44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 31, 2023 10:00AM
- Jan/31/23 3:12:01 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the Wabano family of Peawanuck lost a beautiful child in a house fire this weekend, and we mourn with them and grieve with the 10 people who have been left homeless. In 2021, I wrote to the minister warning about the lack of fire protection for the Weenusk Cree. That warning was ignored, and now a child is dead. It is unconscionable that any community in this country is left without basic fire protection.
To the minister, I have a simple question: Will she stand today and promise to commit to build a fire hall and give emergency resource support to the people of Peawanuck so they can live in safety?
113 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:12:38 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I send my deepest condolences to the family and the entire community for the loss of the young girl due to a fire incident in Peawanuck.
Minister Hajdu spoke with Chief Hunter on Sunday to express her condolences and confirmed that Indigenous Services would be able to coordinate supports for this particular community. We will provide more updates as more information can be confirmed and as officials continue their discussions with the community.
75 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:13:12 p.m.
- Watch
I would like to remind members that, when we are referring to a member, we are to refer to them by their title or by their riding, and not by their proper name. I understand it is emotional and it is very difficult, but we have to try to maintain the decorum of the chamber.
55 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:13:32 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the rich are getting richer while everyone else is losing out, says a recent Oxfam report.
In Canada, the rich and powerful are making record profits while working people and people on fixed incomes fall further behind. This did not just happen. Liberals are refusing to make the rich pay their fair share. Despite Conservative rhetoric, they are keen to let the ultrarich off the hook, too. One thing is clear, whether Liberal or Tory, it is the same old story.
It is time for a windfall tax on oil and gas. It is time to increase the corporate tax. It is time to go after tax cheats in our country. It is time to step up for working people and people on fixed incomes. Will the Liberals step up?
132 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:14:16 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is important to everyone in this chamber that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. That is why we decreased taxes for the middle class by increasing them for the top 1%.
We actually introduced a 15% recovery dividend to banks and insurance companies, which is going to bring in about 4 billion dollars' worth of income. We have put in place a permanent 1.5% tax on profits over $100 million. This has allowed us to make life more affordable for Canadians. It has also allowed us to lower taxes for small businesses.
97 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:14:56 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, after consultations with the parties in the House, if you seek it, I believe you will find unanimous consent for the following motion.
I move that, given that the rise of far-right and associated violent extremism led to the attempted insurrection in the United States, the House condemn recent comments made by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, in which he suggested that U.S. Armed Forces should “liberate” Canada from the Prime Minister.
78 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:14:56 p.m.
- Watch
That is all the time we have for Oral Questions.
We have a number of points of order.
The hon. member for Hamilton Centre.
24 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:14:59 p.m.
- Watch
All those opposed to the hon. member moving the motion will please say nay.
Some hon. members: Nay.
18 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:16:01 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to draw your attention to a procedural matter relating to Question No. 974, which I submitted on November 4, 2022.
For the sake of time, I will spare reading the text of the question into the record, but my point of order relates to a passage found on page 523 of Bosc and Gagnon, which states:
While oral questions are posed without notice on matters considered to be of an urgent nature, written questions are placed on the Order Paper after due notice, with the intent of seeking from the Ministry detailed, lengthy or technical information related to “public affairs”...Members may request that the Ministry respond within 45 calendar days, generally by adding a sentence to that effect either before or after the text of the question, or by so indicating to the Clerk when submitting the question.
Standing Order 39(5)(b) states:
If such a question remains unanswered at the expiration of the said period of 45 days, the matter of the failure of the ministry to respond shall be deemed referred to the appropriate standing committee. Within five sitting days of such a referral the Chair of the committee shall convene a meeting of the committee to consider the matter of the failure of the ministry to respond.
The key word here is “unanswered”. I indicated my desire to have the question answered in 45 days, and at this point the question cannot be legitimately considered answered. To date, the government has failed to provide any answer on the substance of key aspects of my question. Due to this, I would argue that, per the Standing Orders, after 45 days my question remains unanswered and should be deemed to not have a response.
Before section 5(b) of Standing Order 39 came into effect in 2001, governments routinely ignored the 45-day deadline to answer questions. Following the adoption of this rule, the government began to respect the 45-day deadline. However, it appears that the government has found a way to circumvent this rule to thwart the intended protection offered by Standing Order 39(5)(b).
Your rulings have established that access to information from the government is a fundamental privilege of a parliamentarian. It is also a critical aspect of the functioning of our system of democracy. When the government flaunts its responsibility to provide this information, the system fails, and this is why, in a related matter, many members of the Press Gallery are raising concerns about the breakdown of the access to information system requests.
Coming back to the matter at hand in this place, my point of order simply asks you to rule that, when the government substantively ignores the substance of an Order Paper question, it should be considered a failure to answer for the purposes of Standing Order 39(5)(b). That way the government's refusal to answer a written question can be referred to a committee for review.
