It is easy to guess that the work of an MP is not always exactly a cakewalk. In the long run, it can even become rather heavy, all these requests from distraught citizens faced with the big bureaucratic machine.
“The staff of an MNA’s office is often made up of people who have a social worker profile,” confides to me the Bloc Québécois MNA for Jonquière, Mario Simard. It is not so much a question of developing political strategies as of responding to people discouraged by the cumbersome nature of the system. »
Sometimes a chosen one cannot do anything for them. But, from time to time, he manages to change their lives. By bringing their voice to Parliament. By struggling to make things happen. By bringing the human touch that seems to be lacking in the government apparatus.
These are the kind of small miracles that restore faith in politics and are happening in every riding across the country. But, strangely, things don’t seem to work that way in Chicoutimi–Le Fjord…
Letitia Cruz and her son, Raul Cruz, fled violence in El Salvador in 2019. Their journey, on foot and by bus, was long and perilous. It took them over a month to reach Roxham Road, which they had located “on Google Maps,” Raul Cruz tells me.
Once in Quebec, they took the road to Chicoutimi, where Letitia’s sister has lived for a quarter of a century. They found work. Learned French. Tamed the snow. In short, they have made Saguenay their new home. And they learned to love it.
After four years, bureaucracy struck, in the form of a deportation notice: mother and son had to leave Canada by December 8th.
Desperate, they called on the federal deputy for their riding, Richard Martel. But the elected Conservative rejected their request for help on the spot. He refused to even take a look at their file!
We are talking about illegal refugees, who have passed through Roxham Road, while there are legal refugees waiting! This case is illegal refugees. Me, I don’t get into that.
Richard Martel, Monday, on Radio-Canada
On Tuesday, the Conservative MP for Chicoutimi–Le Fjord received a volley of green wood from his political opponents in Ottawa. And for good reason.
PHOTO SEAN KILPATRICK, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
The Conservative MP for Chicoutimi–Le Fjord, Richard Martel, in 2018
Letitia Cruz and Raul Cruz are not “illegal refugees”. They have a work permit. A pending asylum application. They have committed no crime.
Neither they nor anyone else should ever be called an illegal immigrant. We can speak of an irregular immigrant, and again: Roxham Road has practically become a regular passage for tens of thousands of asylum seekers in Canada.
A parallel system supervised and managed with hundreds of millions of dollars by the federal government…
That could soon change. Negotiations initiated with Washington to modernize the Safe Third Country Agreement are finally on the verge of a conclusion. But in the meantime, we must remember that we are not just dealing with numbers.
We are dealing with human beings. What the hon. member for Chicoutimi–Le Fjord seems to have forgotten about in this story.
Mr. Martel’s major problem is not to distinguish between the legitimate criticism leveled at the federal government about Roxham Road and the people who use Roxham Road.
Mario Simard, Bloc Québécois MP
The Cruz family is the real world behind the political debates. The two Salvadorans didn’t even speak French when Sihem Mannai hired them to work in her restaurants.
That gives an idea of the magnitude of the labor shortage affecting the Saguenay. The catering sector is particularly affected, says with a sigh Mme Mannai. “Before, there were 24 of us working. Now we are 11. If you take two full-time employees away from me, I can no longer operate. »
The entrepreneur moved heaven and earth to save her two employees – and her business, at the same time. “I make a turnover of 1.3 million. It’s no joke. I have other employees, I have a business, it has to work! »
PHOTO JACQUES BOISSINOT, CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
The Bloc Québécois MP for Jonquière, Mario Simard, in 2019
She turned to Mario Simard, in the neighboring riding, after having been refused by Richard Martel. “The member for Jonquière, he accepted me right away. He was really very nice. It is thanks to him that my employees were able to stay. »
Does Richard Martel refuse to process the files of asylum seekers who have the misfortune to take Roxham Road? Did he rather find this excuse to justify his refusal to examine the file of the Cruz family?
Hard to say, since my request for an interview with the MP for Chicoutimi–Le Fjord went unanswered on Tuesday.
Mario Simard leans towards the second explanation. Some MPs, he believes, prefer to tell citizens in distress that there is nothing to be done rather than use the levers at their disposal to try to help them.
In the case of the Cruz family, there was definitely something to do. “It’s by collaborating with the people in the minister’s office [de l’Immigration, Sean Fraser]by presenting the situation, by telling them that it did not look like “that Mario Simard was able to obtain a reprieve for the two Salvadorans.
The eviction notice was revoked at the very last minute. Letitia Cruz and her son were granted temporary resident status.
And so it was that on Christmas Eve, Mario Simard changed the lives of two human beings. “It’s rewarding,” he admits. But that’s part of the job we have to do. You are an MP, you are supposed to offer your services to the whole population. You can’t say: those don’t correspond to the ideological orientations of my political formation, so I won’t deal with them. You can not do that. »