- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
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- Calgary Rocky Ridge
- Alberta
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- May/10/24 12:01:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, the Canadian Armed Forces has 16,000 personnel vacancies and a crisis of morale, recruitment and retention.
That is why the defence committee unanimously voted to cancel the April 1 rent increase for base housing. Like other Canadians, our troops cannot afford rent and groceries, and they know that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Will the Prime Minister show that he actually supports our troops and reverse the April 1 rent increase, yes or no?
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- May/2/24 7:34:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are debating the eighth report of the Standing Committee on National Defence, which addresses the rent increase that took place in April. This is what was reported back to the House: “Given that, rent for Canadian military personnel living on bases is increasing this April, and at a time when the military is struggling to recruit and retain personnel, the committee report to the House, that the government immediately cancel all plans to increase rent on military accommodations used by the Department of National Defence.”
This was something the committee agreed to unanimously. There was no dissent at committee over this point. All four parties at committee agreed that we should report this back to the House. We have now had a chance to debate this, and every member in this chamber will have a chance to vote on this. I am curious to see whether the Liberal support at committee will spill over to an expression of support in the chamber.
April 1 has come and gone, and Canadian Forces members did not get rent relief, so the housing crisis in the military continues, and the retention and recruitment crisis continues. There are 16,000 vacancies in the Canadian Armed Forces. There are 10,000 undertrained and undeployable personnel in the Canadian Armed Forces. We are in a crisis of retention and recruitment. This has been observed by the chief of the defence staff and everyone on down, who have testified at various points over the last year and a half at committee. This crisis of personnel is affecting Canada's national security. It is affecting our ability to be a meaningful ally to our partners in NATO and throughout the world.
There are a number of crises facing the forces, including the production and supply of ammunition. Troops are unable to train due to lack of equipment and supplies. We do not have enough trained forces and equipment to be able to deploy and accept deployments on behalf of allies. Increasing the rent of our soldiers on base at a time like this, when so many members are facing the cost of living crisis across the board for food and everything else, it is like we are asking the troops to tighten their belts a little more, among all of the other ways our troops are shortchanged of training opportunities and the things they joined the forces for. Our forces want to deploy. They want overseas and domestic deployments. They want to train. They do not want to go on an exercise and shout “bang” rather than actually fire training rounds. That is not what our troops want to do.
The statement that the committee reported to the House was amid reports that began in a committee of the Nova Scotia legislature. Erica Fleck, the director of emergency management for the Halifax Regional Municipality, testified, “we have active serving Regular Force members who are still couch surfing who were posted here in the Summer who cannot find a place to live. They are regularly now going to food banks.” She went on to say, “Again, I mentioned the food banks. People are coming to work hungry. Young soldiers are coming to work hungry, and leaders are trying to feed them as best they can, using their own money.” This is testimony in a provincial legislature. This is not an unverified news report or rumour that there are hungry or homeless troops.
At the same committee, Craig Hood, the executive director of Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command for the Royal Canadian Legion, testified, “What I came across was some startling information on serving members of the Canadian Armed Forces being posted here: living rough in tents, living out of their vehicles, couch surfing, engaging in interpersonal relationships for the purposes of securing housing - which oftentimes puts them as victims to domestic violence.”
This happened in December 2023, when this explosive testimony occurred in the Nova Scotia legislative committee, and what was really startling was that, when asked about this in the House of Commons, in response to a question from the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman to address these allegations and to ask what was being done and why the government was failing our troops, this is what the minister had to say about that testimony: “Mr. Speaker, of course, the member opposite is once again badly misinformed. In fact, when this was reported in the press, the Canadian Armed Forces in Nova Scotia canvassed all of the members of the armed forces and determined that all of them were properly housed and that the reporting was false.”
The minister of defence actually said those words in the House of Commons. He dismissed the reports of the executive director of the Royal Canadian Legion for Nova Scotia and Nunavut Command and the director of emergency management of the Halifax Regional Municipality. He dismissed them and called their claims false. That is quite astonishing, and it was in no small part because of this that we really dug into the issue of housing in the military.
Fortunately, there are two Halifax-area MPs on the defence committee, and neither of them presumed to deny what was going on in their own city because they know. It is a fact that there is homelessness in the Canadian Armed Forces. There is food insecurity in the Canadian Armed Forces. This is the state of the armed forces under the government and the cost-of-living crisis faced by millions of Canadians that is being acutely felt in the Canadian Armed Forces.