504 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:18:51 p.m.
- Watch
I want to thank the hon. member for her point of order. We will look into it and come back.
20 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:19:19 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. When the member for Calgary Midnapore was making her intervention today, there was a problem with interpretation and you asked her to start again. When you did that, the member for Timmins—James Bay yelled out, loud enough for us to hear way down here in the House, “Make it more comprehensible this time.”
My point of order is that the member for Timmins—James Bay should apologize to the member for Calgary Midnapore. It is time that men in this place stop shouting down women who have a strong and articulate point to make.
108 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jan/31/23 3:19:57 p.m.
- Watch
What I would also like to do is remind all members to stop shouting each other down during question period and during debates. That is something that everyone should take a lesson from.
I thank the member for bringing that up.
41 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, if my colleague will recall, in the last federal election there were 338 Conservative candidates who went around espousing what the former leader of the Conservative Party said, and that was that he would rip up a national child care agreement, just as we were proposing it.
Could he provide his thoughts on what many might see as a bit of hypocrisy?
64 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, indeed 338 Conservatives did run in the last election to scrap the plan we are here to enshrine into legislation today. As a matter of fact, in a French language debate, the member for Durham said that there would be a transition, over one year, from this plan to a tax credit.
As I said in my speech, what we see happening routinely with Conservatives is that their default program is a tax credit. All they want to do is provide a standardized universal tax credit because they think that is the only solution.
Conservatives find themselves in a very difficult situation now. They are trying to wrap their head around how they can be critical of a wildly successful program that the federal government has set up and, at the same time, try to show their support for Canadians who genuinely want to see this. What we will end up having is pretty much a unanimous vote in favour of this bill. The Conservatives will do an about-face from what their position was in the last election, and they will see that this is, in fact, an extremely important program for Canadians.
196 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, clause 8 of Bill C-35 discusses funding commitments. It states that the Government of Canada would engage with “Indigenous governing bodies and other Indigenous entities that represent the interests of an Indigenous group and its members.” When the previous child care agreements were signed, they were done between the provinces and territories and the federal government, respectively.
Is the government really prepared to engage with first nations communities who want more jurisdiction over their child care needs? This is a monumental task, and I am not sure whether the Department of Indigenous Services Canada would be able to complete this in two to three years.
110 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I think that, if this government has proven one thing when it comes to that very important relationship, it is that we do want to see indigenous communities have the autonomy to make the decisions that are required to properly care for, in this case, children.
I strongly believe that, even though the member might find the timelines to be tight, it is important for this to be discussed at committee. I think that this speaks to why this needs to get to committee, so that the discussions can be had. Questions that he has can be posed to the department officials and those responsible to get to the bottom of it, so we can deliver on this very important part of the agreement.
126 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I want to start by agreeing with the member for Kingston and the Islands that this bill is incredibly important and it will benefit parents in my community, just as it will for those in his.
That being said, I do want him to know that child care providers in my community, such as those at the YMCA of Three Rivers, are concerned about hiring and retaining talented early childhood educators.
As I am sure he knows, the federal government's deal with the Province of Ontario only provides a wage floor of $18 an hour, at a time when the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario is calling for one of at least $25 an hour. This is at a time when we need almost 15,000 new childhood educators in Ontario alone by 2025.
Could he talk about measures that could be put in the legislation, or other actions he and the governing party could take to address this significant gap?
165 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, the responsibility for paying individuals and child care professionals would largely fall under the purview of the provincial government, but there is, to his point, an opportunity within the framework of the legislation to enshrine some measures to encourage the growth of the sector.
He is absolutely right when he says that our communities will benefit from this tremendously. My understanding is that 92% of child care facilities that are eligible in the province have already signed on. The YMCA of Eastern Ontario and Rob Adams, the CEO, as I said in my speech, commented specifically about how important this program was. I am looking forward to the implementation and the development of the program in future years, and so is the minister.
125 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I believe it is imperative for our country that every person in this place agree on one thing: We have to equitably value the labour of child care in all its forms. It is through that principle that I believe people in this place should be considering amendments to this bill.
I want to speak about why this bill gets us part of the way but does not talk about the equitable value of the labour of child care. We need to do better. Better can always be achieved.
This bill does not address the lack of child care spaces across the country in an adequate way. We have to look at how we can work within the confines of our regionally and demographically diverse nation to see how child care is being undertaken and to see how we can incentivize people to undertake that activity. For example, not every person has access to a spot that would be considered under this bill. Some people look to extended family to provide child care or private home day cares, and some people would not have access to that with this bill.
As I have been listening to the debate, many colleagues have raised concerns about people who do shift work or who are part of the gig economy. Their hours do not neatly overlay with the way these child care spaces would be structured. I believe one of my colleagues from the NDP raised issues this morning about whether this bill adequately addresses indigenous child care needs, which are sensitive. This bill does not really address any of those things.
