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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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Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC)

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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Mr. Charlie Angus

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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Ms. Andréanne Larouche (Shefford, BQ)

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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Mr. Charlie Angus

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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Mr. Richard Cannings (South Okanagan—West Kootenay, NDP)

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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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

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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Designation of Members by the name of their constituency or title

Ms. Louise Chabot (Thérèse-De Blainville, BQ)

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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Mr. Richard Cannings

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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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

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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Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC)

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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Mr. Richard Cannings

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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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Feb/1/22 11:19:28 a.m.
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The hon. member for Elmwood—Transcona.

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Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

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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Mr. Richard Cannings

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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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

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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Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)

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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Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

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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Mr. John Nater

Feb/1/22 11:21:39 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am seeking the guidance of the Chair. My understanding of Bosc and Gagnon is that a member may only speak to a motion once. My understanding is that the member has spoken three times now to the same motion. I am seeking clarity from the Chair on whether or not this is an oversight, or whether there are so few Liberals willing to defend their record that the member has to get up for a third time on the Speech from the Throne. I am just seeking clarity.

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Feb/1/22 11:22:28 a.m.
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A member has the opportunity to speak to the main motion, the amendment and the subamendment. The hon. parliamentary secretary has not addressed the main motion.

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