44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 29, 2023 02:00PM
- Mar/29/23 3:16:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in Canada, no person with a disability should live in poverty. That is why we are creating the Canada disability benefit, a thoughtfully designed income supplement with the potential to seriously reduce poverty and improve financial security for hundreds of thousands of working-age persons with disabilities from coast to coast to coast. On February 3, Bill C-22 passed unanimously in this House, and it is currently being studied at a Senate committee. We look forward to its swift passage.
I am pleased to say that budget 2023 provides funding of $21.5 million to continue work on the Canada disability benefit.
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- Mar/29/23 5:14:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the answer is simple: No, because it is not enough. It is six times less than what Quebec and the provinces are asking for to prop up the health care system.
What is Ottawa doing with this agreement? It is stabilizing the proportion of support it provides to the health care system. In 2015, when this government was elected, the federal government was funding 24% of health care spending. With what is being proposed, it will still be 24% in 10 years.
To restore fiscal balance a bit, it needs to be 35%, because it is not enough. The Government of Quebec told us that given the choice between this and nothing, it decided to take this, but it is not enough and it is not going to solve anything.
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- Mar/29/23 5:35:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today as the NDP finance critic to say that we will be voting in favour of the budget.
The budget includes initiatives that we think are very important. We worked very hard to ensure that they were included. There is a dental care plan for students, seniors and people with disabilities. The GST credit will be doubled for another six months, which is important right now because of inflation and the high cost of groceries, housing and many other things. There are requirements for the investments that the government is going to make in a clean economy. That will ensure that workers get their fair share, with good pay and benefits.
We are hearing rather common responses to the budget. We can be for it or against it. We have heard some contentious speeches, but the NDP is trying a different approach this time. At a time when hate, anger and polarization are increasingly seeping into our politics, we want to try to find a way to work together, even with people we fundamentally disagree with, on finding common objectives and making progress, instead of simply criticizing what is broken. There are plenty of things that are broken, but we need to find a way to set our differences aside and work together to make progress for the benefit of Canadians.
We are living in times when politics and doing politics are getting more difficult. There is a lot of anger, a lot of justified anger, with the difficult circumstances we are facing. There is a feeling of unfairness at the burden of things not falling equally on the shoulders of all Canadians. People should be angry about that, but it is not enough to just be angry. People have to try to find solutions, which means trying to bring people together, not dividing them.
New Democrats are prepared to support this budget, as we were prepared to enter into an agreement with the current government to not cause an election in exchange for progress on a number of key policy areas. We see some of those reflected in this budget, according to the timeline that had been agreed to in that agreement. First and foremost is dental care, which is a really important initiative that would allow millions of Canadians, who up until now have not been able to, to get their teeth fixed. Children, seniors and people living with disabilities are finally going to get access to dental care, which has been eluding them for a long time.
That has had real consequences. It has affected their ability to get and keep a job. It has affected their sense of confidence in socializing with others. It has affected the way people look at them. It has caused them pain. These are real things that we are going to help a lot of Canadians take on in their lives and find solutions to.
We are doubling the GST rebate, not for the first time but for the second time, because we recognize that, in a crisis of affordability, people need to receive help, and that help should be targeted in a way that does not simply pour more fuel on the fire of inflation. This is the best way to do it. Members do not need to take my word for it. They can take the word of many private sector economists who, incidentally, are not NDP members. They do not always have nice things to say about us, but they recognize that this is a way to get help to people who need it and to do it in a way that is responsible and reflects inflation.
Finally, as this is long overdue, the government is preparing to make some serious investments into the new energy economy that is coming. It must come if we are to reduce our emissions and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. As the government is doing this, we have been working hard to ensure that workers stand to benefit from those investments. They will benefit not because a cheque will be handed to corporations, as the Liberals so often do, and then we are left to beg them to do the right thing, but because it will be written into the funding agreements to pay prevailing union wages with benefits and pensions in those wage packages. This is so we will know that Canadian workers, when they show up to work to build the economy of the future, are going to be fairly compensated, that it will not be paid out in dividends to international or Canadian shareholders, the wealthy shareholders who hide their money offshore so we do not see a benefit here.
That is important as we move forward. One of the biggest concerns that workers have had about the changing economy and the changing role of fossil fuels in our economy has been that they would get left behind, and initiatives like this are what are necessary to make sure they are at the centre of that transition and that they stand to benefit as much as companies.
