Families of two members of Parliament from the Quebec City area have changed their names in order to avoid discrimination, says Luc Harvey, Conservative MP for Louis-Hebert riding. He avoided connecting the recent shooting in Montreal to racial intolerance, as a fellow MP suggested, but agreed immigrants are the objects of discrimination.

Daniel Petit, another Conservative MP from the Quebec City area, linked the difficulty of immigrants to fit into Quebec society with the shooting, though he later retracted the statement. Making a link between intolerance and the shooting at Dawson College was a “grave error,” Harvey told reporters, “but that doesn‘t change the fact that there is a very large amount of work to be done on integration in Quebec City and in my opinion in the rest of Canada.”

His wife, who is from the Caribbean island and black, has encountered discrimination and a number of qualified professionals can’t get jobs because they are immigrants, he said.