44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 20, 2022 10:00AM
- Oct/20/22 10:30:26 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, if the NDP member is so unhappy with the way things are going in Canada, why is he supporting the Liberal government that is making it so?
He and his costly coalition have supported the government greed that has hoovered up the money that Canadians worked so hard to earn. That costly coalition has caused today's inflation. That costly coalition will make it worse by tripling the tax.
If he is not happy with how badly his people are suffering, then why does he stay part of that coalition?
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- Oct/20/22 11:52:01 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the NDP has gone to work in this Parliament and has pushed the government to put in place supports for dental care, a historic expansion of our health care system, and It is about time. Canadians believe universal health care is our most cherished institution. Our former leader, Tommy Douglas, was instrumental in bringing that about. Now, under the leader from Burnaby South, we have expanded it with dental care this year for children. Right across the length and breadth of our country, parents will be able to provide dental care for their children 12 and under. Inexplicably the Conservatives voted against that measure to help kids. They will have to explain that to their voters whenever the next election is held.
We also forced the government to provide supports to nearly two million Canadians renters through the renter supplement, hundreds of dollars that will make a difference to people in my riding.
Of course, the member for Burnaby South had been pushing for a number of months to get the doubling of the GST credit. That will mean anywhere from $200 to $500 that will go out in the next few weeks. Thankfully, the Conservatives, after initially opposing this NDP position, rallied. I think they finally understood the importance of providing those supports. As a result, we know those cheques will be on the way soon.
Canadians are living in difficult times. They are struggling for affordable housing. They are struggling to pay their health care bills. They are struggling because their wages have not kept up. In this corner of the House, Canadians know they have an NDP leader and an NDP caucus that is resolute about providing supports, and we have the track record to prove it.
Over the course of the last two Parliaments, almost every measure that has had a net benefit to Canadian families has come from the NDP caucus, leveraging in a minority Parliament our 25 voices, and 24 voices in the last Parliament, to make a difference for Canadians.
The fact that we have one leader in the House who has a laser-like focus, ensuring Canadians benefit from decisions made in Parliament, has made a difference in the lives of so many Canadians, but we have so much more to do, and we are going to continue to push. The reality is that we have had seven years of a Liberal government that has basically been paralyzed when it comes to the important decisions that would make a difference in the lives of people.
When we look at the disability benefit, it still does not have any substance behind it. We are going to be pushing, with Bill C-22, to actually have a disability benefit that makes a difference in the lives of people. However, to date, we have not seen the substance or the meat that actually will make a difference in the lives of people with disabilities.
These are the kinds of measures the NDP will continue to push.
On housing, we were able to force the government, in the last budget, to finally start to reinvest in affordable housing, and over the next couple of years 150,000 new affordable housing units will be built. That is a result of the efforts of the member for Burnaby South and the NDP caucus, again, to leverage our 25 members to make a difference, to push for change for a better life for Canadians.
We are pushing to have put into place all the calls to action on truth and reconciliation. We are pushing for measures that would stop the spread of hate and right-wing extremism that we are seeing. We will continue to push all those elements, because we believe fundamentally, as New Democrats and as members of Parliament, that our responsibility is to make a difference in the lives of people.
We did not see that in the dismal Harper decade, an incredibly dismal period in Canadian history, or in the seven years of paralysis that we have largely seen from the current government, until, with minority Parliaments, the NDP started to leverage and get things done in Parliament. We saw over the course of the Harper dismal decade a massive expansion of overseas tax havens, valuated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer at $25 billion a year, now over $30 billion a year. This is taxpayer money going off shore. The utlrarich, profitable corporations are taking their money offshore rather than providing those investments that would make a difference in the lives of families, students, youth, children, people with disabilities and seniors.
Under both the Conservative regime and the Liberal regime, the immediate thought when a crisis hit, whether it was in 2008 or with COVID in 2020, was what they could do to help the banks. We saw under the Harper government a record $116 billion in liquidity supports given overnight. The Harper government wanted to shore up bank profits. That was its first and foremost priority. It cut pensions and eviscerated a wide variety of services for veterans, seniors and people with disabilities.
