44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 1, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/1/22 10:50:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.
As always, it is a great honour to stand here as the representative of the people of Timmins—James Bay. This is the day that the old Irish Catholics would tell us is St. Brigid's Day. Why is St. Brigid's Day worth recognizing? This is the day that is halfway between the darkest day of the year and the spring equinox. I would like to think we are past the dark days, but I do not think we are. January was a very hard month, and we are looking at a time in our nation when there are many forces of darkness confronting us: forces of disinformation, a breakdown in civil society and a breakdown in our ability to talk to one another.
As such, it is essential that Parliament—the people's House, the House of Commons, the House of the common people—is open for us to come and debate. There is so much we need to address at this time. Today marks not just the halfway point to the equinox; today marks 27 years that the people of Neskantaga First Nation have gone without clean water. For 27 years, generations have grown up with contaminated water in a community in Canada.
Just over from Neskantaga, at Marten Falls First Nation, the community marks the 111th day that the children of Marten Falls have been unable to go to school because of the chronic underfunding, the poverty and the overcrowding in Marten Falls and Neskantaga.
These are the issues that we should be debating. In our society in Canada, indigenous people are expected to live in degrading circumstances. The thing that is fascinating about Neskantaga and Marten Falls is that they are located in a place that many Canadians have heard of, the Ring of Fire. We hear about the great riches of the Ring of Fire. Doug Ford said he was going to drive a bulldozer to the Ring of Fire. The nation of Canada's focus has always been on getting the resources out of the ground, yet we have children who cannot go to school because of chronic underfunding.
It was very moving in the slowdown and the crisis with omicron during January to hear parents talk about the mental health of their children; the mental health of children in cities, suburbs and small towns; and how we had to be there for our children. We never heard any national conversation about the mental health of the children in a community like Marten Falls, who are denied a universal human right, the right to quality education. They are being denied that.
No, I do not think we are halfway between the darkness and the light. We are still very much in the darkness.
I think of January and the thousand people who died from omicron in Ontario alone. It is a thousand people so far. I think of their families. I think of the front-line medical and health teams that struggle on their shifts to try to keep people alive. I think of the people who are facing delayed surgeries because our ICUs are overrun.
Today, this morning, in North Bay in northern Ontario, there is a gang of thugs outside the health unit in North Bay threatening people. What kind of nation have we become when the notion of freedom is that someone can go and target vaccine clinics? They bragged this weekend that they were shutting down vaccination clinics in Ottawa. What kind of so-called freedom is it to target doctors, nurses and health workers?
I know we are tired. Omicron hit us like a baseball bat. We had all thought we had gotten through it. We thought we got through it while we did not bother to ensure the rest of the world had access to vaccines. Then what came out of the rest of the world was omicron, and we do not know what is coming next.
However, what concerns me most is not so much that we are tired or not so much that we are stressed, but this fundamental breakdown as a nation that we have to confront. When I talk to people about the pandemic, I know the vast majority are tired. They are doing their part and going along, but when I see people dancing on and desecrating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, never in my life as a Canadian could I have imagined that someone would be so ignorant.
What concerns me much more is the number of people who came on my Facebook page to say that it never happened, that it is not true, that it is made up. The disinformation about the situation that we are facing is the real crisis in this country. Here in Parliament, we are not talking about how we find our way through a pandemic but about whether or not we can work together as parliamentarians to try and raise our nation up to find a way through this together, yet some may find that it is politically advantageous. There is one very crafty Conservative MP who came up with the term “vaccine vendetta”, but I actually think it is more of a vendetta against his own leader. What has happened in our country when vaccinations, a solution, medical science and our front-line researchers become targets and the Conservatives can talk about vaccination as a vendetta?
