44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 2, 2022 02:00PM
moved for leave to introduce Bill C-225, An Act to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and the Pension Benefits Standards Act, 1985 (pension plans and group insurance plans).
He said: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to present a bill that would correct a long-standing deficiency in Canada's bankruptcy laws, which have had the perverse impact of expecting Canadian workers who have paid in good faith into pension plans throughout their entire career to take a back seat to professional risk-takers, whether those be banks, creditors, investors or others, who invest in companies with surplus capital in order to make money when workers do not have the opportunity to have a whole other 25-year career on the cusp of their retirement.
It is really important that the pension promise be honoured in Canada, as it is in other jurisdictions that have far better protection for the pensions of their workers.
I would be remiss if I did not say a big thank you to the former MP for Hamilton Mountain, Scott Duvall, who did excellent work in developing this piece of legislation, not only as a parliamentarian but also out of his personal experience as a worker and a union officer at Stelco, where workers for many years had the future of their pension called into question because of these inadequacies in our bankruptcy laws.
I look forward to working with members of all parties to find a way forward to get this change finally done.
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- Feb/2/22 3:50:39 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, not that long ago the Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report in which he expressed concern about the late tabling of Canada's public accounts, and about the government's accounting for money and the way it is spent.
The situation we have before us is that in Bill C-8 there is a proposal to spend $1.72 billion on COVID-19 rapid tests, and then of course we just heard a question of privilege about Bill C-10, which proposes to spend $2.5 billion on rapid tests.
Is the intention that the amount in Bill C-10 would replace and get rid of the clause in Bill C-8 for purchasing rapid tests, or is the idea that the government is asking for money in two places and ultimately intends to spend about $4.2 billion on rapid tests?
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- Feb/2/22 4:16:02 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I am very glad to be talking about the issue of housing here today in the House of Commons.
There absolutely has been an astronomical increase in the cost of housing over the last five or six years. I has been particularly acute in the last two years, but we have to note that this is part of a longer-standing trend. House prices in December 2010 were at about $345,000; by November 2015, they were at about $450,000. Now they are at about $713,000. Just n the five years between 2010 and 2015, that is still a 32% increase, and that coincided with another government that was largely absent when it came to the housing file.
The fact of the matter is that these prices, even if we go back to 2010, are still out of reach for a lot of Canadians. The answer has to be substantial investment in rent-geared-to-income housing and housing that is non-market housing, a strategy that would not treat our homes as if they are a commodity to be traded on the market. That answer requires public expenditure.
The member continues to say the answer to the housing crisis is for government to stop spending money. That clearly cannot address the issue with the kinds of rent-geared-to-income housing that we need in order to address a significant part of the housing crisis in Canada. I would like to know what the member proposes if it is not any kind of government spending. If developers were going to build housing for all the Canadians who need it, presumably they would have done it by now, and they do not just need another incremental tax break to finally start doing that. That is not their business, so what is the member's proposal for a real solution to get the kind of housing built that we need in this country?
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- Feb/2/22 4:55:36 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-8. It is my first time giving a speech in the House in the new year. It is not my first time on my feet but my first time speaking at length, so it is my first time speaking in the House since the omicron wave seriously took hold. I want to take a moment to recognize what a punch in the stomach it has felt like to Canadians across the country, many of whom had some hope that we were getting beyond the pandemic. When this wave came, I think many of them felt all of those many feelings we have been feeling over the past two years kind of condensed into a new wave of the pandemic.
I want to give special thanks to all the frontline workers we talked about at the beginning of the pandemic, who never went away and never stopped doing those important tasks even though the limelight shifted away from them.
Health care workers continue to labour in really difficult circumstances, and they are overworked, tired and under-resourced.
Teachers and child care workers have had to face the pandemic all the way through. In this particular wave, and I will speak to my own experience in Manitoba, they were having the challenges of remote learning and are now having to deal with full classrooms and students and colleagues who are getting sick, or they are getting sick themselves.
Grocery store workers are putting themselves at risk once again. As my colleague from Windsor West has rightly pointed out, some of the big grocery chains said that when another wave came they would bring back hero pay to recognize the risks workers are taking in order to help Canadians, but they have not stepped up to reinstitute that pay.
All of these things together are leading to a lot of outrage, and I am going to talk a bit about some of the things I find particularly outrageous today and that inform my work.
I am outraged when I get emails, as I did today, about another senior who has lost their life, not because of the pandemic directly but because they took the government at its word when it said it would be there to have their backs, would support them through the pandemic and told them to apply for help when they lost their job. They did. They applied for CERB.
Because the government could not figure out its own rules, and that is probably the most charitable interpretation, or because it did not care, it decided to claw back those benefits that were supposed to be for working seniors in need through the guaranteed income supplement. Not only did the government do that and not catch it before it happened, but the government was advised at least as early as May of 2021 that it was happening and it chose to do nothing about it. The government chose to do nothing about it.