It cut a whole bunch of important programs, including, inexplicably even today, the crime prevention programs that reduced crime right across the country. For the Harper government or any person connected to the Harper government, like the member for Carleton, to pretend that it took initiatives that reduced the crime rate when it destroyed the crime prevention centres strikes the heart of rampant hypocrisy. It eviscerated the most important tool in fighting back against crime.
This was the record of the Harper government: destroying services and ensuring that the banks, the ultrarich and the oil and gas industry had record profits. That was its first and foremost objective. Sadly, the new Liberal government has done the same, continuing those practices. We have gone from $25 billion a year under the Harper government to over $30 billion in overseas tax havens under the new government. In the banking sector, it was $116 billion.
We saw the Liberal government, in March 2020, step up in 96 hours with $750 billion in liquidity supports for the banks. This is while people with disabilities were struggling to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table. They are still waiting years later, and we have a bill that does not do anything yet. However, the NDP is going to fight like hell to ensure that it does do something to actually make a difference in the lives of people with disabilities.
What we have had over the last couple of decades is a government that has been focused on the needs of the banking sector and bank profits and that has allowed the grocery industry, the big giants of the grocery sector, to profit from Canadian families, without putting any measures in place to restrict that. With the oil and gas sector, of course we have seen the rampant profiteering, with the price going up on old stock as soon as there is any sort of crisis, as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pointed out so many times. Both at the beginning and at the end of every crisis, the oil and gas sector reaps record profits.
These are the decisions we have seen from both Conservative and Liberal governments, but now we have an alternative. I want to point out why it is so important for folks in Canada to recognize that. We have a choice between the current government, the official opposition and the NDP. In the coming election, whenever that is, whether next year, the year after or in 2025, at some point this Parliament will come to an end and Canadians will have a choice to make. We have seen what the Liberals and the Conservatives do. They cater to the wealthy, the ultrarich, the banking sector, grocery chain CEOs and the grocery empires rather than dealing with regular people.
The NDP, this week, in our only opposition day of this cycle, brought forward a motion that ultimately forced all parties to support it. It recognized that “Canadian families are struggling with the rising costs of essential purchases” and asked the House to “call on the government to recognize that corporate greed is a significant driver of inflation”, or greedflation, as members know, and to take action, which includes:
(a) forcing CEOs and big corporations to pay what they owe, by closing the loopholes that have allowed them to avoid $30 billion in taxes in 2021 alone, resulting in a corporate tax rate that is effectively lower now than when this government was elected
This is an important point. It was bad under the Conservatives. It is even worse now under the Liberals.
The motion continued:
(b) launching an affordable and fair food strategy which tackles corporate greed in the grocery sector including by asking the Competition Bureau to launch an investigation of grocery chain profits, increasing penalties for price-fixing and strengthening competition laws to prohibit companies from abusing their dominant positions in a market to exploit purchasers or agricultural producers; and
(c) supporting the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food in investigating high food prices and the role of “greedflation”
When we introduced this motion, the CEOs of the big grocery chains and big food immediately stepped up to say they were not going to increase their prices anymore; they were going to freeze prices. The NDP had an impact with that motion. This is an important part of what members of Parliament should be doing.
This motion passed unanimously, as members know, because it was good sense that we pushed back as members of Parliament knowing the impact that greedflation has had right across the length and breadth of this country. It has cost Canadians a terrible price. As a result of that, the member for Burnaby South brought forward this motion, which had an immediate impact.
I contrast that with the Conservatives, the official opposition. This is the third time now that they have brought forward essentially the same motion. They did it on June 7, they did it on September 28 and they are doing it today. It is for tackling a price on carbon, as if climate change and the climate crisis do not affect Conservatives. It is quite the contrary. We know that climate change is impacting people right across the country. We know that putting a price on pollution actually helps to alleviate that, yet we have this obsession from the Conservatives where on three opposition days in a row they essentially bring forward the same motion.