Of course, they are all wrapping themselves in the Canadian flag, walking around with the flag upside down or walking around with the flag desecrated with the swastika, and everyone I have ever heard from this so-called “Freedom Group” tells me that their great-grandfather, grandfather or uncle fought in the war. Well, welcome to Canada; everybody's relatives fought in the war, but they fought for a freedom that is not an individual right to harass and intimidate. They fought for a collective belief that together as a nation, we are different and we are better.
Rather than talk about our veteran grandfathers, I am going to talk about my grandmother, Lola Jane Lindsay MacNeil, from the Ottawa Valley, who worked 12-hour shifts as a nurse. My grandmother was a hard woman with me because she remembered polio, which disappeared just before I was born. I thought my grandmother was raging and angry, but she had been on the wards of the polio children and she understood the importance of vaccinations, so when someone comes on my page and says, “Oh, on the polio vaccine, all they needed was vitamin C”, no, that is false, and we have to call that out.
I urge my colleagues from all parties to rise above this disinformation campaign that is out there and the idea that this is somehow a vendetta or that this is somehow cooked up by the Prime Minister to make everybody's life hard. Yes, it is hard. Suck it up. Grow up. It is has been hard for all of us, but it has been really hard for our front-line medical workers, who deserve better than to see a mob trying to harass them at health units today.
This brings me back to this principle of so-called liberty and freedom. I welcome the protesters on Parliament Hill. That is why Parliament is here. I love the fact that an open Parliament Hill is a place where people can demonstrate for whatever reason they want. If the City of Ottawa decides that Wellington Street is now going to be part of a permanent demonstration, I do not have a problem with that; I just hope the city will allow it when indigenous protesters come. However, what I do have a problem with is the harassment of small businesses on our residential streets and the harassment of people off Parliament Hill. That is not about freedom; that is about intimidation, and we are better than that as Canadians. We are so much better than that, but it means that in Parliament we have to stand up.
In closing, I have been reading Camus again and again. I hear people talk about their right to do this and their right to do that. In The Plague, Camus says that what happens is that there is no more individual destiny; there is only a collective destiny made up of the plague and the emotions shared by us all. Yes, we are frustrated, and yes, we are angry, and yes, omicron has caused massive emotional damage to all of us, but we cannot exploit that. We have to find a way as parliamentarians. I know there are people of goodwill in every part of this chamber who understand that as a nation, as Canada, we have to be that light. We have to say that there is a better way to be. That is the discussion that I am hoping we can have, with respect and support and the love for our people who have suffered so much through this pandemic.
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- Feb/1/22 11:00:08 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate many of the comments that the member has put on the record with regard to the protest that we have been witnessing over the last number of days. No one questions the value in a democracy of having peaceful demonstrations, but I think this continuing demonstration is having a very strong negative impact on the community of Ottawa, particularly in the downtown area.
Could the member provide his thoughts on how this demonstration has affected those who live downtown and call it home or have a small business there, as well as the importance of having streets clear for traffic?
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- Feb/1/22 11:00:53 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, a lot of people are calling and telling me not to go to the Hill and asking if I am okay. I am a politician. Being abused is part of the job. This is what we do. I walk on Wellington Street, and it is fine. It is like a big, crazy parade. I do not have a problem with that.
However, I have been very concerned with what I have seen. Outside of Farm Boy, a group of guys were shouting at locals while they were trying to shop because they were wearing masks. I saw three big thuggish guys wearing Canadian flags as Batman capes going into small shops without masks and demanding service. What kind of people think their freedom is about intimidating others?
I thank the Ottawa police. They have been trying to be respectful, but I would encourage them to start dealing with that when it is off of Parliament Hill and in the residential neighbourhoods, where people are being harassed. People can stay on the Hill. That is fine, but not in the residential neighbourhoods where there are senior citizens, who I have spoken to, and young people.
A young woman told me she did not want to be out on the street at night in her own neighbourhood because she was afraid. We are better than that, and we have to protect people. This is a residential city as well as a place of political work.
