Francis Drouin has been replaced by Quebec City Liberal MP Joël Lightbound, making him the first French-speaking MP on the committee from a riding outside of Montreal.
Drouin has been replaced by Quebec City Liberal MP Joël Lightbound, making him the first French-speaking MP on the committee from a riding outside of Montreal.
The announcement short-circuits a plan by the opposition to exercise stalling tactics over the course of eight meetings of the committee aimed at forcing Drouin’s ouster as a member and as chairperson of the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie, a position Drouin actually left last July.
Arriving at the House of Commons, Marc Serré, parliamentary secretary to the minister of official languages, said it was “normal” for the composition of committees to change in the autumn and noted the Conservatives had also changed their lineup for the committee.
Serré said the opposition parties had made it clear they would not give up their efforts to remove Drouin as he remained on the committee.
Drouin became a focus of controversy last May in the wake of a stormy meeting of the committee that saw him take several days to apologize for using inappropriate language when addressing two witnesses.
The witnesses had argued that when a francophone or allophone attended an English-speaking CEGEP or university in Quebec, it increased the probability of their speaking English for the rest of their life. After describing the witnesses as being “full of sh–t,” Drouin then asked if they truly believed that McGill University and Dawson College were part of the problem of the anglicization of Quebec.
At the end of July, Drouin announced that he wished to spend more time with his family and would complete his current term but not seek re-election. He was first elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2019 and 2021.