The motion does not deal with the issue of affordability, in the same way that the Conservatives in the House and the sound and fury from the member for Carleton do not in any way help Canadians. In fact, the Conservatives cannot really point to anything they have done over the last few years that has helped Canadians.
The NDP can. We can point to dental care. We can point to the housing supplement. We can point to the affordable housing that we forced in the last budget. We can point to the doubling of the GST credit. We can point to all of the COVID supports that we forced in this House. In a minority Parliament situation, we are using the weight of our members of Parliament to make a difference for Canadians.
What can the official opposition point to in the last few years? They can point to nothing, nada. It is so much the worse that it is a repudiation of the commitments made by the former Conservative leader in the election before last. It is important to point out that back in 2019, the Conservative leader, to quote the CBC website, made an “election promise to remove GST from home-heating bills”. To quote Global News, he said he would “cut GST from home heating bills as prime minister”.
Given the opportunity to actually put that forward, the Conservatives failed, and they brought forward the same motion a third time, as if somehow it is a magical third time. It is that triple, triple, triple of putting together the same motion and putting it out to the House again as a rerun rather than dealing with the fundamentals of removing the GST on home heating, which the Conservatives previously promised to do and did not and which the member for Burnaby South has been promoting.
What I am offering today is the opportunity for the official opposition to actually keep a promise. The Conservatives promised in the election campaign that they would take the GST off home heating, so I will be offering an amendment shortly that would do just that. The amendment, which the Conservatives should support because they committed to it, would replace the carbon tax in their opposition motion. Rather than for the third time dealing with the issue of climate change as if it is something that does not exist, we would instead put in place the removal of the GST from home heating. The Conservatives promised that, so they should support this amendment. It would actually have a meaningful impact on Canadians' lives. We know the impact of the GST on home heating, so it would make a fundamental difference.
We have seen that the NDP is really making a difference in Canadians' lives. We have seen it with dental care, housing assistance and affordable housing, measures that we forced the government to include in the last budget along with the doubling of the GST credit. All of these are a win for Canadian families.
Today, we will give the Conservatives the opportunity to keep their promise to eliminate the GST on home heating. We will propose an amendment that will make a real difference in people's lives.
That way, the Conservatives will finally be able to say that they did something to help people, that it was not just talk, that they actually did something. They need to help people instead of just going around in circles.
It is therefore with pleasure that I offer the following amendment on behalf of the NDP, and if good sense and good judgment take place, the Conservatives will support it. I move that the motion be amended by deleting the words “from the carbon tax” and substituting the following: “from the goods and services tax”.
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- Oct/20/22 12:33:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my question for the member is in regard to a commitment that he was no doubt a part of in the last federal election. I raised this earlier today with the Leader of the Conservative Party, but the leader chose not to answer the question.
As candidates, they campaigned on the principle of supporting a price on pollution. Today, the Conservative Party is sending a message to Canadians that Conservatives do not support a price on pollution. That is emphasized once again with the motion we are debating.
Does the member not believe that he and his party made a commitment to Canadians to support the principles? What does he think of that commitment today?
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- Oct/20/22 1:37:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, why is the NDP supporting the Liberal government, which supported $28 million to a Liberal donor's company? Now they have a $54-million ArriveCAN app that could have been made on a weekend for a quarter of a million by most tech companies. They jumped right into—
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- Oct/20/22 2:25:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives did not support child care for those who needed it, to help cut it in half immediately and make sure that it goes to $10 a day. They did not support raising taxes on those who are earning the most so that we could give a break to those in the middle class. Here we are again with dental care, where many families are struggling because of the challenges happening across this globe, and they are not supporting that. I understand they are not supporting that, which is their partisan position, but will they at least get out of the way so that those of us who are trying to help Canadians right now can pass legislation?
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- Oct/20/22 9:51:22 p.m.