One could say that the government did nothing about it until it happened, except that it happened in July and it still did nothing about it. The Liberals called an election and did nothing about it. They came back from the election and did nothing about it. It took weeks of persistently raising this in the House of Commons to get an announcement, and that announcement did not solve the problem because that money still is not in the pockets of seniors who are in dire need.
The money is not in the pocket of the senior I heard about today, the senior with type 2 diabetes who could no longer afford the food and medication they needed to be healthy and passed away. I have an email open in front of me about a couple from Mississauga who are in dire straits. The two of them are trying to live on $1,300 a month because their GIS payments are gone.
The government says not to worry and that it has a solution with a one-time payment in May or June. There are already seniors who are no longer living and who cannot receive that payment, and there will be more by May or June. That outrages me. It outrages me on the substance of the matter, because Canada should do better. It outrages me because it breaks the promise the Prime Minister made to people in this country that the government would be there for them.
Instead, on a principle of bureaucracy, the Liberals are not, because they could not figure out their internal systems, or they did not have the right lists or they were not sure about this or maybe needed to do that. This is after just proving to the country that when the political will exists they can roll out a program to millions of Canadians almost overnight.
Liberals expect us to believe that, for those seniors who were already receiving money from the government, already on a list, already in a system where we were paying them, they cannot find a way to get money into those seniors' hands so that they are not dying in the cold. It is not believable and it is shameful.
I am outraged about that. I am proud that people in Elmwood—Transcona sent me here to relay that message to the government. I am going to keep doing that until that money gets into the hands of seniors who can then get back into their homes and out of the jeopardy they are in because the government cannot be bothered to take on its own bureaucracy, which is telling it something that needs to be done cannot be done, when we all know that is not true.
That outrages me.
I am outraged that people during the pandemic were dying in personal care homes because of years of cuts, at the federal and provincial level, to health care. We know our system has been under-resourced. Those cuts did not come because Canada could not afford to do those things. Over the years that those cuts came to our health care system, the corporate tax rate in Canada went down from 28% to just 15%. That is a huge decrease. That is almost a 50% tax cut to the largest corporations in Canada, while our government was telling us it could not afford to pay its fair share of health care to the provinces.
That is shameful.
What is more shameful still is that we are two years into this pandemic and there has hardly been a long-term care centre in Winnipeg that has not had a COVID-19 outbreak. There has been no work done by the federal government to convene the provinces to talk about better national standards and funding those standards.
I am not talking about the federal government telling the provinces what to do. I am talking about convening them so they can talk about best practices, so that every Canadian can benefit from the best things our provincial governments are doing to serve Canadians in long-term care, and then ensuring the federal government is at the table to help resource those things.
That was the power of—
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- Feb/2/22 5:02:55 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I suspect that may have something to do with the shouting, but I did say I was outraged and I suppose that has some technical consequences.
Here we are. We are two years into the pandemic. We have not made significant progress on long-term care. It is not like the experts that have been advising governments on how to handle the pandemic were caught off guard that there was another wave of the pandemic. Even early on, they were saying there would be probably at least four waves. We know that these are problems that need to get fixed, even if somehow magically the pandemic were to end tomorrow. We hear certain members in the House, even today, suggesting that somehow the pandemic is a function of public health restrictions or something. If we end the public health restrictions, we do not end the pandemic. I wish that were true, but we are fighting a virus. We are not fighting each other. We need to bear that in mind.
The way to get through this is with a lot of care and resources to be sure. As we were cutting those taxes for big corporations and telling people that we could not fund the health care that they needed, that was also being done by a lot of governments provincially. We are seeing it in Manitoba, Alberta and around the country because we have people in the government who do not believe in public health care in the first place and would rather see it privatized and would rather give tax cuts to big corporations instead of ponying up the funding that we know is necessary to have proper health care.
I am outraged at the Liberal Party, which promised as long ago as 1997, and the government has said again and again until their most recent Speech from the Throne, that they were going to make progress on pharmacare. Why am l mad about that? It is because I understand that people are really getting hit hard in the pocketbook with the inflation that is happening. I know there is no magic wand in the desk of government and some of the factors driving inflation right now are beyond their control. However, what is in their control? They could certainly help with the cost of prescription drugs because a national pharmacare program would do that. It would save money. It actually costs less to have such a program than Canadians are spending right now on prescription drugs.
We are going back a couple of years now to the PBO study, but the PBO was very clear. Right now Canadians are spending about $24 billion a year on prescription drugs with the many provincial systems that we have and the many private plans. One national system would cost about $20 billion a year. That is a way to save money and serve people better and help bring down some of those costs that are making things so hard for Canadians right now. It is something the government absolutely needs to do and would help.
