Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be with you at this critical time as this sitting of the House draws to a close. During these final two minutes in your company, I will be pleased to speak to you and hope that I will not put you to sleep or make you wonder whether this will ever end.
Since my time is very limited, I will get straight to the point: The Bloc Québécois is going to vote against this bill. In our opinion, it is useless, an empty shell. It claims to be creating a national strategy when in fact it does nothing of the sort. At best, it allows the Liberal Party to boast about having a strategy and claim that it has the knowledge to tell the provinces what to do.
The government already has a whole host of programs and, in any case, its only role is to transfer money to the provinces and, potentially, to cede land that Ottawa owns but does not use. It should be providing transfers with no strings attached and ceding unused land. Even that would move us closer to something that makes more sense as far as housing goes. Housing is a major crisis for most of Quebec's big cities and a common problem in western countries generally, but it could be mitigated with the tools at our disposal.
We know that centralization gets us nowhere because Quebec and the municipalities have a better understanding of local realities and citizens' needs. Although Ottawa claims it wants to collaborate, its usual “Ottawa knows best” attitude leaves little doubt as to how it will implement such a strategy.