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Context: House Hansard - 102 - Sep/26/22

Sep/26/22 9:53:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for her comments and her years of advocacy on this important file. It is one of the things that we learned growing up in an indigenous community, that within a language we are all connected. That is an important thing that I try to remind myself of daily, but I think the answers are not only in indigenous knowledge but in collaboration within this House. The answers are within us. We are in a minority government. We need to work together, like in our all-party caucus on environment. We need to start meeting more frequently. We need to start having these conversations in a way that I know the member has led for many years, and I thank her for those efforts. However, I want to hold on to hope in this government, that we all see what is going on and that we are all ready to act.

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Context: House Hansard - 102 - Sep/26/22

Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Sep/26/22 10:05:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am going to follow up on the question from my friend from Victoria. I do not disagree with him that, if the Liberals were serious, they would actually do the right thing on climate change, but I equally do not quite understand, as I am not quite certain that his caucus would support the government if it did the right things. We immediately need to, for instance, cancel Bay du Nord, cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline, and make sure that we follow the advice to stop adding greenhouse gases and start subtracting them. That is the first step, and we need to take it before 2025, according to the world scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We need to support those moves.

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Context: House Hansard - 102 - Sep/26/22

Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)

Sep/26/22 11:08:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this important debate tonight about the impacts of hurricane Fiona on eastern Canada. As members know, I represent a riding in Alberta. We live in a big country, where a natural disaster could affect one part of the country and not another. I also know we are a community of solidarity, where people in Alberta follow events in other parts of the country and are feeling a deep sense of solidarity and a desire to help. There are many Albertans with close familial and ancestral connections with Atlantic Canada, who are really following in horror the impacts of this hurricane and would like me to share on their behalf the sense of solidarity and the desire they have to see their government come to the aid of those in need. Just as when western Canada has faced natural disasters, such as the B.C. floods, Atlantic Canada was with us, in the same way my province and my constituents are fully behind Atlantic Canada and are calling on the government to have a strong, effective and continuous response. The lead to this response from within our caucus is coming from the Atlantic caucus, and I want to salute and recognize the excellent work being done by members of that caucus, including the member for Cumberland—Colchester, who put forward the proposal to have this emergency debate tonight. Of course I also want to recognize the engagement of our leader and the powerful speech he gave tonight as well. What really stuck with me from our leader's speech was his saying that we do not want this to be another situation in which there is an “A” for the announcement and an “F” on the follow-through. Sometimes commitments are made when a story is in the news, when there is a focus on the situation, and it is very acute as it is happening. Then there is the question of whether the government and the rest of the country are really there through the follow-up, through the rebuilding process that must continue long after the story is not in the news anymore and attention has shifted to other issues. Is there the follow-through? Also, is the government making announcements but then severely delayed in actually delivering the results, or is the government responding quickly enough? The opposition will be there, led by our Atlantic caucus, in pushing strongly for follow-through, for efficiency, and for the government to support the rebuilding that is required, not just while the story is in the news but in fact over the long term. We need to have a results-oriented approach that measures the results that are achieved, that measures the concrete impacts, that invests the dollars that are required and really measures those results. Canadians can be assured that our opposition will be diligently following up on this issue for the long haul to make sure those results are achieved, or certainly to do all we can from this side of the House to ensure they are achieved. I want to speak tonight in particular to highlight one issue that we have seen with the government's response. It is about the issue of matching programs. There is a problem with the way the government has consistently developed and delivered matching programs. The problem has been that the government identifies one organization or a small group of large organizations for matching support, and it says it will match every donation that is made to organization X or to this group of five organizations. However, the government does not offer matching programs to all of the organizations that are involved in a response. I have encountered this issue, particularly in the area of international development. In cases in which we have seen disasters around the world, this was a major issue brought to my attention by international development organizations working in Lebanon, responding to the humanitarian needs associated with the invasion of Ukraine, and most recently in the situation in Pakistan, where there are organizations, maybe small organizations, diaspora-led organizations, organizations with really deep connections and a significant footprint on the ground, that are left out of a government matching program because it becomes easier for the government to say that it is going to match with these very large organizations that have more experience dealing with government and that we have established relationships with. It is easier to say that it is going to match a contribution to this big player as opposed to saying it is going to match donations to all of the organizations that are doing this work. I have encountered and learned about this issue in the area of international development, but now we are seeing this as part of a domestic disaster response. Again, the government, in the process of a matching program, is choosing one organization. In this case, it is the Red Cross. I want to say at the outset that I think the Red Cross does excellent work. I also think the idea of matching programs, of encouraging individuals to donate and saying that when someone makes a donation, the government is going to match those dollars, is a very good concept. It expresses the shared solidarity that we need here, which is not the government acting alone, but the government being part of a solution and supporting individual philanthropy in collaboration with government. In principle, that is really good. When we have a system that matches donations to some organizations and not others, not only do those smaller organizations, which may have a bigger presence on the ground and may be led by local people and plugged into local communities, lose out on the benefit of the matching dollars, but they actually lose out on donations as well. When people say they want to be part of responding to, in this case, the recovery efforts around hurricane Fiona, or in previous cases, the flooding in Pakistan or the situation in Lebanon, people instinctively want to give to those organizations that are receiving matching, as opposed to the organizations that do not. Organizations tell me that they get calls from previous donors who say they were going to donate to what they were doing, but they actually want to donate to another organization that is getting matched. We see how, through a government policy, by matching donations to some organizations but not others, the government ends up incentivizing private donors to change their donation behaviour from organizations they were previously giving to, to organizations that are matched. The government is, through this matching policy, directing donations from some organizations to others. That is a problem. The effect of offering matching to some organizations is that it might take away from groups that have a long track record and have been working on the ground. It also creates some level of suspicion. People ask why the government is not matching them. Is it because it has somehow determined the organization is not good enough for the match? That is not the reason. In fact, some of these organizations may be more effective in their response, but they are not receiving the match because government instinctively goes back to the same organizations to provide that match every time. Having raised this issue multiple times in other contexts, I want to implore the government again to really reconsider this policy. There are different ways of doing this. The government could identify, in some global sense, all of the donations that are made to charitable organizations related to flood relief, and the government could then put that same amount of money aside in a fund, which it then distributes. It would not have to necessarily match every dollar that was given to an organization to exactly the same organization. However, if it put aside an amount of money that was equivalent to the total donations and then disbursed that, it would at least address the problem right now of disincentivizing donations to organizations that are not matched. I think that would be a good way of exploring the response. Every Canadian who donates to hurricane relief, in some way, should see their donation matched, whether it is to the Red Cross or to organizations that are smaller and embedded in local communities. The Knights of Columbus council in my area might want to raise money and transfer it to a Knights of Columbus council in Atlantic Canada. There might be small local food banks that are raising money, locally and across the country. I would say those worthy efforts deserve the same kind of matching support. Again, I have raised this in the House on past occasions. It is a bit frustrating to feel these simple, non-partisan solutions, which say we need to reform these matching programs, do not seem to be heeded. It has been raised on past instances yet it remains a problem. I implore the government to revisit this issue and to look for mechanisms to match donations in a way that is inclusive, that represents the diversity of organizations and that supports small local organizations as well as the larger ones. Again I want to share with the House that my constituents, the people of western Canada, are very much behind and in support of the people in eastern Canada who are struggling right now. We want to see the government have their backs over the long haul.

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