Guillaume Deschênes-Thériault

“Mr. Speaker, I should mention that I will be sharing my time with the member for Shefford. One year ago, the government was elected on a single, simple promise: to fix the tariff crisis. We all remember the departure of former prime minister Trudeau and the arrival of the new Prime Minister, who was portrayed as the man who would save us from the Trump administration, as a businessman who could hold his own against the most formidable negotiators. One year on, however, it is clear that the promise has not been fulfilled. Where are the results? Again, the members of this government and the Prime Minister were elected one year ago, almost to the day, purely on the strength of a promise to end the tariff crisis. In April 2025, the Prime Minister promised that the crisis would end in June. Then he pushed it back to July. Then he pushed it back to September. Now a year has passed and not only is the tariff war still going, but it has escalated thanks to Mr. Trump’s recent executive orders. Worse still, we were presented with one of the most absurd ideas ever last week: Borrow $25 million on Quebeckers’ collective credit card and create a supposedly sovereign fund that is neither sovereign nor independent. That speaks volumes about the government’s long-term vision. Right now, it raises the question of whether we are dealing with pure improvisation. The icing on the cake is that on April 6, the Trump administration issued a new executive order. There is now a flat 25% tariff on the full value of the export if the percentage of Canadian steel, aluminum or copper in the product exceeds 15% of the total composition. As a result, many products protected by CUSMA that were not taxed before are being taxed today. When we asked the Prime Minister about this issue—when my leader asked about it, I was right beside him—we realized that he did not even know about it. Amazing. He did not even know about an executive order signed two weeks earlier. According to a study by Desjardins, this new 25% tariff applies to one-quarter of exports to the U.S. It is significant. There are exemptions, like for the aerospace sector and products that contain American steel or aluminum, but, for the most part, this new American surtax is hitting our industries much harder than previous ones. The cumulative effect is very clear. It is the added value of our economy that is being taxed—skilled trades, engineering and local processing. Washington is no longer taxing our exports; it is taxing what we are building. That is unprecedented. The people had put so much faith in this Prime Minister and his government to put an end to the tariff war, but the result, as I said earlier, has been an escalation of that war. What are we doing in the meantime? The Bloc Québécois proposed a series of measures when the so-called economic update was being drafted. The government did not use a single one of them. These measures would have been easy to implement, would have barely cost anything and would have directly helped the people most impacted by the tariff crisis in Quebec: workers and SMEs. Today, we are back at it again for the sake of our workers and businesses, who are sick of waiting for this government. After months of waiting, on May 4, the government finally announced new measures: $1 billion in loans and $500 million for economic development agencies. It is worth mentioning something here, because the government does not seem to realize that it is missing the mark. Although I do want to acknowledge that these agencies are very useful, they do not address the concerns of businesses that are already in debt. The problem is that with this announcement, the government is helping businesses that will be affected in the future, not the ones already being affected by the crisis. We estimate that Quebec businesses alone have lost about $8 billion in one year. The $1.5‑billion measure announced by the government is woefully inadequate. I would remind the House that ahead of the economic update, the Bloc Québécois proposed numerous measures to support businesses. For the benefit of my Liberal friends, I will outline some of the seven measures proposed by the Bloc Québécois to support workers and businesses severely impacted by the tariff crisis. The first of our demands is the one that resonates most with the public. It is to implement a wage subsidy program modelled after the one rolled out during the pandemic to prevent layoffs, maintain employment relationships, and protect the expertise within businesses during the tariff crisis. The Bloc Québécois’s second proposal is to impose safeguard tariffs to protect the hardest-hit sectors, including the softwood lumber, aluminum and steel industries, from cheap imports. These tariffs would apply to products from the United States or any other source that resorts to harmful trade practices, such as dumping, as my colleagues mentioned earlier, or the misrepresentation of Canadian origin. We proposed another measure, and that is buying back a portion of the countervailing and anti-dumping duties that softwood lumber manufacturers pay when they export to the United States. We proposed this measure a long time ago. It was also proposed by the industry and supported by the various unions representing workers in this industry. We could also stimulate the secondary and tertiary processing of our resources. The Bloc Québécois always aligns its proposals with industry demands. AluQuébec, the secretariat of Quebec’s aluminum industry cluster, is calling on governments to implement an urgent response on three fronts: subsidies or interest-free loans, preferential procurement rules for Quebec, and anti-dumping quotas or duties on imports. The CEO, Charlotte Laramée, says that the aluminum processing sector deserves the same treatment as the steel sector, and that includes immediate protection against unfair competition. For their part, steelworkers and the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec, or FCCQ, are taking the same stance. The CEO of the FCCQ, Véronique Proulx, sent a clear message when she said, and I quote: “For businesses whose survival is currently in jeopardy, this is not enough. They need to have the cash flow necessary to maintain their day-to-day operations, not take on more debt or make investments that will only benefit them in the medium to long term”. In the latest economic update, however, the government did not include any targeted measures for businesses affected by Donald Trump’s illegal tariffs. On the contrary, the Liberals patted themselves on the back for taking in more than $10.1 billion in tariffs in 2025‑26 and redistributing $5.7 billion. Wow. That means that $4.4 billion in countertariff revenue is sitting idle in Ottawa’s coffers while SMEs are going out of business. The Liberals are celebrating that. The government clearly has the tools, but as my colleague from Joliette—Manawan said earlier, it does not have the will. Real solutions do exist, though. Another proposal that the Bloc Québécois made was a wage subsidy program for businesses affected by the tariffs. We calculate that the government could allocate $5.5 billion for such a measure. This is an expediture that could easily be offset by cutting back on the numerous subsidies going to oil and gas companies, since they are making record profits anyway thanks to rising global oil prices. Their costs are not going up, so these multinational corporations are pocketing the difference. Not providing wage subsidies in response to the ongoing tariff war is tantamount to condoning the inevitable wave of layoffs, letting decades of expertise go to waste, and permanently crippling whole industrial clusters in Quebec and Canada. The Bloc Québécois’s request today is very simple. The revenue generated by our retaliatory tariffs must be redistributed, as a priority, to the workers and businesses that are bearing the brunt of these measures. It must not be diluted in centralizing programs that encroach on Quebec’s areas of jurisdiction or subsidize fossil fuels. For every dollar collected on the targeted imports, a significant portion must be used to maintain wages here, keep factories open, and keep our regions alive. What needs to be made clear today is that the real urgency is not to maximize returns on a fund that will bet on oil and gas. The real urgency lies with our workers, our small and medium-sized businesses, and our regions, which are bearing the brunt of a trade crisis triggered by Donald Trump’s decisions. With just a fraction of those $25 billion, we could take action now. We could set up a special fund to immediately support businesses hit by tariffs, protect jobs, support retraining and give our small and medium-sized businesses the means to weather the storm. That is what a responsible response looks like. That is what rising to the challenge look like. Instead, the government seems to be taking a different path. Either it does not believe in its ability to negotiate an agreement that will put an end to these unfair tariffs, or it has already accepted that our economy must slowly adapt to a new reality where our traditional markets and our SMEs—which form the economic fabric of Quebec and keep it afloat—no longer matter to the government. We need answers now. We need a government that chooses to defend jobs, support businesses and invest in the future. Ultimately, the question is simple: Will the government choose to wait, or will it choose to act? We choose to act. We are doing it for our workers, for our SMEs, for our businesses, for Quebec and for our regions. Everything the Bloc Québécois does is done out of love for Quebec.”