The MP for Thérèse-de Blainville has been active in nursing, unions and politics since 1976.
OTTAWA — Louise Chabot, who has represented the riding of Thérèse-de Blainville in the Laurentians since 2019, will not seek a third term in the next federal election, the Bloc Québécois announced Monday.
Chabot writes in a statement from the party that her role as an MP was “an experience as exciting as it was enriching, in which I invested myself fully and of which I am extremely proud,” and that bowing out was a difficult decision.
Chabot said major gains were the fruit of hard work, in particular the ban on the use of replacement workers in the Canada Labour Code and the bill on the protection of workers’ pension funds.
“But there are still struggles to be fought, including the necessary reform of unemployment insurance, and we can count on the Bloc to continue the work,” she asserts.
Before entering politics, Chabot was president of the Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ) union federation from 2012 to 2019, an organization that has more than 200,000 members.
The professional nurse previously worked at the Lévis Hospital starting in 1976, then at the Trois-Rivières Regional Hospital Centre starting in 1979. According to information compiled by the Bloc Québécois, she was elected union delegate for the first time in 1981.
A Quebec government file mentions that she was president of the Syndicat professionnel des infirmières et infirmiers de Trois-Rivières in 1985 and that in 1988 she became the founding president of the Union québécoise des infirmiers et infirmières. In 2000, she became vice-president of the CSQ.
The Bloc leader, Yves-François Blanchet, praised the commitment of a woman “committed, lucid, capable of being sharp and so gentle, generous with her experience, thoughtful in all matters, but at the same time rebellious.” He said it represents “an important stone in the building of a better, fairer and possibly independent Quebec.”
While elections must take place within a year at most and political instability is taking hold more and more in Ottawa, Chabot is the third elected Bloc member to announce that she is not running for re-election after the MP from Mirabel, Jean-Denis Garon, and that from Repentigny, Monique Pauzé.