We have been studying the crisis of housing on base, and we have had alarming testimony at the defence committee from ombudsman Lick:
I've heard from a member's dependent, who shared with me they had been homeless for five months. I've heard from families using food banks. I've also heard from some who are one paycheque away from not paying their rent or needing to make a hard decision between food and rent.
He continued, “While members do not expect a lot from their barracks, I was shocked to see some deteriorating single quarters on base that are not acceptable for any human in any situation.” This was from the military ombudsman. He also said, when he asks, “'Do you know someone who is at risk of being homeless or at risk of accessing a food bank?', everybody nods. Everybody knows someone.” This was his testimony at committee.
Amid all of this, we have a denial from the minister of defence that there is homelessness and food insecurity in the Canadian Armed Forces, so we have examined this quite thoroughly at committee, and we will have a report in due course with recommendations to Parliament, but we have found that it is not even just the residential housing units. It is the RHUs, the PMQs and barracks. We have heard of toilet facilities not up to standard by any means, mould on various walls and ceilings, and so on.
We have heard time and time again that it is things like this, such as the lack of access to a home, that drive people out of the Canadian Armed Forces at a time when we need our men and women so much. At a time of elevated need, we have a crisis of retention and recruitment.
In response to an Order Paper question that I had asked, we have confirmation that recruitment is not keeping up with people leaving the forces. We have 16,000 vacancies and 10,000 people undertrained, and the forces are shrinking. It is getting worse, not better.
We have seen the shortages and how the wait-lists of personnel to obtain a home are sometimes longer than the postings. When members of the CAF have to re-post from one end of the country to another, this is a trigger point. This is where military families have to decide whether they can continue in the forces or not. If personnel have to transfer from Halifax to Esquimalt, maybe they own a home in Halifax already or maybe they have access to a residential housing unit that is not terrible, that is not falling apart and that has a working toilet, and they would be going to another posting where they might be on a waiting list for five years. Then they would have to go on the market and find a place to rent or buy in an expensive place like Esquimalt.
Every place is an expensive place in Canada after nine years of the Liberal government. In nine years of the government, we have seen rents double, as an average, across the country, more than double and almost triple in some large cities. We have seen the price of housing across the country double. Interest rates are high and are being fuelled by deficits, which trigger inflation, which triggers higher interest rates. We have seen no restraint from the government. We have seen no balance and no ability to rein in or do anything about the crisis of housing and access to housing across Canada.
When it comes to our armed forces, the least the government could do is not boost up the rent on the small group of people who are fortunate enough to even have a base house, never mind the plight of forces members who are on multi-year waiting lists. There are thousands of CAF members waiting for access to base housing.
We have actually called upon the housing minister to come to committee, housing being one of the triggers that are causing people to leave the forces and presumably a factor in the difficulty of the forces to recruit. The minister has not come to committee to answer for this.
We note that the budget the Liberals just tabled contains exactly zero dollars for additional housing on base. There is zero dollars next year, too. There is $1 million the year after that, if I remember correctly. As far out as we can see, in the budget projections through to 2029, I think there is eventually a total of some $14 million for military housing. They are short thousands of units. How are they going to fix this problem without budgeting for it? The government is not even going to start to address the backlog and the shortfall in construction for base housing, not with zero dollars this year and zero dollars next year.
Under the existing funding, they are building about 20 homes a year. Let us think about that. There are thousands of people waiting for a home, and 20 homes a year are being built. They are decommissioning close to that number anyway. They are barely keeping up with the ones that have fallen apart to the point that they cannot even be used anymore. These properties, as we have seen from testimony, are pretty rough to begin with.
There is also nothing to address this issue in the defence policy update that was just tabled. In fact, it is a misnomer to even call it a defence policy update. It is full of exploring options and reaffirming existing policies. There is literally nothing concrete that is new policy, unless it was formerly the policy not to consider options.
This is assuming the Liberals were ever going to consider options to replace our submarines. undertake and see through NORAD modernization, or build and procure any of the kit we need. Unless it was the Liberals' policy not to consider options before, a new policy of considering options is hardly a policy.
Taking it back to housing, there is nothing in there respecting housing. This seems to be such a small thing. I have heard the Liberals ask, “do the Conservatives not know the rents are capped at 25% of the forces member's salary?” This is capped, so they can afford it. However, their wages are not keeping up with the rest of the cost of living increases. The military members' budgets are already stretched, so now even any increase is going to reduce the standard of living for that family.