Those are some of the things we think are positive about the budget. I was saying earlier that there is a lot to be angry about now. We have seen grocery prices go through the roof, and that is affecting families. We know there are record lineups at food banks. We have seen a generation in Canada begin to give up on the dream of home ownership because prices continue to go up and up. We have seen indigenous people continue to suffer from the legacy of colonialism in so many ways, and we have seen them lose family members and friends far too regularly as a result of the intergenerational legacy of colonialism in Canada. People are starting to see the consequences of climate change and appreciate the enormous costs, both personal and financial, that are coming for all of us if we do not find a way to get on top of it.
As such, there is a lot to be angry about. I can get pretty angry about some of these things. I appreciate that members here who care about their communities and care about our future get angry about these things. However, I say to Canadians to watch out for the guy who is selling anger without any real solutions because to be angry, but to not try to channel the legitimate anger people are feeling about the injustices in Canada into a real solution, is to take us nowhere fast. When that anger turns in on itself, it is self-destructive, and that is why we need to take that anger and focus it on solutions so we can make real progress.
If we want to propose solutions, we have to understand the problems. Unfortunately, we do not have to understand a problem to get angry about it. We saw this earlier from the Conservative leader, somebody who is willing to get really angry about problems he clearly does not understand. If he does not understand the problem, it means he is not going to be able to find a solution to it.
What am I talking about? I am going to go through a list. First of all, I will go to the economy because the leader of the Conservative Party likes to talk a lot about the economy. He is right. Inflation is hurting people. We agree on that, but if we want to stop inflation from hurting people, we have to propose real solutions, and that means we have to understand the problem. He would have us believe that only government has caused inflation in Canada. That is not true. During the pandemic, we saw, across the world, manufacturing facilities shut down and shipping shut down. We saw all sorts of supply chain issues as a result of shutdowns due to a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic.
It is strange for me as the democratic socialist in the room to have to be teaching market principles to my Conservative colleagues, but anyone who understands the market will know that, when we have that level of significant supply chain disruption, we are going to see an increase in prices. That is going to happen. It is unbelievable to me that the so-called economic analysis of the Leader of the Opposition does not even take a moment to recognize the very real supply chain disruption we have seen as a result of a global pandemic.
The other thing he refuses to mention, which is just what the Governor of the Bank of Canada refused for months to mention until we squeezed it out of him at committee, is that corporate greed has been a significant driver of inflation. Even the Governor of the Bank of Canada has now said that companies have been raising prices beyond the increase in costs they have incurred and that the inflation happening because of the global pandemic created circumstances in which they felt they could raise their prices and get away with it because people would not know why the prices were going up. They might think it was justified. He said that, as inflation comes down, we may see prices come down even further, as companies no longer have a pretense to be raising their prices.
How does the Conservative leader pretend to have answers to inflation when he will not talk about corporate greed? Do members know who else will not talk about corporate greed? It is the Liberal government. That is something they have in common. It is a blind spot in their understanding of what is happening to Canadians right now, and they work together to try to silence the voices that would point out the role of corporate greed. I say shame on them both for that.
That is why we have made it a mission here to push the government to do things that it would not otherwise do. That includes the permanent 1.5% increase in tax on banks and insurance companies, which the Conservative leader loves to decry, but he never once has expressed support for taxing back some of the money that banks and insurance companies improperly took from Canadians during the pandemic. Do not tell me that guy has solutions; it is not true. He does not even have the decency to recognize a good solution when it comes up and slaps him in the face.
He likes to talk about housing, and rightly so. Canadians are rightfully angry about what is happening in the housing market. The Conservative leader likes to pretend that this is a product of the last eight years. In 2004, a house that sold for $30,000 in Winnipeg would sell for $60,000 in 2007, and then for well over $120,000 in 2012. Housing prices have been doubling in Canada for a long time. They doubled every few years under the last Harper Conservative government. Therefore, they cannot tell me that this is a product just of the last little while. It is a problem, and it is a growing problem, but it has been growing for a long time.
How do we solve the problem around housing? Browbeating municipalities into approving building permits for houses that will be built and that Canadians cannot afford is not a solution. Developers have been building a lot of houses over the last number of years. Do members know who has not been building houses? Governments have not been building housing. Before 1995, the CMHC, in partnership with provincial governments, would build 15,000 to 20,000 units of affordable and social housing every year, but they stopped when their funding was cut in 1995 by the then Liberal government. If we take the last 30 years and multiply the 15,000 to 20,000 units per year that would have been built, we land right around 500,000 units. Do members know what the deficit for affordable housing in Canada today is? It is about 500,000 units.
How did we end up with this deficit of affordable housing? It is not rocket science. It is because governments with the same philosophy as the leader of the official opposition cut and cut and cut the housing budget right out of the federal government's budget. That is why we have such a dearth of affordable housing today. That corresponds with the financialization of housing that we have seen, not over the last two years or the last eight years, but over the last 30 years. That is when it started taking off, because we no longer had more affordable housing being built at the bottom end of the price spectrum. That meant all those folks who otherwise would have moved into affordable or social units had to pinch their pennies and make tough decisions about what they could afford and what they could not, so that they could start to compete in the housing market. That is how we got to where we are.
