quebec and Canada, all getting poorer. That means that we are increasingly needing federal transfers to be able to meet the needs of our people. The federal government is not meeting those needs, and it is not the job of the federal government to do that.

When it comes to the needs of women in general, in Quebec and in Canada, I would in fact say that, in this budget, the federal government is neglecting certain women for whom it is actually responsible. Obviously, I am talking about first nations women, aboriginal women, women in the north, the Inuit, and so on.

Those women fall within the direct jurisdiction of the federal government, and there is absolutely nothing for them in the budget that has been presented to us. I am very disappointed to see this, and extremely concerned. We know that it is even harder for women in aboriginal communities to have a decent life. Housing is virtually nonexistent. There is no waste water treatment. There are problems with education. Some Status of Women Canada programs were designed specifically to enable women to pass on the aboriginal communities' values and way of life to the children, so that they could have a better life and feel better about themselves. We are familiar with the many problems faced by young people in those communities.

But the minister and the government were not concerned about solving those problems.

They spread the money around various programs— not the kind of programs that communities had asked for—but the kind of programs that give the government visibility. When governing you must respond to the needs of the people and not do what will keep you visible or popular, as the current government has done.

Unfortunately, since having become an MP, this is the first government that I have seen act in this way. I am troubled because people are not aware of the dangers that await when they elect such a government, even though it is a minority. Several issues are still on the table and the government will go to any length to pass bills that we, as a democratic society and a social democratic society, hope will not see the light of day.

I have been reading quite a bit about the budget and also the views of several groups about it. I would like to share some of what I read regarding the budget in a FAFIA summary:

Women in Canada are affected differently than men by tax and spending policies of governments as a result of their varying labour market opportunities, family and community responsibilities, and levels of economic security. This budget demonstrates how little these facts are acknowledged. Some of the measures in this budget continue a trend that was documented in FAFIA's ten year retrospective budget analysis...authored by Armine Yalnizyan.

They also speak about aboriginal women, as I mentioned, as well as immigrant women. FAFIA states:

While this year’s federal budget invests an additional $342 million per year for language instruction and employment-related support, the federal government has backed away from its commitment to establish a federal agency to assess and to recognize credentials at the federal level. It has instead directed resources to providing immigrants with path-finding and referral services to identify and connect with the appropriate assessment bodies. However, the difficult question of how foreign credentials will be assessed has yet to be resolved.

In addition, many groups have called for the elimination of the live-in requirement of the Live-In Care-Giver and Domestic Program, which attracts skilled and almost exclusively female professionals to work as full time care-givers while residing in their employer’s home. Groups have also demanded that these workers be granted landed status upon arrival.

This has not yet happened. I find that unfortunate because we know of situations where these women, these people, have been abused and used as slaves in the homes of people who have the means to pay for slaves in modern times. These are modern-day slaves.

The Standing Committee on the Status of Women has often discussed human trafficking in terms of sexual abuse, but it has not discussed these women even though this is a major issue because there are so many of them. There are thousands of them living in people's homes. They are hidden. They are forced to keep quiet because often, they do not even have an opportunity to learn a language that would enable them to communicate with the outside world. This is a very dangerous situation.

Earlier, we talked about social housing. The budget does not mention social housing even though we know that the CMHC is making astronomical profits—over $11 billion. I think they might even be making $15 or $16 billion.

When drafting a budget, the government must consider the people it represents. Even though it was elected by 36% of the population, it should meet the needs of more than 36% of the population. When a government is elected, it is elected for everyone and it must meet everyone's needs.

That is why the Bloc Québécois will continue to demand that the government do better, that the government do more and that the government do a better job of meeting the needs of Quebeckers and Canadians.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, March 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, as I close out the debate, I will not talk about Bill C-280. Nor will I talk about the hundreds and thousands of refugees who, in the absence of a refugee appeal division, will be denied full Canadian citizenship and will be sent back where they came from.

I will not talk about them because today, after listening to the debate all day, I realized that this government is so mean-spirited that it is using all kinds of people to deny other people their rights. It is using women to deny women their rights; farmers to deny farmers their rights; people born elsewhere to deny the rights of refugees; and francophones to deny the rights of francophones.

It has been going on about the previous government ad nauseam, saying it was they who did nothing. Now this government has been in power for over a year. It made its promises over a year ago. When the Conservatives were in opposition, they said that there would be a refugee appeal division, but now they want nothing to do with it.

This is not right. The Conservative members from Quebec, who spend their time denying people their rights and denigrating other members from Quebec, have done nothing as part of the government. They have done nothing for their ridings, nothing for their citizens, nothing for Quebec and nothing for Quebeckers.

Next week, when we vote on this, will they decide to do nothing for refugees? I hope that all Canadians and all Quebeckers with immigrant ancestors will remember this.

We have been asking for this appeal division for years. The UN has even said a number of times that it is incredible that it still has not been implemented.

This is not just a whim or a passing fancy the Bloc Québécois came up with for political gain; we are talking about lives, people, women and children who are living in churches today, who do not even have the opportunity to go out in the storm because they cannot even leave their home in a church, where they have been shut in for more than a year in some cases.

This is not right. I wonder what the government is doing. We are still waiting for rights to be reinstated and for fairness and justice to be restored. We are not talking about billions of dollars, we are not even talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

The hon. member from the government side spoke earlier. The government interferes in every provincial jurisdiction when it suits its own interests. However, when it does not suit the government, it talks about the millions of dollars. But it wants to invest those millions of dollars in fighting cancer or Alzheimer's, wherever its own interests are served.

It is a matter of political will to restore fairness and justice for people who have the right to be heard, listened to and validated in their quest for freedom.

[International Women's Day, March 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, on March 8, we will celebrate International Women's Day. Events to mark women's contribution began in Europe in 1910, but it was not until 1977 that the UN established Women's Day.

The theme adopted by the Fédération des femmes du Québec to mark this 30th anniversary of Women's Day is “Toute l'égalité. L'égalité pour toutes”, that is, full equality; equality for all. Although women are equal to men in the eyes of the law, they are not yet equal in fact.

International Women's Day is a time to remember the battles waged and the victories won and to make people aware of just how much work still remains to be done. In 2003, for example, the average salary for women was $28,200, compared to $39,700 for men.

My Bloc Québécois colleagues and I stand in solidarity with women and demand that the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Status of Women give women back the programs that will help them achieve equality.

Happy International Women's Day.