44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I appreciated my hon. colleague from Sarnia—Lambton's speech. Of course, I do not agree. This is one of the few times that I actually want to see a bill passed through this place without going to committee first, but I want to follow up on something that we do agree on. I would like to hear more about her private member's bill to deal with the long-standing problem of corporate pensions that are not secure for our seniors.
With your permission, Mr. Speaker, because I do not get to intervene during private members' business and ask questions of the mover of a bill, I would love to hear more about it now.
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- Feb/15/22 5:02:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very fond of the member for Kingston and the Islands, so it almost seems unfair to point out that one of the obstacles we have all faced in this place was an unnecessary election called on August 15, which stopped the work of the House from the end of June until the end of January.
I know it is not his personal responsibility to explain it, but can he perhaps cast some light on it?
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to ask a question of my colleague from North Island—Powell River. I certainly commend her for everything that she has done to raise this issue. I am particularly struck by her private member's bill, which is not directly related to this, except, of course, it is about poverty among seniors. I wonder if her private member's bill is in this current Parliament, what its current number is, or if it was from the last Parliament. I certainly want to do everything I can to support it. With respect to late filings of income tax, I have had similar cases in my own riding and certainly it is appalling.
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Madam Speaker, does the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot have an answer to the question of the Conservative Party position on OAS at age 67.
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Madam Speaker, as always, it is an honour to rise this evening to speak to Bill C-12.
Over the course of this day of debate, it has been shown that this very simple and very clear bill seeks to fix an obvious mistake that is a source of profound injustice for seniors across Canada, especially the poorest seniors.
I think we know what we are dealing with tonight. I have twenty minutes of speaking time, and I do not plan to use it. This is the end of a long day. It is very clear where we all stand. This bill should pass.
This is very rare for me, by the way. Earlier today I voted for closure. I think in the whole time I have been a member of Parliament, which is astonishingly, and this is a huge honour, coming onto 11 years, I think I have only voted for closure one other time. It offends me to close debate almost every time.
However, seniors have been waiting too long for a simple error to be repaired, and I want to see the bill pass as quickly as possible. I wanted to look at this from a broader perspective and raise something about this. This comes from the comments immediately before mine, from the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot, but from those of others as well.
We are here to fix a mistake, something that should never have happened. The seniors who applied for COVID relief were, in many cases, assured it would not affect their guaranteed income supplement. There was bad advice given to many people, as has happened before on other aspects of COVID relief. However, seniors were shocked to find that their guaranteed income supplement had been clawed back.
To fix the mistake, we have to bring another bill to Parliament. Think of how many times this has happened. The member for Battle River—Crowfoot mentioned the three times to fix the CEBA. Think about what happened when we found that there were other unintended mistakes that occurred under COVID relief.
One that is still hanging over us was the change to the Canada Recovery Benefit, which happened in the summer. This was when it looked as though we were coming out of the pandemic, and there was tremendous pressure that we were not getting people back to work because their COVID benefits made it easier for them to stay home. I think we have all heard that narrative. I do not buy into it, by the way.
We have all heard that narrative, that it was hard to get people to come back to work. Because of that, the CRB was reduced from $500 to $300. However, now it is clear that we were not on our way out of the COVID experience. We still have businesses closing. We still have public health orders. They have gone on.
They may be about to be lifted, but the decision that was made in July does not look so good in February. That is so much time for people to have been struggling to hang on at $300. Again, to fix this simple mistake, an entire new piece of legislation is required, and we have to come back to Parliament.
Think about another thing that was promised by the Liberal government in 2020. That, of course, is the Canada disability benefit. It is much needed. We know that, as a community, if we look at people with disabilities, that is the differently abled community, it struggles the most with poverty. The Canada disability benefit is long overdue. It was promised in 2020. It was promised again in the Liberal platform in 2021. I am sure they intend to get to it. I honestly do. I am not suggesting anything to do with skepticism on my part. I think the minister genuinely wants to bring forward the legislation.
However, here we are. People are poor, and they are still struggling with a society that is struggling with the pandemic, and they are still living with being differently abled in a society that does not accommodate them. We pass legislation for a barrier-free society, but we are not there yet.
Again, it needs legislation. I think we can make the case that, after two years in the pandemic, what we have discovered through COVID are the depths of inequality, which many of us had not looked at. I think a lot of us who are arguing all the time to address poverty have looked at it.
We have been very, I hate to use the word smug, but Canadians who are living above the poverty line have a hard time imagining how hard it is for our fellow citizens, who are homeless, dealing with addiction, and unable to find a place to live, even with two people in the same family working.
One thing that struck me regarding COVID-related stories has to do with the spread of COVID. This is a story from two years ago in Ottawa at one of the homeless shelters. The workers and supervisors wondered how COVID had come into this particular homeless shelter, only to discover that two of its regular residents were workers at long-term care homes. This was their address; this was where they lived. They went to work at long-term care homes and brought COVID back to the homeless shelter. Working people doing hard jobs, the frontline workers we needed so desperately, were infected with COVID and brought it to a homeless shelter.
We need to recognize from all these various stories that we do not have a social safety net that works. Our predecessors in this place from another minority Liberal Parliament in the late 1960s, when Lester B. Pearson was the Prime Minister, and the extraordinary people who once were the NDP, managed to use their minority position to push for what was needed. I apologize to my friends in the NDP now, as it is a shadow of its former self without the giants of social justice Tommy Douglas and David Lewis.
We had our whole health care system put in place in the late 1960s. We had the Canada pension plan put in place in the late 1960s. We had unemployment insurance and student loans without interest payments all in that period. I describe it in ways that might make one think the music of Camelot is about to swell in the background, but we had that once.