The NDP has long proposed taking on telecom companies. Canadians are paying among the highest rates for cellphone and Internet. That is not a luxury anymore. It is not a “nice to have”. If people want to participate in the labour market, good luck finding a job and keeping a job if they do not have access to the Internet or to a cellphone. That is something that the government could do. It could take a regulatory approach to bringing down prices and making sure that, at the very least, there is a genuinely affordable plan for basic access to something as important as cellphone and Internet rates.
What is in Bill C-8? There is nothing particularly offensive, but not a lot of the things that we really need. I think that is the dilemma. Certainly there are many Canadians who are frustrated, in this time of real difficulty and real challenge with the pandemic but also with, for many of us, a real looming sense of challenge when we look at what is happening to the planet and all the extreme weather events and we look at the economic disruption and the displacement of people that it is going to cause, that we are just not rising to the occasion. Yes, absolutely we should be helping businesses improve their ventilation systems. That is the right thing to do in the context of the pandemic and these measures make sense as a way of contributing to that.
We ought to be helping schools improve their ventilation systems. It is not a real answer to reimburse teachers for some of what they are paying out of pocket, because I do not think teachers should have to pay out of pocket. Until we have governments that are willing to fund education to the extent that it needs to be, so that every student has what they need, I am thankful to teachers who are willing to go above and beyond, and I am willing to support a measure that gives them a little relief for doing things out of compassion for their students that they really should not have to do because that is a compassion that we should have collectively. We should work collectively to fund the things that students need, instead of leaving it to their teachers on an individual basis.
I am glad in principle that the government is looking at having some kind of tax for underused housing. However, I think it will be important to interrogate that seriously at committee, because initial analyses suggest that there are loopholes that we could drive trucks through in this legislation. There is a lot more we need to do to tackle the problems of the housing market, some things the Liberals themselves promised in the last election, like banning blind bidding. That was a platform commitment of the Liberal Party.
Why is that not here? What could they possibly be waiting for? Are house prices not high enough? Do they need to escalate faster for the Liberals to make good on their own election commitments? Give me a break. That stuff should at least be here.
We also know that we need a serious plan, not the national housing strategy they love to tout, because it is inadequate. We need to get more real units, and I am not talking about so-called affordable housing, which has a technical definition that really just means “high rent” for most people, rent they cannot afford.
We need to build housing with rent geared to income, and we need to explore non-market options, like co-ops and other things like it, so that we take the speculation out of enough of the housing market that people really can access housing. That would also help relieve cost pressures among people for whom home ownership is a real goal. It would be a larger group if prices came down, as it was not that long ago. That would help them out too by relieving demand in the housing market and helping to lower prices overall.
These are things that we really need to be doing. I look forward to having an intensive study at committee of this new proposed underused housing act. I think that is a good piece of parliamentary work. However, we are kidding ourselves if we think it is really going to change the fundamental trajectory of the Canadian housing market, not just in the last two years, as the Conservatives would have us believe, but over the last 20 years, during which prices have been going up consistently because we have had federal governments that, since the mid-nineties, have not come to the table with enough funding to build enough non-market housing to relieve serious pressure on the market. That absolutely needs to happen.
There is more money proposed for things we need, particularly rapid tests, and we are quite supportive of that. There are some questions, though. I did ask the Associate Minister of Finance about this earlier, and I was somewhat dismayed that he did not have an answer. In Bill C-8 there are proposals for money for rapid tests, and in a stand-alone bill, Bill C-10, the government proposed to spend money on rapid tests. Bill C-8 asks for $1.72 billion for rapid tests and Bill C-10 asks for $2.5 billion for rapid tests, and the Associate Minister of Finance and the government could not give a clear answer to whether it is asking for $4.2 billion combined, the $2.5 billion in Bill C-10 or the $1.7 billion in Bill C-8.
I think Canadians should know, and I think Parliament should expect to have some reliable reporting on those numbers as we go, because as we know, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, not that long ago, said the government, when it came to tabling its public accounts, was considerably late and was an outlier among other G7 countries. I think the government really needs to get with the program. There has been a need for a considerable amount of public spending, but the fact that we need to spend is not a reason not to report well on what the money is being spent on and not to do it in a timely way. In fact, it becomes that much more important that the government reports well and in a timely fashion on its spending when so much money is going out the door and so quickly. There are certainly things to talk about in that regard.
