The lies uttered in the middle of the debate by Donald Trump, according to which illegal migrants eat the cats of American citizens, deeply insulted elected members of the National Assembly, including the minister of Haitian origin Lionel Carmant, who openly appears “for Kamala” Harris.
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“I was insulted,” said the minister responsible for social services, recounting his reaction to hearing the former president of the United States say live on television Tuesday night that Haitian immigrants “eat dogs, (…) eat cats and pets of people who live” in Springfield, Ohio.
“It doesn’t make sense to say things like that. (…) It’s unacceptable. I’m for Kamala,” exclaimed the CAQ MP for Taillon to the parliamentary press.
Risk of stigmatization
“It is absolutely distressing that a candidate for the American presidency arrives on a platform of this height, then spouts lies like these,” said liberal MP Madwa-Nika Cadet, whose grandparents arrived from Haiti in the 1980s.
The member for Bourassa-Sauvé, who knows the Haitian community in Montreal well, was at the very least relieved to see the moderators of the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris correct the facts in real time.
Archive photo, QMI Agency
According to Mme Cadet, the remarks of former President Trump, although they are false, risk stigmatizing members of the Haitian community.
“I think it doesn’t do justice to the role he’s trying to achieve. I think he’s hurting a lot of people, whether they’re of Haitian origin or not, in the United States or not, and that it’s completely unpresidential,” the Liberal MP denounced.
A warning for Quebec
House leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who recently expressed his fear of seeing former President Trump return to power, finds it both “frankly depressing” and “completely ridiculous” that an aspirant to the most powerful office in the world “can spout nonsense about people who eat cats, then dogs.”
Mr. Nadeau-Dubois believes that “it is the fruit of decades of political and media polarization in the United States.”
He also sees it as a warning for Quebec. “There is no democracy that is by definition safe from excesses like that, from overpolarization like that, and then from a loss of common sense,” worries the Gouin MP.
“Let’s pay attention to our democracy so that we continue to have political debates that are minimally constructive, so that we don’t reach levels of degeneration like that,” he added.