We have heard time and again that it is all these other factors that drive people out of the forces. It is the difficulty with repostings and the way that affects families if they are established in a community. They may already have a family doctor in a community and kids in school, and the serving member's spouse has employment, and then they are told they have to be reposted across Canada. Maybe the spouse's job is not transferrable. Maybe their credentials are not recognized in another jurisdiction. Maybe they are going to be waiting five years to find a doctor in that community and, oh, by the way, they cannot afford a home there. They may lose the base housing if it is a family in a PMQ and would not receive the same accommodation in the new post. These are all factors that affect retention and recruitment.
The government has a crisis of retention and recruitment. The forces are, in the words of the defence minister, in a death spiral of crises of retention and recruitment. Why not do the easiest thing that the Liberals could have done, even if it is only symbolic? It is by no means suddenly meeting the 2% of GDP obligation that we have to our allies, but it would be something. It would send a signal to the troops that they do not bear the cost of the $950 million of cuts that are taking place and that the Liberals announced.
I have said enough on this for now. I will take any questions.
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- May/2/24 7:17:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the report we are debating called upon the government to reverse the rent increase on our forces members. While this may seem like a small thing, it just seems to be what is typical of the government's approach. The utter neglect of the forces has precipitated a crisis of recruitment and retention, yet the government has pressed ahead with the rent increase.
I wonder if the member would like to comment and connect these seemingly small things with the near-catastrophic state that our national defence is in right now.
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- Oct/27/23 11:16:28 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, under the NDP-Liberal government, a generation of young Canadians are giving up on home ownership. It used to be that if someone had a full-time job and saved their money, they could buy a home, start a family and eventually pay their house off.
How can a young Canadian save for a down payment when they are paying $2,500 a month for rent? How can they qualify for a mortgage when the payment is $4,000 a month? It now takes a worker most of their working life just to save enough for a down payment, but then they still would not even qualify for the mortgage.
The government's inflationary deficits have triggered an inflation crisis and the highest interest rates in decades. Those who already own a home do not know what they are going to do or how they are going to make their mortgage payments after the next renewal. Those who do not own a home are forced to pay ever-increasing rent.
The Prime Minister has killed the middle-class dream of home ownership. That is his legacy after eight years. The Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
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Madam Speaker, I am aware of a few things, including that the government has been in office for eight years and is only now being spurred on, kicking and screaming, by the opposition's plan, which has been tabled in this place, to implement something it promised to do in 2015. I know that in 2008, it did not cost $2,200 a month to rent a portion of a house in my riding. I know that in 2008, the mortgage payment on a typical home in Canada was not $3,600 a month. I spent 22 years in that industry. I know a bit about affordability and what people could qualify for then and now.
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Madam Speaker, it is always an honour and a pleasure to speak in this place and to add my voice to debate. Today we are talking about Bill C-56, which if passed would amend the Excise Tax Act and implement a temporary 100% rebate on the GST portion for new purpose-built rental housing and amend the Competition Act to get rid of the efficiencies defence, which has been a handy loophole that has been used to let almost any corporate merger go ahead, no matter what it would do to consumer choice.
I want to talk mostly about the housing portion of this.
We are in a housing crisis. Too many Canadians cannot afford to live in their own country. For a long time, people thought of this as just a Vancouver and Toronto problem, but over the past eight years the affordability crisis has reached into every community in Canada. Even in my city, where the economy was devastated in 2015 and where real estate prices actually fell due to the government's implementation of an immediate attack on the energy industry, I am receiving emails from my constituents, who are demanding action on housing. I got an email from Kathy, who talked about her rent going very quickly from $1,600 to $1,800 to $2,200 per month, and that is more than half of her income. I know that every MP in this House is getting these kinds of emails. Rent has doubled, under the watch of the current government, across Canada.
I also get emails from people who believe they will never become homeowners. If someone is a young person today who did everything their thoughtful and nurturing parents told them to do, like studied hard and earnestly, worked hard, got a good education and entered the workforce in a profession or a skilled trade, they would now be earning a good income, which is probably higher than an average income for Canadians. This ambitious young person who might be a nurse, a welder, a lawyer, a teacher or an engineer should have the world at their feet. The promise of Canada for decades was that this young person could now go out and rent a place, save their money for a few years and buy a home before maybe settling down and starting a family, but this is no longer the reality.
How much money can a young person be expected to save in this current environment? What do they do when half their income is going to pay rent? What do they do about the food prices that constantly go up or the prices of gasoline and home heating that go up? The cost of everything due to the government's inflationary deficits and wasteful spending leaves a worker without the ability to save. It would take the typical worker most of their working life to save up for a down payment to buy a typical house, but that would be in vain anyway, because they would not qualify for the mortgage that they would then need to actually go ahead and purchase a typical home.