Suffice it to say, while I am not impressed by the extent to which many of the things we need to do to rise to the moment are not in here, whether they are in facing the pandemic or the climate challenge, I am not of the view that this is a reason for things not to proceed. However, I really think the government needs to figure out how to rise to the occasion and move forward with a sense of urgency, particularly, to reiterate it one more time, the extent to which is has to internalize the sense of urgency required when it comes to seniors who have had their benefits clawed back by the government. They are not just losing income; they are also losing access to provincial programs in many cases. They were part of their support network and kept them housed, fed and alive. All of that has been called into jeopardy because of the government's refusal to act swiftly in May of last year when it knew that this was going to be a problem. This is something the government absolutely has to act on with urgency.
It also has to address all the people who are still out of work because of the pandemic. Let us not kid ourselves. We all know somebody, at least one person if not more, who is struggling to get back to the job they had or to get enough hours in a new job and who cannot support their family. The 40% cut to pandemic benefits was bad enough, going from $500 a week to $300 a week, but in addition to that, with the Canada worker lockdown benefit, the government made it way harder for people to access help. My office is hearing from people in Elmwood—Transcona and from people across the country who are trying to access this benefit at a time of incredible need and cannot access it. They are being told that it should take a matter of days for a response, but they have waited weeks and still have not gotten a response. The government had a system that was providing income support for a lot of people, and when it ended, the government was still providing support to about 900,000 people. What it was replaced with is not adequate to the task, both in terms of how much it delivers and in terms of the criteria that people have to navigate to access it.
As I said, Bill C-8 can certainly go to committee and there are things worth looking at, but this is not the kind of leadership we need at the moment. The government has to do more to rise to the occasion. I will continue to be here, as will my New Democratic colleagues, to press the government to rise to the occasion.
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- Feb/2/22 5:16:41 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I will tell the member what is different. In this case, we had seniors who were working to top up their guaranteed income supplement benefit, but they lost their job when the pandemic started. They were told to apply for help and that they would get some supplementary income to replace what they had lost. When they said it was a little more than they usually make, the government said not to worry and to just apply. It said, “We have your back; there's not going to be any penalty.”
Some seniors ended up fixing their car, some fixed their teeth and some paid bills that were in arrears. Then the time came to assess them for the guaranteed income supplement for next year, and without the government having told them, their pandemic benefit counted against them in the calculation of their GIS. This represents not only their GIS, but a bunch of other programs for which GIS enrolment is a precondition and that support them. The government just started clawing it back. The government knew for months that this was coming, but it did not care and did not do anything about it.
Now people are being evicted and some are dying. That is a huge difference. This has to do with the government and how it has managed its own internal bureaucracy, and it is costing lives. That has not happened before.
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- Feb/2/22 5:19:11 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.
I think we can do a lot more for seniors and for all Canadians who need support. This is not just about direct financial support. I am also talking about more funding to help the provinces upgrade their health care systems, for example. That can come from the federal government.
There is also the issue of tax loopholes and tax rates for large corporations and the wealthy. A few months ago we learned that 1% of Canadians own 25% of all wealth. That is not sustainable.
The government cannot fund all of the services Canadians need without more revenue. We have a serious problem when 1% of the population has this kind of wealth and does not contribute its fair share.
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- Feb/2/22 5:22:04 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for North Island—Powell River for the all the work and advocacy she has undertaken on this file since we first found out about this.
The reality that is stark, which we are seeing very clearly, is that poverty kills. Poverty can kill people just as sure as the pandemic can. It is why it was so important to have a full economic response and financial response to the pandemic. That is why the New Democrats fought so hard for a benefit of $2,000 a month. It is why, given that we are clearly not out of the pandemic, it was wrong for the Liberals to cut that down by 40%. It was wrong for them to claw it back from seniors.
I do not know how long we will have to wait for the government to make this right. However, I know there are many seniors out there who cannot afford to wait any longer than they already have. The government needs to find a way to act on an urgent basis.
Campaign 2000 had two calls. One was for a direct emergency payment to affected seniors, and the other was for a housing fund to get the ones who have already been evicted or who are facing eviction rehoused or kept in their home. The government should do both. It needs to pick at least one so that we can get these seniors off the streets and somewhere safe. Then they can make it to a day when the government is finally ready to offer compensation.
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- Feb/2/22 5:24:57 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I would point out that the other decrease in the corporate tax rate from 22% to 15% happened under the Harper government, and that it did that while it reduced the escalator for federal funding to provinces for health care. Therefore, there is enough blame to go around between Liberals and Conservatives for the diminishing amount of money that goes out to the provinces.
Part of the solution, frankly, is the health accord model, in which the federal government brings provinces around the table to talk about best practices. I worked in the minister of health's office in Manitoba, and some of the things we saw the most success on were the five priority areas coming out of the 2004 health accord. This was because provinces decided what the priorities were and how to measure progress, and then they had federal money to meet those standards.
That is when we see progress: when we get together, plan and fund success. That is the promise the Liberals broke when they were elected in 2015 after running on a new health accord. Shame on them. That is the model we need to get back to.
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