Members of Parliament helping their constituents

(Ottawa) Elected officials are not idle when the business of the House of Commons is slack. Some people travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers back to their ridings, where they try to help people solve their problems. Five MPs told us a story that has particularly marked them since they were elected.

Mylène Crête
Press

A new veranda to keep their confidence

It is sometimes difficult with the labor shortage to find a construction contractor for small contracts. Liberal MP Stéphane Lauzon looked for one without success for a couple in their seventies from Saint-André-Avellin, in the Outaouais. They had to get a new veranda quickly, otherwise they would lose insurance on their home. “There are not many entrepreneurs who want to go to the bottom of the countryside, in a small house of an older couple, he notes. It is a problem. ”

The ex-teacher in vocational training therefore decided to take out his nails and his hammer to build a staircase and a veranda himself with the help of his 13-year-old daughter. “It doesn’t take much to help someone,” he points out. We do a little gesture like that, it may seem very trivial, but it can change someone’s life. For them, it was a big stress. They weren’t asleep anymore. The couple paid for the materials and the MP was rewarded with a dish of cabbage cigars!

Hot water for her last days

When he received a phone call from an employee of a CLSC in his riding a little over a year ago, Louis Plamondon had no idea he was going to be so moved. The Bloc Québécois member has helped many people over the course of his 37-year political career, but he cannot forget the couple to whom he was about to give a helping hand. An elderly lady was taking care of her very ill husband who insisted on dying at home. But it was impossible for the attendants to make him take his weekly bath: he no longer had hot water.

The couple who lived in extreme poverty did not have the money to buy a new water heater. “Sometimes, we have to find means outside of all government programs,” says the elected. So he went to a hardware store to buy himself a new water heater at a good price, then found a plumber and an electrician willing to volunteer their time to install it.

“Three and a half months later, I received a letter on old yellowed paper,” he recalls. The woman thanked the MP for being able to allow her husband to die at home. “When I received this, I was crying,” he adds. It was beautiful to see how grateful this woman was to have something quite simple anyway, to have had hot water for a bath every week. ”

Arrested two weeks before Christmas

Elizabeth May’s efforts prevented the eviction of an unexplored man who lived in an Indigenous community on Penelakut Island, British Columbia. The story goes back to 2014, but the member is still thinking about it. “Employees of the Border Services Agency knocked on his home, arrested him and handcuffed him,” said the former head of the Green Party. They then incarcerated him in the basement of the Vancouver airport in an attempt to return him to the United States.

Richard Jerman had settled with his Canadian partner in British Columbia 37 years earlier, but had neglected to take steps to acquire Canadian citizenship because Aboriginal people were able to move freely across the border. However, he did not have the required status, even though his father was from an indigenous community in California, since he had grown up in a white foster family after his mother’s death. In Canada, he still had a social insurance number, a driver’s license and a health insurance card.

“It was an urgent case, remembers Mr.^me May. We only had 24 hours before the time of his eviction. “Alerted by an ethnobiology professor who knew the family well, M^me May found a lawyer, alerted the media and contacted the office of then Immigration Minister Chris Alexander. Three months later, Mr. Jerman, who was able to reunite with his children and grandchildren, received his Canadian citizenship.

Saved from bankruptcy

The pandemic is difficult for many entrepreneurs who are struggling to make ends meet. Conservative MP Bernard Généreux knows something about this, he who has owned a printing press for 30 years. When a business in his riding contacted him in 2020 to help sort out a situation, he didn’t hesitate. Bankrupt, she had managed to sell her transport division to bail herself out. However, officials believed that the purchaser was not entitled to acquire it under federal law. The transaction fell through the cracks.

“Sometimes they don’t perceive that the terminology that is used can have an impact on a large number of workers,” he explains. This is what we argued and we won our case. People were really happy. The proceedings lasted six months. The MP and his team sent letters and spoke with officials. Twenty jobs in the Bas-Saint-Laurent have thus been saved.

Touched by the generosity of the people

Leah Gazan had just been elected just a few months ago when the scope of her role as an MP took on its full meaning.

On December 26, 2019, a fire destroyed a residential building in the West End, one of Winnipeg’s poorest neighborhoods. About thirty people find themselves homeless in the middle of the holiday season. The NDP member and other local elected officials are therefore appealing to the generosity of people to obtain donations to allow the victims of this fire to start afresh. Pots, clothes, televisions, utensils… boxes and bags pile up. “My office was completely filled with donations, so much so that the firefighters made two trips by truck to give all these objects to these people who had lost everything,” she recalls.