Denis Lazure

Denis Lazure (born October 12, 1925 in Napierville, Quebec is a former Quebec politician and psychiatrist. He was a member of the National Assembly of Quebec from 1976 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1996.

Lazure attended Université de Montréal and was a doctorate in medicine. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania in psychiatry as well as the University of Toronto in which he was bachelor in hospital administration.

Lazure was the founder of the infant psychiatry department of Saint-Justine Hospital in 1957. He was also the director of this hospital as well as those of Riviere-des-Prairies and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine all in the Montreal region. He would later be the director in 1974 of the first psychiatric hospital in Haiti. He was also a teacher at Université de Montréal and was the President of the Canadian Association of Psychiatrists.

Before being a Quebec MNA, Lazure ran twice for a seat in the Canadian House of Commons as a candidate for the New Democratic Party, in a by-election in 1967 and in the 1968 federal elections. He was first elected in Quebec in the Chambly riding as a member of the Parti Québécois in the 1976 elections and was re-elected in  1981 in Bertrand (now Marguerite-D'Youville). During his first mandate he was named by René Lévesque the Minister of Social Affairs and after his re-election, he was named State Minister of Social Development until he resigned in 1984, when the Parti Quebecois' support dropped after measures implied in the public sector in order to alleviate the negative effects of the 1980s recession on the Quebec economy.

He would become a psychiatrist at the Greenfield hospital until he ran again in 1989, where he was elected in La Prairie. He was re-elected in 1994 but resigned in 1996. He returned to his professional career after. His work contribution was rewarded with an award given by the Psychiatric Doctors Association of Quebec in 2004.