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Madam Chair, it is an honour to rise in the House today to take part in this debate on such an important issue, which is the topic of how we can collectively improve the mental health of Canadians. As we take part in today's discussion, I want to recognize we share a common commitment in this place to address this serious challenge together. Indeed, we all ran on a commitment to our neighbours, and I am encouraged tonight. This has not been a political evening. This has not been a partisan evening. This has been an evening where members came to share personal stories, personal concerns, priorities from their communities and messages from those who they have heard suffering.
Before I start, I want to acknowledge the leadership in the House from colleagues from different parties. I would like to acknowledge my friend and colleague, the member for Cariboo—Prince George, for his leadership on suicide prevention and on the three-digit hotline. We probably would not be this far along if it were not for that member's work, and I want to thank him for it. I heard him on CBC the other day. It was nice to hear his voice when I was in my car commuting.
In addition to the member for Cariboo—Prince George, I want to acknowledge my friend from Courtenay—Alberni. His leadership on the opioid epidemic and toxic substance emergencies across this country has been remarkable and inspiring, and I want to thank him for that leadership.
I would also like to focus my energy a bit tonight on some local leadership in Milton. I was filming a video during the last campaign on a bridge in a park in Milton. It was a beautiful place. I was talking about important investments we plan to make in mental health. Dr. Nathan Pillai from Bayridge Kids was within earshot, and he came to talk to me afterward. He said that he had heard me talking about mental health and told me he was a mental health worker. He then asked if he could help. We exchanged a couple of emails afterward, but another conversation is overdue, so I expect to hear from Dr. Pillai sometime soon.
Angelo Posteraro, Rod McLachlan and their group of amazing volunteers for the Play On! ball hockey tournament raise money for the Reach Out Centre For Kids every year, and it is an exciting tournament I love to engage with because it raises money for a really important issue.
I also want to acknowledge Michael Burns and everyone at Re:soul, which is a drop-in centre in Milton. They do extraordinary work supporting kids.
As I have said on other issues, I do not think our country should or can rely on charity for basic services we are all in agreement are essential. Many of the leaders I mentioned are engaged in fundraising activities, and many of our colleagues here are too, but we should not be relying on charity for services we all know are essential.
We have been working hard to provide people in Canada with supports that are free and available whenever and wherever they are in Canada. One of those was that in 2020, in response to the pandemic, we launched the Wellness Together Canada portal to provide Canadians with access to those free 24-7 resources and supports, including counselling, on the convenience of one's telephone. The companion app, PocketWell, connects seamlessly to the portal and provides another way to help Canadians access online mental health resources. It has been a game-changer for me personally.
This year, I turned 40. I have heard that prevention is treatment. I did not know how I was going to feel when I turned 40, but my life has gone through some changes recently. I used to be focused on personal endeavours, personal fitness and going as fast as I could in my little boat. I am here in a much more serious capacity, in my view, supporting my neighbours and being their voice here in Ottawa. It has been challenging at times. This job is tough. Lots of jobs are tough. Lots of Canadians are struggling for lots of reasons.
That little app helps me check in every once in a while and reminds me what I need to do. It reminds me I have some needs. I need to exercise. I need to listen to music. I need to make sure my nutrition is good, and I need to make sure I am hydrated. Those things make my mental health a lot better. We do not need to be suffering to check in with ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to check in on our mental health and the mental health of those we love.
I would like to focus on kids. School has seen a massive disruption over the last couple of years, and we are finally getting back to normal. That is why I was so thrilled to meet with Children First today. I met with Jamie, Meghan and Josephine. They talked to me about their struggles over the past couple of years with anxiety, eating disorders, depression and their sense of fitting in and belonging when they went back to school.
Jamie, Meghan and Josephine are identified as gifted. They are intellectuals, and they are leaders. They are to be commended for coming forward to talk about these important issues on behalf of all of their classmates.
Our government remains fully committed to investing a further $4.5 billion over five years for the new Canada mental health transfer. However, we know we have a lot more to do.
We can improve. We will save lives. We need to work together on a holistic approach that addresses all aspects of mental health, not just the symptoms. Prevention is treatment, and I am so encouraged tonight by the collaboration evident in this House.
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