Therefore, I will say “No thanks” to the leader of the official opposition, who runs around saying he is really angry about housing but does not even understand where the problem came from. He does not understand that policies like the ones he is preaching have caused the housing crisis we are facing today. It did not happen overnight; it took 30 years and, unfortunately, it is going to take a long time to fix. That is why we cannot afford to have somebody who is so ignorant about how we got here in the first place be in charge, because it would push us back another 10 years before we even start addressing the problem.
Let us talk about the indigenous peoples of Canada, who have suffered generations of colonial violence when the government determined to commit genocide, to take children away from their parents, to rob them of their language and to deny them access to their cultural heritage. We are still living out the consequences of that. The answer is not going to come without empowering indigenous people to be masters of their own economic destiny. Obviously, that is important when we talk about developing natural resources. It is important when we talk about the investment of $4 billion, here in this budget, for a “for indigenous, by indigenous” housing strategy so that indigenous people have the tools and resources to begin solving the housing crisis for themselves. That is important. If they can bring private capital and do some of that building, in addition to what the government can supply, that is a great thing. There are certainly examples of those successes.
We should not kid ourselves. Just as we cannot rely on the market that has created the housing crisis writ large to solve it without beginning to build again the kinds of affordable housing we had been building before, when times were better in terms of housing affordability, we cannot pretend somehow indigenous people now are going to rely on the market and market mechanisms to be able to house their people. If that was going to work as a strategy, I swear it would have been done already.
Indigenous people are not sitting around waiting for a handout when they have other solutions. What they are waiting around for is a government that is willing to work with them and resource them to be in charge of their own destiny and to be able to find the solutions in their own communities.
They have been economically sabotaged by the Canadian government since Confederation, when they started to have successful businesses and were told they could not take their products off the reserve, that there was going to be a pass system and they needed the permission of the Indian agent. We should not be surprised it did not work out. Now those are some of the problems we are trying to solve.
I hope that gives some understanding of the housing problem and what we are going to need to do in order to be able to fix it. I do not doubt a genuine desire to solve the problem, but I really do question whether the Conservative leader and his group have the intellectual wherewithal to be able to solve it. We would not know it by listening to what they have to say about the problem.
It is a similar thing when it comes to climate. The fact of the matter is we need to get our emissions down; there are no two ways about it. It has to happen, so we need to find ways to be able to do it. We need to find ways of doing it that put workers at the centre of that transition so they have good union jobs that pay well, that provide good benefits and that provide a pension for them when their working life is done, so they are able to support themselves in retirement and support their families along the way. That is how we are going to get this done.
If we look to the budget, how does this begin to assert some solutions? When it comes to Canadians who are making really difficult choices between caring for their teeth, buying their food and paying the rent, a national dental care program to cover children, seniors and people living with disabilities makes a difference. It makes a difference for their dignity. It makes a difference for their health, which otherwise deteriorates until they present in an emergency room because it has become so bad. We pay for it then, but we pay a lot more than what we are going to pay for some preventive dentist visits.
It is also a question of affordability. For those who are at the margin, who maybe have been able to afford some dental care in the past but for whom it has been difficult, this takes that cost off their plate and allows them to no longer need to put the care of their teeth in that delicate balance of costs they are trying to juggle in a time of increasing costs. The dental piece is very important.
There is another doubling of the GST rebate. The Liberals can call it a grocery rebate, they can call it whatever they want, but it is a doubling of the GST rebate. It makes sense. It is something that is targeted support that does not contribute to inflation. It is not going to households that have the ability to cause inflation; they could not cause inflation if they wanted to. They are just trying to buy the same basket of goods they used to be able to afford and no longer can afford. That money just helps them put most of the same things on the table.
I talked earlier about some of the investment tax credits and the labour conditions that are attached to those, because that is really important. It is also really important Canada begins to decarbonize and electrify. We cannot do that without producing significantly more power than we currently do. We need a grid infrastructure that can support that power if we are going to electrify not just homes and vehicles but industry such as aluminum production and steel production.
Canada has the capacity to be a world leader, so that means an opportunity for some folks to make a lot of money. This is an economic opportunity just as it was in the seventies when Peter Lougheed had the vision to make public investments in the oil and gas industry then to benefit his province.
I do want to talk about some of things that are not in the budget, but I will leave that for questions and comments.
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- Mar/29/23 6:49:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise at this hour to bring forward a question I asked the Prime Minister on February 1 of this year.
