The Minister for the Economy, Christopher Skeete, finds it difficult to see how his government could do better in the regions. This is what he said in response to Liberal MP André Fortin during an interpellation at the Blue Room on Friday.
Mr. Fortin asked him about the challenges in the regions, including in the pork and forestry industries.
The elected Liberal lamented that the Minister responsible for Regional Economic Development, Pierre Fitzgibbon, did not appear for questioning, preferring to dispatch his colleague Skeete.
The latter defended the results of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) in the regions, and attacked the “credibility” of the Liberal Party, which only managed to elect one deputy outside Montreal. .
In the last elections, the CAQ had a supermajority elected: 90 deputies in all regions of Quebec. Despite this, the party has kept an “urban thinking”, according to Mr. Fortin.
“Major decision-makers in government, […] they are not people who live rurality, who are steeped in rurality and it shows in their public policies,” he said.
Friday’s arrest is reminiscent of “a young man who has just read a book about Italy, and who is trying to tell us what the mountains of Tuscany look like”, retorted Mr. Skeete.
“It’s not very credible”, he added, saying he refused to “be lectured” by a party “almost 100% urban” which has “no rural confidence”.
As for the actions of the CAQ in the regions, “I do not see what could be done better,” dropped the minister.
Attack on other topics
He was surprised by the subject of the arrest, a “homerun” subject for the CAQ, while “there are plenty of other subjects where I think we are much more vulnerable”, such as health, a he admitted.
Minister Christopher Skeete recalled government investments in the battery sector and in the Accès Entreprise Québec program, a support service for entrepreneurs in the regions.
Virtually all Quebec homes now have access to high-speed Internet, he also argued.
But what about pork, the forest, the bridge over the Saguenay, regional air transport? asked Mr. Fortin, who criticized the minister for his lack of precise answers.
The MP for Pontiac clearly got the wrong interlocutor, replied Mr. Skeete. When he was Minister of Transport, would he have liked to be talked about about mines on the pretext that there are rocks in the cement?
“I think he would have rightly said: ‘Dear colleague, I think you have to talk to the minister responsible for mines if you want to talk about rocks’”, he illustrated.