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- Feb/1/22 11:02:06 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as the member opposite would know, I am one who has always stood up for rights and freedoms. I have always called out violence, desecration of property and intimidation of people as wrong, but I think we are at the stage in this pandemic where we can see that the level of frustration in people is rising.
We are seeing other countries around the world opening up, and we need to come up with a plan to exit this pandemic and restore our economy. I wonder if the member has ideas on how we ought to go forward.
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- Feb/1/22 11:02:37 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was hoping that was what we would do in Parliament. The fact is that the pandemic does not care if we are tired. It does not care, so we have to deal with medical science first. That is the issue before us. Every cheesy politician in this country said it was going to be the best summer ever and ignored science, and we keep getting back into this, so we have to see that as a fundamental issue.
We have to find a way to open up. We have to also deal with our ICUs being absolutely overwhelmed and people still dying. Let us talk about that. Let us not pretend it is not happening. Let us not pretend it is just the flu. A guy went on my page and said those thousands of people did not die and that the medical community is making things up. As parliamentarians, we have to say, “No, this is serious.”
We need to sit down as parliamentarians and discuss support for small business and support for the medical community. If we get out of omicron, and I am hoping we are finished with it and we can get back to normal, we have to have a plan for if another wave hits. It seems we just keep hoping we are going to get out of this without having a bigger vision.
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- Feb/1/22 11:03:55 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to see you for the first time in 2022.
I thank my colleague for his speech. He spoke a lot about health, but does he realize that the problem is not about creating standards or federal interference in jurisdictions belonging to Quebec, the provinces and the territories?
What is crucial, as we emerge from this health crisis, is that the federal government increase health transfers up to 35%. Quebec, the provinces and the territories are responsible for health and need the funding to manage this area of jurisdiction.
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- Feb/1/22 11:04:34 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her good question.
Health care in Canada falls under provincial jurisdiction, which leads me to ask why the truckers are here in Ottawa when the pandemic protection mandates were issued by Quebec City or Toronto.
The government must increase health care funding, but the provinces also have to implement standards to ensure that funding goes towards nursing care.
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- Feb/1/22 11:05:29 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we are wrapping up the debate on the Speech from the Throne today. That, of course, reminds us that there was an election last summer. I would like to thank the people of South Okanagan—West Kootenay for re-electing me as their representative in Ottawa. I send my deepest thanks.
I always say that I represent the most beautiful riding in Canada. I miss travelling around the riding because so many events are not happening. I miss those face-to-face meetings. Everyone in Canada is impacted by this pandemic, and we are living in difficult times.
My colleague from Timmins—James Bay just spoke much more eloquently than I could about what is really facing this country. People are angry, and we are all wondering when life is going to get back to the way it was. People have lost loved ones. People have lost their jobs or lost their businesses. They cannot visit their friends or relatives.
We have seen a lot of concern and anger on the streets of Ottawa the past few days, but we have to remember that the common enemy here is COVID. It is not the lockdowns. It is not the vaccine mandates. It is not science. It is not the government. The enemy is the pandemic.
Science has brought us most of the way back with really miraculous vaccines that really work. They will get us through this pandemic. That is how we will exit this pandemic and get back to normal life. We just have to make sure that we do not give COVID another chance, or a fifth or sixth chance to take us back into it.
If any group feels fed up with COVID, it is health workers. I have talked to nurses and doctors over the past months and they have had it, so I really want to give my sincere thanks to all health workers for their dedication over the past two years and for keeping our health care system functioning in the face of overwhelming demand. We have to rise above this anger and frustration and concentrate on the task at hand, which is the task of overcoming COVID here in Canada and around the world.
Getting back to the Speech from the Throne, as I said, last summer we had a general election in the middle of this pandemic. It was an election we did not need. We should have been concentrating on tackling difficult issues, not just the pandemic, but also the long list of other issues that are affecting our country.
We should have been working on these issues starting last September. The NDP would have happily supported any initiatives that were focused on helping all Canadians. We gave the government a lot of suggestions of what was really needed. Instead, it is now February, tomorrow is Groundhog Day, and we have lost six months of work time, not just the six weeks that the election took.