If we are going to talk about child care, we have to do more than just look at one frame of reference. That frame of reference is important for sure, but if we are only talking about that frame of reference, what happens to the people who are planning to have children or who are looking for child care right now, are struggling and do not necessarily fit in the very prescriptive box this bill puts together? They do not feel like they are part of the bigger vision. That is why we need to amend this bill, and I hope that happens.
There is another context this bill needs to be studied in. We say “affordable child care” or “affordable day care”, but the reality is that life is not affordable for many Canadians right now. I want to take a slightly different approach to explaining how the cost of living crisis could seriously affect our economy and where child care fits into this.
Right now, Canada's national fertility rate, when we factor out immigration, is about 1.4, and the natural rate of replacement of a population is about 2.1. This phenomenon is not unique to Canada or to any country in the world. In fact, we are seeing a rapid global decline of fertility rates across the board.
For example, I believe China now has a 1.1 fertility rate. China's fertility rate is actually lower than Canada's rate. When people are looking at China's long-term economic growth forecast or the ability of China to maintain its continuous growth, the lack of children is factoring into the economic equation. We have the same issue here in Canada.
The other phenomenon we see in Canada is that immigration is very important to our country, and we need to ensure we have adequate processes to incentivize immigration, to welcome people to Canada and to integrate them into our social and economic fabric. However, we are also seeing over time, through studies out of the U.S., that immigrant populations that have traditionally bolstered fertility rates within countries are seeing declines in their fertility rates as well.
When we are looking at child care affordability and the cost of living, we have to understand that people make a decision to have a child based on a wide variety of factors. It is a very sensitive topic, but affordability and the availability of child care is one of the big reasons. If we are just putting child care into the box we have in this bill and are not seeking consensus to look at valuing the labour of child care in all its forms, we are missing the plot here for people who need child care right now. We need to be talking about very urgently as a Parliament how we incentivize people to have children without leaving women behind and while progressing on issues of gender equity.
This is a very tough, very emotionally charged subject that many people will have a lot of feelings over based on their frame of reference and the personal experience in their lives. Frankly, the decision to have a child is about one person and one person alone in the context of a family. If we want more people to have children, we need to incentivize people so that when we are looking at all of the factors that somebody considers when deciding whether they are going to start a family, those factors are taken care of.
One of the things this bill does not consider, which I hope this place will sensitively and from a cross-partisan perspective look at, is the failure of our immigration system to process parents and grandparents' applications. Right now, I believe the wait time in that particular stream is over 38 months. That is just the service standard; we know it is a lot higher. We know there are a lot of Canadians who want to bring extended families here either through that stream or through a super visa in order to provide child care. I hope the committee that studies this bill looks at that as well. We cannot be talking about child care in a country as diverse as ours without looking at ways that we can make it easier for people to have their family engaged in that if they choose to be.
We also need to make sure that we have affordable child care spots, as this bill starts to lay out. However, we need to look at how those spaces affect people who cannot access them due to their work schedules. That is something this bill does not address.
The other thing this bill does not address is the fact that, at the same time that we are looking at child care and looking at a decline in fertility in our country, we have an aging population. On one hand we have people of a certain generation who are trying to figure out how to have child care, and at the same time, they are starting to ask the question of how to care for aging parents.
We cannot have the conversation about child care without talking about elder care for all of the reasons that have already been raised in debate, particularly around the issue of staffing, burnout and early child care educators. It is not just early child care educators who we are lacking. It is also people who are willing to be caregivers in the broadest sense of the word. We need to talk about labour and valuing the labour of child care. Again, this bill is a start, but what it does is put our perception of the response to this crisis into very narrow terms. We need to be looking at this a lot broader.
I also believe that for us to allow for gender equity and allow people to look at starting a family, should they so choose, we cannot do that without understanding that not everybody in this country will want to access programs under this system. That does not mean people should not have access to that system. It should not mean that these people are left in the dark without a solution. It should not mean that their labour is not valued.
I know somebody very close to me who chose to have a child at a very young age. They made that decision because people circled around them and made child care happen. How do we value the labour of those people? We understand that our country is diverse and is not homogenous, so how do we meet this need, particularly in the context of the fertility crisis that our country is facing?
1402 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, what is significant is that in Bill C-35, we are establishing a fundamental, universal early learning and child care program that would be a first in the history of Canada. We are saying that in working with provinces, territories and indigenous communities, there would be public, non-profit child care that is affordable and provides the type of quality care that Canadians want. This will enable women in particular to get into the workforce if they choose to do that, or volunteer or upgrade their educational opportunities. All sorts of wonderful opportunities would be created here, and it is modelled off what we saw in the province of Quebec.
Would the member not agree that this is an absolutely critical aspect of furthering, in a very significant way, child care and enabling women in particular to get more opportunities in the future?
145 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