The budget was tabled yesterday, so when I referenced it in my question, it was in the drafting stage. I had thought that one might, in drafting the budget, look to the previous promises made by the governing party to see if they did not create a framework or guidance to assist the Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance in drafting the budget.
I suggested that, for instance, if times are tight and we want to contain spending, it would be a good idea to cancel spending money on fossil fuel infrastructure. The government had suggested, in previous election campaigns, that it was a priority to meet climate targets and follow the advice of scientists. I also asked the Prime Minister if it was not a good time to stop spending money on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Between the time I asked the question and today, it has risen in its estimated cost to over $30 billion.
Its original price tag, back when I intervened at the National Energy Board and it was a private sector project being run by Kinder Morgan, was approximately $5 billion, so that is a six-fold growth in the price and a remarkable $12-billion increase since this time last year. That is really quite astonishing.
I also asked if it would not be a good idea to save money by cancelling buying the F-35 fighter jets, which remain controversial in the United States, where Pentagon critics are wondering if they are good value for money because the F-35 is still plagued with problems.
I asked whether, going forward, we should not deliver on the promises the government has made, such as funding the disability benefit, following up on promises for pharmacare, and delivering on an independent Canada water agency and the promises to live up to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. My closing question to the Prime Minister was whether he would use the budget to deliver on his promises.
Now, we know the answer, and it is a partial yes. I will start with the good news. At long last, the budget does commit to, along a specific timeline, the Canada water agency. I will congratulate my friend, the hon. parliamentary secretary, who is here tonight to respond. The Canada water agency is something he cares a great deal about. It is now to be based in Winnipeg.
There is more funding for fresh water than we have seen in some time, although not as much as was promised in the Liberal platform, but let us say that is a partial delivery on a promise. I hope my question helped. Who knows if it did? The Canada water agency is an important promise. It will be independent, and it will see legislation brought forward. Again, the clock is ticking on that. I hope when they say “soon”, they mean “really soon”, and not “two years soon” like the last ones.
The Trans Mountain pipeline is not mentioned in the budget. We know the price and the cost of that are falling on Canadian taxpayers because it is now a Crown corporation. We know the debt load from buying it definitely falls on the government. The various promises to not spend money on it really ring hollow, as construction continues against the interests of sovereign first nations, such as the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, Squamish and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, which absolutely protest its existence. We know it is a climate killer.
There were various ways we could have reduced fossil fuel subsidies, but in the budget the government expands them, as we are now seeing dirty fossil fuel used to create hydrogen, so it is no longer green hydrogen. We also have seen, and this is the worst part of the budget for me, a commitment to open the Arctic offshore to oil and gas development.
I will close there.
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- Mar/29/23 6:53:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, indeed it is a pleasure to participate in tonight's debate and talk about budget 2023, a made-in-Canada plan for a strong middle class, an affordable economy and a healthy future.
I am going to respond to a few of the promises the government made that are referenced in the member's original question. One of those was regarding funding for a Canada water agency.
We know how essential healthy lakes and rivers are to Canadians, communities and businesses across the country and we know the threat that climate change and pollution pose to our fresh water. This is why, in budget 2023, we are moving forward to establish a new Canada water agency, which will be headquartered in my home community of Winnipeg.
I really want to thank the hon. member, leader of the Green Party, for her steadfast support of the concept of a stand-alone departmental agency, independent of Environment and Climate Change Canada, reporting directly to the minister. This will be a legislated Canada water agency, and that legislation will, I hope, be introduced soon. Meanwhile, the Canada water agency will be operable in a form that will be effective until it formally becomes that stand-alone agency.
This is in addition to proposing major investments to strengthen our freshwater action plan. For example, we will invest $650 million over 10 years to monitor, assess and do restoration work on the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg, Lake of the Woods, the St. Lawrence River, the Fraser River, the Saint John River, the Mackenzie River and Lake Simcoe. These are water bodies from coast to coast to coast, and these investments will support better coordination of efforts to manage and protect fresh water across Canada.
Again, I want to thank the hon. member for her support of our freshwater investments. I agree with her that we need to go further and faster. Indeed, there are future budgets where I certainly hope those investments will be considered.
The hon. member also asked about seeing progress on advancing reconciliation. Since 2015, the federal government has worked with indigenous partners to advance reconciliation and make significant distinction-based investments to respond to the unique histories, interests and priorities of first nations, Inuit and Métis communities. Through budget 2023, the government continues to advance reconciliation by supporting healthy communities and investing in self-determined solutions. For example, budget 2023 proposes investments to improve safe and affordable housing, which is critical to improving health and social incomes, and to ensuring a better future for indigenous people and their communities.
I will end there and continue my remarks after the next question.
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