The duty asked five candidates who made the leap into the political arena for the first time what made them interested in public life. In turn, with one candidate per party, they tell us about their doubts and their hopes. Today, curator Pascal Déry.
“String bridge, rope bridge, wooden bridge, steel bridge. This metaphor was offered to me by my Master Instructor at Karate Sunfuki years ago and has never left my head. Imbued with wisdom, his offering pertinently illustrates the time, patience and dedication required to develop solid social relationships, whether personal, professional… or ideological.
In the 1960s, it took only a few months for Jean Lesage to build a wooden bridge strong enough to put an end to 16 years of Union Nationale rule. Promoted to the leadership of the Liberal Party of Quebec in 1958, Lesage inspired Quebec to say “Bye, bye, Maurice”, driven by the hope of renewal carried by his campaign slogan, “C’est le temps que ça change”. .
This is exactly the motivation driving my political candidacy and that of the 124 other citizens who today represent the Conservative Party of Quebec, from the end of the Gaspé Peninsula to the Portage Bridge in Gatineau: to change things.
Quebeckers, like you and me: nurses, lawyers, entrepreneurs, mothers and fathers of families, educators, farmers, doctors, individuals of all kinds, hardworking, who have decided to take the future of Quebec in their hands. People from all walks of life, with their feet on the floor, saying, “Enough is enough. »
To stop the decadence of our public systems, to respond to more than two years of disastrous CAQ crisis management, to take on the heavy task of improving our ways of doing things: new ideas, new blood, expertise on the ground, people wanting to help their fellow citizens. An added value that our democracy lacked.
Collective well-being
It is also the vocation of life that I have chosen: to help others. Martial arts instruction to children, humanitarian trip, fundraising for the Make-a-Wish/Rêves d’enfants Foundation, support for local organizations through my training center with obstacles SpartanFit, in Sainte-Julie: so many personal initiatives to humbly contribute to the collective well-being.
If we enjoy a certain positive force, it is our duty to make the community benefit from it. My recent involvement in politics is only a continuation of this civic involvement. Because I don’t go into “politics”, I amplify the influence of this involvement. I take advantage of the vector of change offered by the Conservative Party of Quebec to help my fellow citizens and give on a larger scale: motivating challenges, accepted with great gratitude.
Concretely, my main ambition is to revalue physical activity at the provincial level, to democratize it and to emancipate it from the false perception that its practice is a choice exclusively for “athletes”. Moving, adopting healthy lifestyle habits is not an athlete’s business. It is our responsibility as human beings. Point.
Unclogging the health system of its sclerosing bureaucracy can take years, even decades. What you and I can do now is avoid hospitals by accepting responsibility for our health. The responsibility for the failure of our system is shared: it is because of the State and it is because of us. As I said in my candidacy speech, we have to admit our poor collective health. For years, the two most important causes of death in the country have been cancers and cardiovascular disorders, according to Statistics Canada, diseases on which our lifestyle choices have a direct, negative… or positive influence.
A new historical crossroads
So in every dark situation is an illuminating opportunity for change. The opportunity here is to take active care of our health: it is by multiplying the microscopic changes that we will generate, together, a lasting macroscopic change in health. What if we trained to avoid hospitals, literally? Certainly, things have to change in Quebec. You know it. I also agree. Now, what actions are we really ready to take?
Big changes often require difficult choices, sacrifices, discomforts. For me, the gray cloud is unfortunately there: what are we willing to do to make this really change? What collective resilience can we demonstrate in the face of the challenges ahead? In a civilization where we prefer the prescription of drugs to physical effort, how can we hope for a real improvement in health? When we prefer our tablet to our espads, how can we imagine that we can actively participate in the shedding of emergencies? When we content ourselves with mass sources of information to shape our thinking, how can we aspire to a collective intellectual awakening?
Good news: we control these variables. I have hope. Our ideological string bridge was built more than a decade ago with the emergence of organizations such as the Quebec Freedom Network and a provincial conservative party under Adrien Pouliot. The arrival of Éric Duhaime at the head of the PCQ is a solid rope bridge. The wooden bridge is made up of more than 55,000 dedicated members, volunteers and Conservative candidates who participate in its construction, every day…
In 1960, Quebecers came out of their Great Darkness by saying: “It’s time for things to change. Sixty years later, we have reached a new historical crossroads, critical for our future. For you, your community, for future generations, what choice will you make? That of “continuity” or that of being, finally, free at home? Give me hope, my friend, my friend, that together we will be able to build the steel bridge.