What are young people today coming out of school to do? Under the government, the country is becoming a place with two kinds of families: families that already own a home and families that may never. The only hope that young Canadians have of becoming homeowners now in most of Canada's large cities is, with help from their parents, if their parents happen to already own a home, the hope that their parents will have the ability and enough money that they can contribute to that large down payment and co-sign the loan. For everybody else, there is just an ever-increasing cycle of rents that rise with shrinking space and quality of accommodation.
The reason for this is quite simple. For years, the supply of houses has failed to keep up with demand. For eight years the government has ignored the failure of supply to keep up with demand. The government has piled on costs and taxes at the federal level to push up construction inputs and it has enabled municipal political allies, who never fail to be the voices of Nimbyism.
Eight years after making a promise on page 7 of their election platform in 2015, Liberals have now figured out there is a problem with access to housing in Canada and are rushing a bill in at the beginning of this fall session to bring about this campaign commitment they made on the elimination of GST on purpose-built rentals.
We see this time and time again. The government creates a problem, and in this case eight years of high taxes, deficits, increased bureaucracy and wasteful spending, leading to inflation, which has led to high interest rates, compounding the shortage of housing supply by making it more expensive, or impossible, for builders to build. Now it wants Parliament to rush through a bill that contains something it promised in the 2015 election and which it has just now gotten around to tabling in Parliament.
Something else happened. The opposition leader tabled the proposed building homes, not bureaucracy act, which also promises to cut the GST on purpose-built rental for construction of below-market rent. The Leader of the Opposition's bill also deals directly with the bureaucratic hurdles to home construction and municipalities that do not want to build new homes.
The Conservative plan is elegant in its simplicity. A Conservative government would make federal infrastructure money contingent on housing outcomes, not housing announcements but actual keys in doors. The Conservative plan would do so not by telling municipalities what to do, but simply by insisting they meet this national policy objective of ensuring that Canadians have a home to live in.
A Conservative government would not bully local councils, like the housing minister recently did in his letter to city council threatening to withhold federal money if city council did not take a particular position on a particular vote. That is not how the Conservative plan would work.
The Conservative plan takes no position on what municipalities do. We would leave that to elected officials, who are elected in their communities to decide how they achieve the objective of increased housing supply. Let us make no mistake, the Conservative government would tie and hold back infrastructure funding if municipalities failed to get keys in doors by increasing the amount of housing stock that is built in their communities. We are saying to municipalities to let the builders build, get on with making sure we have approvals and stand up to the powerful, vested interests that can always come up with a reason that a housing project or a neighbourhood development cannot be approved.
The bill we are debating today seems like it was forced on to the floor by the Liberals trying to catch up to the Conservatives, who already had a plan tabled.
The other part of the bill is actually also stolen directly from the member for Bay of Quinte, who had tabled a private member's bill to abolish the efficiencies defence. I do not have time to get into the efficiencies defence, but I certainly support abolishing it. I have supported it before. I supported my colleague, the member for Bay of Quinte. Also, the previous NDP speaker supports this, and he has talked about competition. I agree with him as well. It is long overdue.
The Rogers-Shaw merger debacle should have been enough to immediately table such legislation, but if a Conservative initiative like that private member's bill is enough to spur the government to action, so be it. That is fine. That is actually Parliament doing what it should, which is debating ideas. If the government sees an idea in two Conservative PMBs, and maybe even an NDP PMB, and wants to copy these ideas and table them as government legislation, great. Let us get it done.
Canadians do not care who tabled what. They just want it done. However, it is a lesson to those who maybe have cozied up and are in this unhealthy coalition with the government. They can be in opposition and still get things done, like tabling good legislation. Let us get good ideas on the table and let us get better policy for Canadians.
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- Jun/8/23 6:44:22 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is just it. It is about the actual care and quality of care for the children. Most parents, given the choice between a bill that enshrines principles and a day care space that is affordable, would probably choose the affordable day care space.
Again, this is what we often see with the Liberal government and the bills it introduces. The Liberals want to be rewarded for the intentions of their bills rather than their ability to execute and achieve the outcomes they state.
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- Apr/28/23 11:57:01 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, after eight years under the Prime Minister, Canadians cannot afford a place to live. What do the Liberals have to show for the $90 billion they have committed to housing? Mortgages have doubled. Rents have doubled. It is $2,500 a month for a couple to rent one room in a townhouse. That is not the townhouse, just the room. A government on autopilot cannot fix a housing crisis.
When will this jet-setting Prime Minister and his government get back to work?
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