The CAQ MP for Abitibi-Est, Pierre Dufour, remains deaf to the many calls for resignation: on Tuesday he defended the comments he made to the Val-d’Or municipal council on May 15, going so far as to justify his allusion to “a pile of shit”.
“The “heap of shit”, I will explain it to you, he launched on his arrival at the National Assembly. I wanted to make an analogy to the mayor with the pile of shit by saying: “You just arrived in 2021. The problem did not arrive, boom, in 2021. It is a chronology of events that make so that we arrive at this chaos at the moment”. »
When journalists asked him if he was staying on, Mr. Dufour replied in the affirmative. He also said “deplore” the fact “that we always try to bring it back to a racialized file”.
“This is not a racialized file. In homelessness, there are all kinds of people, there are all kinds of people, “he said, stressing that” it does not bother him “to give coffee to a homeless person, sometimes .
MP Dufour then stated that “60 to 65%” of homeless people in Val-d’Or were Aboriginal. A “normal” situation, since several services for Aboriginal people have been developed there over the years, he recalled.
His colleague Ian Lafrenière, Minister responsible for Relations with First Nations and Inuit, admitted to having received several calls since his colleague’s statements.
“I can understand the reactions, by the way. However, our actions speak,” he said. Mr. Lafrenière said he “made a point of talking to partners in the field” on the ground. “We always have the same intention to move forward,” he assured, before acknowledging that there is still “a lot of work to do”.
A stormy session
MP Dufour is under pressure because of his comments about the delicate situation prevailing in Val-d’Or. In recent weeks, the municipality has urged the Legault government to “take responsibility” to fight crime and homelessness downtown. Mayor Céline Brindamour chaired a stormy session on May 15, during which nearly a hundred people showed up to ask her to act.
In the same session, MP Dufour criticized the work of the Viens commission, set up after a report on alleged police abuse of Aboriginal women in Val-d’Or. “You have worked, since you took office, with a lot of shit that has been created especially since 2015 when there was the show Investigationa show full of lies that attacked very honest police officers, ”he said in particular to the mayor.
Since then, the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador has called for the resignation of MP Dufour. Québec solidaire did the same on Tuesday. “Mr. Dufour has not acted up to his duties and can therefore no longer adequately represent the citizens of his riding,” wrote MP Manon Massé on Twitter.
The interim leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec, Marc Tanguay, meanwhile refrained from calling for the departure of Mr. Dufour. “But it’s a question he should ask himself,” he added. In the opinion of PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the CAQ should “pull itself together and stop doing things that make apologies necessary every day or every week”.
An elected official who “failed in his duty”
The Association of Native Friendship Centers of Quebec also issued a statement on Tuesday. “As an elected official, Mr. Dufour failed in his duty,” wrote his representatives. They criticized him for holding a discourse that “comes to harm social peace, reconciliation initiatives between peoples and collaborative efforts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations and institutions working in the field”.
Mr. Dufour refused to say that he had been able to inflame an already tense situation. “I’ve been receiving emails, people at my office, text messages, lots, lots of opinions from people who say: ‘there, Mr. Dufour, we don’t know where go, which doors to knock on”. There are shop owners who block their businesses, […] banks that have [réduit leurs heures d’ouverture] “, he illustrated.
In his opinion, “everyone wants to do well, but everyone works a little too much in silos”. “So, we have to find cohesion in there to arrive at common objectives to, precisely, stop this problem of aggression,” he suggested.
At the Blue Room, the Minister of Public Security, François Bonnardel, assured that more police resources would be deployed in Val-d’Or. “It’s a problem that is not simple,” he said.