Stéphane Lauzon

“Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague on his speech. We might say that he tirelessly defends his party with all the enthusiasm he is known for. That said, although we may not agree on much, I am going to take the liberty of asking him a question. We are all familiar with the Build Canada Homes program, which was previously called “Bâtir Maisons Canada” in French. This sparked a lot of reactions, particularly because some people felt the name was a clunky word-for-word translation. This led the government to change the the name of the program. This brings to mind other situations we have seen, including the discovery in January 2025 that the website of the Liberal leader, who has since become Prime Minister, was riddled with errors and appeared to have been translated with Google Translate. Then there is the campaign slogan “Elbows up”, which was translated into French as “On lève le coude”. Unfortunately, that phrase actually means raising a glass, as in having a drink. All of this led us to March 25, 2026, when we found out that there were no francophones on the team that wrote Mark Carney’s speech. When I— Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is new, as my colleague on the other side of the House was saying. Sometimes, we still say his name out of habit. All these problems show—my colleague on the other side of the House might acknowledge this— that government policies and decisions, as well as their implementation, are carried out in English. Quebec comes second. French is an afterthought. Ottawa clearly could not care less about our reality.”