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While preparing to return to the House of Commons in Ottawa following the summer recess, five Bloc Québécois MPs from Laval and the North Shore are as uncertain as ever about the prospects of the Conservative minority government remaining in power, although they accuse the Liberal opposition of being complicit with the Tories by working with them as part of a “coalition.”
Liberal-Tory coalition
“Instead of taking their responsibilities and helping people, Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff have instead chosen to form a Liberal-Conservative coalition, a coalition that goes against the interests of Quebec,” Serge Ménard, the Bloc MP for Laval’s Marc-Aurèle-Fortin riding said during a briefing held in Laval on Monday and attended by the Bloc MPs.
Regarding an election, Ménard said, “We are ready, but most people aren’t as certain. If you check the polls, they’ll tell you if it is in the interest of either of the two parties to trigger elections. But our point of view remains the same ? we vote according to the interests of Quebec.
Little aid to forestry
“The outcome of the last session shows that the Conservatives and their Liberal allies were incapable to finding solutions for the needs of Quebecers,” he added. “Both support a plan for fighting the economic crisis that is inadequate, but mostly unjust for Quebec.”
The Bloc sees serious inequity in the fact the Conservatives’ economic aid package that passed last January gave $10 billion to Canada’s auto manufacturing industry, which is centered in Ontario, but devoted much less to the country’s long-ailing forestry sector, in which Quebec has an important stake, which got $1.7 billion. “There are 500,000 workers in forestry in Canada and 400,000 in the automobile industry,” said Ménard. “We can see that certain regions are being favoured.”
Nothing for Quebec
Rivière-des-Mille-Îles MP Luc Desnoyers sees more evidence of the Harper government’s neglect of Quebec in the fact they just awarded a $1.15 billion contract for Chinook helicopters to Boeing Rotorcraft Systems in the U.S. “In terms of benefits for Quebec, there’s absolutely nothing that’s assured,” he said. “No document signed by Harper and Boeing demonstrates there’ll be any benefits.”
And even if some of the Boeing business were to come north, Desnoyers notes the company’s facilities are in western Canada. “That’s a lot of good jobs that with gestures like the ones we’re seeing now risks the loss of even more good jobs. Today we have to invest in aerospace. That military funding, just like military aircraft, should be invested in infrastructure, research and development, new technology, so that in 10 or 15 years from now we’ll have a strong aerospace industry in Quebec.”
Unhappy with ‘Quebec Nation’
While the Conservatives and virtually everyone else in the House of Commons enthusiastically supported the Quebec Nation Motion in 2006, which recognized Quebec as a “nation within a united Canada,” the Bloc is growing impatient with the fact the status is relatively meaningless. The Bloc has been trying to add flesh, with proposed resolutions to make Quebec’s Bill 101 applicable in federal institutions, which would effectively end official bilingualism in the province.
“Harper when he comes to Quebec will tell us that it is extremely important, that it is going to bring us all kinds of benefits, but when he goes west of the Ottawa river his talk changes completely,” said Nicolas Dufour, the Bloc MP for Repentigny. “It is only a symbolic recognition. It contains absolutely nothing meaningful to be given to Quebec.” With the economic crisis as yet unresolved, the Bloc’s members remain unhappy with the country’s employment insurance system.
Reforms inadequate
A commission the Tories and the Liberals have announced to examine the shortcomings of employment insurance “is but an empty shell, since the weak solutions that it is probably going to propose are already known and will be coming too late,” said Alfred-Pellan MP Robert Carrier. Laval Bloc MP Nicole Demers maintains social responsibilities on the part of the government were all but abandoned in the last budget given the impact of the economic crisis. “The budget set aside nothing for the construction of social housing for families,” she said, noting that the Bloc had identified at least $2 billion worth of needs.
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