What are some of the issues we could have been tackling? The list is long: reconciliation; climate change; housing; the opioid crisis; helping businesses and workers during the pandemic; and the obscene income gap, which is growing, between the few very wealthy Canadians and the millions of Canadians who are struggling just to get by.
One of the most gut-wrenching moments of the past year was the announcement from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc that they had discovered the unmarked graves of over 500 children on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School. That was followed by a discovery of hundreds of other graves at similar sites across the country, including a similar announcement last week from Williams Lake.
We had known that many children had died in residential schools. That information was clearly laid out in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but the discoveries of the unmarked graves of children meant that millions of Canadians felt that tragedy and loss in their hearts. I have never heard such an outpouring of grief and anger through phone calls, emails and letters to my office than I did around that issue. That information brought on a truly remarkable outpouring from many, many Canadians.
The government must act on all the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I am heartened to hear some of the documents around the history of those institutions will be made public. We need to keep investigating what truly happened, so we can make sure it will never happen again.
On climate change, it was truly a terrible year for weather across Canada. In British Columbia, a June heat dome killed over 500 people in the Lower Mainland in Vancouver. The town of Lytton burned. People lost their lives, their homes and their livelihoods. Fires continued across the southern interior of British Columbia all summer, including in my hometown of Penticton. While campaigning in August for this election, I had to keep all my precious belongings in my car because there was a wildfire burning a kilometre from my house just on the hills west of Penticton.
The summer was followed by a series of unprecedented rain events in the fall. We have learned to call them atmospheric rivers, but we used to call them “the pineapple express”. One event in November flooded the towns of Merritt and Princeton and destroyed the five highways that connect Vancouver with the rest of the country.
The Prairies had one of their worst draughts ever. There were tornados in Ontario and more serious flooding in Cape Breton and western Newfoundland. We are living the effects of climate change. These changes are here to stay. We have to work hard to ensure they do not get any worse.
One of my roles in the NDP is the party critic for emergency preparedness and climate resilience. I have called for the government to up its game both on its reaction to disasters and in preventing them. In 2018, the town of Grand Forks in my riding was flooded. It was a very difficult experience for the town, not just the physical flooding and the process of rebuilding but also the difficult decisions the mayor and council of the town of Grand Forks had to make trying to figure how they could rebuild the community so flooding would not happen again.
There are the interface fires that have destroyed homes across the country. We have to up the game in funding, not only for the fight against climate change, which is very important, but also for these responses to climate change, the adaptation. We need to ensure the government provides much more funding to communities to help them rebuild their infrastructure to prevent these disasters from happening in the first place. This includes FireSmarting communities, building new flood prevention infrastructure and building better highway and railway infrastructure for the coming weather disasters, which will be much more common and stronger than before.
We need to also up the game on climate mitigation to bring down of our emissions so these weather disasters do not get worse and worse. One of the first private members' bills I tabled as a member of Parliament some years ago was a call on the government to bring in the home retrofit program again. I am happy the government has done that with the greener homes grant, but we really need to increase our efforts in that area.
Efficiency Canada has put out a pre-budget document that spells out how we can do this. We need to significantly scale up the number of building that are retrofitted, and we need to ensure people who live in energy poverty can have these programs for their homes. We need to build 500,000 units of affordable housing, not just housing, but affordable housing, to catch up to where we should have been. We need to cut the growing gap between the super wealthy and the rest of Canada with a wealth tax, which would make them pay their fair share while supporting the rest of us who have been struggling to get by.
I would like to finish with the opioid crisis and Gord Johns's bill, Bill C-216. We need to do something different in that crisis.
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- Feb/1/22 11:15:28 a.m.
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I will remind the hon. member that we do not use colleagues' names.
We will now go to questions and comments. The hon. member for Thérèse-De Blainville.
