44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, no one is disputing the urgency of passing Bill C-12. Everyone across party lines has been warning the government about the plight of seniors since 2021, so the need for the bill is well known.
Two weeks ago, we were told that the bill could not be pushed forward and that its measures could not be implemented before July because of IT problems. Now we are hearing that some people may be reimbursed, or at least get some help, as early as April.
Nevertheless, the use of this closure motion hurts. We all would have agreed to proceed quickly, without the gag order, and the bill would have passed quickly.
Why shut down the democratic process and discussions that were going very well?
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Madam Speaker, we now know that the Senate, whose participation in the process is required, will not be sitting this week, and that it was really not necessary to pass Bill C-12 under closure. I am convinced that the legislative process could have taken its normal course and that we could have managed to pass Bill C-12 without a closure motion this week if there had been good will and if we had worked as a team and without partisanship.
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Madam Speaker, I have been entirely consistent on this, as have many of my colleagues. Having a bill like this, or any other bill, pass at all stages without study does not make sense. We need to be studying bills to understand their provisions, understand the application and make sure that whatever is intended by the bill is actually being done by the bill. That is where, critically, the role of committee study comes in.
The member mentioned Stephen Harper seven years ago and closure. He is going to be using Stephen Harper's name for the next 50 years to try to justify what he is doing. There is a difference between using closure to limit debate at a particular stage and using a programming motion to skip over multiple stages of a bill without any opportunity for committee study or amendment. I would say there is a dramatic difference between those things.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech and for what I felt was a very clear explanation of why we really do not need a closure motion.
Could he comment on the irony of the Liberals' insistence that this bill be passed immediately, of them shoving it down our throats when this measure will not even come into effect until July even though we wanted it for March? It is just sickening.
The Liberals rejected our proposal. It is disgusting. Back in July 2021, we condemned these clawbacks, and I am sure my colleague did so too. Nothing happened, and we were told the cheques would not go out until May, or April at the earliest. For such an urgent bill, this sure does not look like a priority.
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Mr. Speaker, I was listening very closely to my hon. colleague who pointed out that the government has been slow to respond.
As everyone knows, because the Bloc Québécois members have repeated it about 12 times today, we warned the government last March of the impact this was going to have on people receiving both GIS and CERB payments.
Throughout the day, I have heard the Liberals say that we are simply trying to delay the problem because we did not support closure. I think that is a bit rich coming from the Liberals, after they have been putting off the problem since last March and now they are introducing closure, especially since closure is not the normal way of proceeding in the House. Members are generally allowed to speak.
The NDP members supported closure, but I do not hold it against them. I do not know whether my colleague could balance the rhetoric from my Liberal friends and point out that the delay is their fault. We have been telling them since March that they should have done something.
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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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