Here we are in a minority Parliament again. Let us be creative. I ask this of my friends across party lines. This is a moment to point out the inefficiencies of the failure to eradicate poverty when we have the chance. This is the time to accept.
I am very proud of the fact that the Green Party of Canada was the first party in this country to advocate for a guaranteed livable income, but there are many more of us now. Obviously the New Democrats have been advocating for it strongly, and many backbenchers in the Liberal Party are advocating for a guaranteed livable income. Prominent Conservatives are too, like former senator Hugh Segal, whose brilliant book, called Bootstraps Need Boots, was just wonderful. We cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps if we are shoeless.
This is an important moment for us to think about the ways we take on these problems. They are massively inefficient. Each mistake made is not calculated to make the poor poorer, but they have that effect. Each mistake, each piece of legislation and each failure to get the right decimal number cannot be fixed by a simple regulation or a wave of the wand from the minister. Bill after bill has to come back to this place. Let us fix it once and for all. Let us say, as we debate Bill C-12, that we are going to pass this one quickly but are not going to give up on casting a light on what is unacceptable in this country. Poverty is unacceptable in this country, poverty in indigenous communities and poverty in any community.
We are a wealthy country and we have study after study after study on this. The all-party poverty caucus has been holding hearings on it for as long as I have been in this place. These are studies that prove our society will be better. It is not about charity. The health, the resilience and the economic strength of our country will be fortified when we have eliminated poverty, and every Canadian has a roof over their head, has access to pharmacare and is able to live in dignity. Then this place will not be bogged down in a pandemic with realizing over and over again that we have a gap here and a gap over there and more legislation is needed.
Let us be brave. Let us be bold. Let us think like earlier generations of parliamentarians did, and let us think fully about the full range of programs that seniors need, such as affordable housing for every Canadian and long-term care that is not for profit. Let us think about what we can do for housing to ensure that seniors do not need to leave their own home, and let us perhaps have creative solutions to ensure they can stay at home. We know that the costs for seniors living in their own home are far less than if they end up in hospital.
I could go on, but the hour is late and I promised myself that I would not use all my available time, because all of us are of one mind in this place: This bill should pass. Our only difference of opinion is about how fast. I am on the side of as fast as possible. That is the only difference in this place tonight.
While we are thinking about what we need to do for each other and for our parents, I am now a senior. I am in the boat of the 67-year-olds, but boy am I lucky to have such a good, rewarding job. I think we are paid too much as MPs. When we look at the people who do social work and frontline health care work, they do not earn enough, and we may earn too much, but that is a conversation for another day.
I am honoured to have this job. I want to be of service. I ask all of my colleagues who agree to let us get rid of poverty altogether, not with piecemeal, band-aid programs. Let us do the decent thing. Let us show the world that we are committed to social justice, equality, anti-racism, fairness and, above all, democracy.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to let a big secret out of the bag and just say that I am deeply fond of the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. We share a lot.
I will say that bean counters would love a guaranteed livable income. Can members guess where we would save money? Snooping around on single moms, to cut their benefits if they find out they have moved in with their boyfriends, takes money. We have a shame-based system of band-aid solutions to poverty. They are expensive. They cost a lot of money. It does not cost money at the federal level the way it costs money at the provincial or municipal levels, but if it is all counted up, and people have done a lot of research on this, a guaranteed livable income could replace a lot of very inefficient programs that are expensive.
Those people who lose their jobs snooping around and checking up on single moms would be all right. They would not fall below the poverty line, because there would be a guaranteed livable income for all.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my Bloc Québécois colleague from Beauport—Limoilou for her very kind and generous comments.
I do think the government needs to fix the mistake it made when it created two classes of seniors. I think the best way to address inequality is to create a system that will eliminate poverty. That is the point of the guaranteed income supplement.
There are other things we must do to protect seniors' health, such as fix problems with long-term health care, which should not be in the hands of for-profit enterprise.
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Madam Speaker, I am older than some members, and that is not to say that I am smarter; I just remember stuff. I remember Reagan and Thatcher and the rise of neoliberalism, and it shifted consciousness. It made a lot of citizens look at government as something alien from them, with a hand out to pick their pockets, whereas the postwar narrative that was in our heads, which lasted through the 1950s, the 1960s and into the 1970s, was that collectively we could look after each other. We had that collective sense. As I mentioned in referring to the importance of democracy at the end of my speech, we had the sense that the way the government operates was at the very tips of our fingers. We controlled what our government did because it was not alien from us: It was us. It was us taking care of each other.
The fabric of that has been significantly damaged, but I hope that post-COVID, people will realize that neoliberalism is dead, because when we were banging our pots and pans on our balconies, it was not for billionaires. We were banging our pots and pans on our balconies for people we knew were underpaid and working hard in health care.
I hope that we can change the way we think about our job as parliamentarians to include leaps of faith to do what is right.
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Madam Speaker, to the hon. member for London West and to all in this House, although I described how beautiful things were in the 1960s and 1970s when those changes were made, there was only one woman in the House of Commons and there were not any really young women and there were no young racialized women. I just want to say what a joy it is to see the number of wonderful young women who have taken their places as MPs here, and I thank the hon. member for London West and promise to keep being as difficult as I possibly can be from my older vantage point.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague is from the neighbouring riding of Victoria where she is doing great work.
I would just say that we have to finish the work that started under Lester B. Pearson, Tommy Douglas and David Lewis, and that includes pharmacare. It will save Canada money and it will be better for our economy.
People think that our ridings, Victoria and Saanich—Gulf Islands, are fairly wealthy, but I have seniors living in their cars. I have people for whom I pay their electricity bills so that they do not fall out of their apartment and end up living in a car. We have desperate needs, and Bill C-12 will help, but pharmacare is essential.
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