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- Feb/1/22 11:15:53 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is, of course, much more to be said about the pandemic, but I thought that the throne speech was intended to get us out of the pandemic and provide some certainty, even if it did not achieve that goal.
I only heard the word “workers” once in the member's speech. What ways of supporting our workers, who are still being mistreated, does the member think the government should prioritize?
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- Feb/1/22 11:16:27 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is workers who have really struggled in many ways through this pandemic, especially frontline workers, whether they are in the health care system, in grocery stores or in restaurants. Many in the restaurant industry have been laid off, rehired, laid off and rehired again. Many have given up and moved on to other things. Those in grocery stores have had to put up with abuse, as my colleague from Timmins—James Bay just mentioned, in trying to enforce the public health orders. Many have lost their jobs and many small businesses are struggling.
The government came out with supports for workers and businesses, but it let many of those people fall through the cracks. For the last two years, we have been pushing the government to fill those cracks and make sure workers like independent travel advisers who have not received anything—
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- Feb/1/22 11:17:37 a.m.
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We need to give an opportunity for other questions.
The hon. member for Sarnia—Lambton.
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- Feb/1/22 11:17:45 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his speech. He is always very thoughtful in his comments.
There are a lot of seniors in my riding. The cost of everything is going up and the pandemic is going on and on. Some mistakes have been made, and some seniors who were working collected CERB and are now having their GIS cut back. The government has really not acted on fixing these things so that seniors can afford to live, and it has been quite a long time.
Does the member agree that the government should be doing more to help seniors who are struggling?
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- Feb/1/22 11:18:18 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would really like to thank the member for Sarnia—Lambton for bringing up that important issue. The NDP has been calling on the government to change its decision. Some of the most heartbreaking messages, emails and phone calls I have been getting in my offices are from seniors who were advised to collect CERB because they were told they qualified, but who then found out after CERB was abruptly cut off that their GIS vanished. They now cannot afford their rent and some of them have lost their homes.
We have been pressing the government to do the right thing, reinstitute that and give them the retroactive pay they need. It is not that they deserve it; they need it. In Canada, we have to take care of our seniors, and low-income seniors are some of the most vulnerable people in our country. Let us do the—
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- Feb/1/22 11:19:28 a.m.
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The hon. member for Elmwood—Transcona.
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- Feb/1/22 11:19:39 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, on that same theme, I would be remiss if I did not mention that yesterday in question period, when the Conservatives had the opportunity to pick their priority issues, one thing they got up on was increases to the Canada pension plan and contributions to the Canada pension plan, which are all about ensuring that the seniors of tomorrow have an adequate pension. The Conservatives do not call it a pension; they call it a payroll tax. However, the fact of the matter is that if we want seniors to have a decent pension, we need to be paying into a well-funded Canada pension plan that actually ensures there is a decent benefit on the other side of it.
I am glad the Conservatives want to say they are standing up for seniors. I think that is great. I think it shows how important seniors are to this country when members of a political party that never misses a chance to denigrate the Canada pension plan when people are actually trying to do something for it still feel the need to bring it up with the other side of their mouths when they think they can score political points with it.
I wonder if the member wants to talk about the importance of a strong public pension plan and what it means to invest in that for the future, instead of calling it down at every chance they get and tearing it up when they are in government. I am talking about the Conservatives here.
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- Feb/1/22 11:20:49 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I agree with the member totally. We need strong pensions. We also need to have legislation to protect pension theft when companies go out of business and use the pension money that workers have put in there. These are deferred wages, and they are going to banks right now. We have to—
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- Feb/1/22 11:21:11 a.m.
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We will have to leave it at that.
Resuming debate, the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.
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- Feb/1/22 11:21:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to address the very important issue of the government's throne speech, a plan to take Canadians in all regions of our vast land through the pandemic—
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- Feb/1/22 11:21:35 a.m.
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If I may interrupt, we have a point of order.
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