44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I always find it rich when I hear the Conservative opposition members talk about this. It was actually their government that wanted to increase the age of retirement to 67. One of the very first things we did as a government was to restore that age back to 65. We moved very quickly on enhancing the guaranteed income supplement, which they, by the way—
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Madam Speaker, on a point of order, we are debating in the House the closure of a bill. We are debating whether we are going to move forward with this legislation or not, yet the minister, in all of her responses, continually refers to a policy decision made over six years—
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- Feb/15/22 10:35:51 a.m.
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That is debate, not a point of order. Also, I remind members that if they are not speaking right now, they should have their masks on while in the House.
I will ask the hon. minister to wrap up. We have other individuals who want to ask questions.
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Madam Speaker, I will go back to the point that Bill C-12 is a very short, simple and clear bill. It is something we can all agree with. There are many things we disagree with in this place, but I really think we have an opportunity to showcase to all Canadians and seniors that this is a very significant fix for those who are most vulnerable. We can work together to fix this.
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Madam Speaker, the debate is on the closure motion. This measure should be used sparingly on the important debates we have in the Chamber.
Today, we are being invited to collaborate, to act urgently, when the government has been dragging its feet for months while being pressured and facing demands. It is getting late to fix this situation.
I would like the minister to give us her definition of urgency. Did they have to wait until the last minute to ask us to collaborate or should they have been proactive?
You had the time to correct this.
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- Feb/15/22 10:37:35 a.m.
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The member should address her questions and comments to the Chair and not directly to the minister.
The hon. minister.
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Madam Speaker, Bill C-12 is exactly that. It is a proactive measure to ensure that seniors who got pandemic benefits last year are not impacted by any reduction or affected by their GIS and income tax.
I appeared at committee yesterday regarding my mandate letter and spoke to this very issue a number of times. The member opposite had the opportunity to ask me questions. I was available to all committee members to speak about this issue, and it is included in my mandate letter. The motion is to expedite this matter to reflect both the urgent nature of the bill to support needs and the ongoing collaboration and agreement between all parties on this. There is a simplicity in the policy content.
Nothing about this pandemic has been normal, and I argue that neither should this be. I hope we can move forward to make sure the most vulnerable people have support moving forward.
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Madam Speaker, the sense of urgency is so real. These are the lowest-income seniors in our country who have had clawbacks because of the failure of the Liberal government.
As the New Democrats, we are here to get help for seniors now. I want to give a shout-out to my colleague, the MP for North Island—Powell River, for being vigilant and pressing the government to fix this problem. We are here to help Canadians and seniors right now. We have been fighting this fight since the get-go. We want some certainty from the government and the minister that they are going to roll out immediate supports for those who need help now, in March, which is just weeks away, so that in April, all of the clawbacks will be repaid to the seniors who are struggling right now.
Will the minister listen to the New Democrats, who are calling for a guaranteed livable basic income, brought forward by my colleague from Winnipeg Centre, so that no seniors are living in poverty? I hope the minister will really listen to the New Democrats' proposal to do that because we should all agree in the House that no senior and no person living with a disability should be living below the poverty line. They need a guaranteed livable annual income.
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Madam Speaker, our government's priority is to be there to support seniors, particularly those who are the most vulnerable. We have worked extremely hard to strengthen income security for them by increasing the GIS, which has helped over 900,000 single, low-income seniors. It has lifted 45,000 seniors out of poverty. During this pandemic, as members know, we were able to quickly provide direct and immediate support to seniors.
When it comes to supporting seniors, we have done a number of things, such as restoring the age of eligibility to 65, enhancing the OAS and the GIS, enhancing the CPP and making significant investments in community services and home care. For seniors affected by the 2020 GIS reduction, we have moved very quickly with a one-time payment, which I announced yesterday. We will be able to give it ahead of schedule and even quicker for those in dire need. Bill C-12 is also going to exclude any pandemic benefits for the purposes of calculating the GIS moving forward.
We have an opportunity to work together to showcase to Canadians how this place can work in collaboration and help those who are most vulnerable. I really hope the member opposite, and indeed all members, will help us move quickly to make sure those seniors are helped.
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- Feb/15/22 10:41:38 a.m.
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It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith the question necessary to dispose of the motion now before the House.
The question is on the motion.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes to request a recorded division or that the motion be adopted on division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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- Feb/15/22 10:42:11 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would request a recorded vote.
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- Feb/15/22 10:42:19 a.m.
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I declare the motion carried.
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Mr. Speaker, I had technical issues and I wanted to register my vote as yea.
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- Feb/15/22 11:28:49 a.m.
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Minister Hussen, I am afraid your hand went up after the vote was compiled, and it is too late. Your vote cannot be counted.
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Mr. Speaker, I got more applause this time, so we should do this more often.
Is it something I said? The government moved to shut down debate on this bill, and I had only two minutes to speak to it last Friday. I know I did not have a Yiddish proverb ready to go then, and that must be why we must rush this bill through the House now.
I do have a Yiddish proverb today, though, just to show that I am not angry and do not hold things personally. I am told there someone named Trevor on the opposite side who loves Yiddish proverbs, and I was going to say that anger is like a thorn in the heart, so I am not angry. I do not want to be angry at the government for the next 18 minutes for shutting down debate on this bill and on our very reasonable amendment to the programming motion that the Liberals have put forward.
When I briefly spoke to this bill when we were considering it in the last sitting last week, I mentioned that this is a big issue in my riding. There are 204,000 seniors all across Canada who would be affected by these rule changes, obviously to their detriment. It would impact their financial situation, and many of them are in dire straits because they are on a fixed income. We have seen the cost of living explode. It is very difficult for seniors on a fixed income to make ends meet, especially when the government has programs that do not address their concerns. When this issue was identified 21 months ago, the government dragged its feet, so it has taken all this time to get to the point where there is now a fix in place for something that the government had introduced. Now we are being told that we have to rush it through the House without even having the minister before a committee so we can discuss the contents of the bill.
I want to draw attention to a few things that the minister said during the debate that we just had on whether debate would be not further adjourned, meaning debate will be shut down on the consideration of the matter before the House, which is the GIS change. In French, it is bâillon.
The minister said that this is a simple bill and a simple fix. That is great, but why will she not come to committee, then, to address it? That would be my response to the minister, because the amendment that forward by the member for Cumberland—Colchester was that we would consider this thing and make sure that the minister would have the rest of the time. Until 11 p.m., she would have to defend it before a committee, and we could actually go into the details.
I think it is a huge benefit. There are many members of the House of Commons who are here for the first time, while some others have been here for several Parliaments now. I think many would say that the work we do at the committee level is valuable. It teaches us how government services work, about the actual operations of government and the mechanics of how things are done. I have found several times that it has been useful when I go back to my constituency. When I am trying to solve a constituent's problem, I then have those details in mind. I have met the person responsible for the program or I have met the deputy minister who is responsible for administering the program, and there is a touch point that we can lean on in order to get more information. We can then use that knowledge to help our constituents on case files.
In my constituency office, apart from immigration case files, seniors' issues are probably in the top two or top three in the ranking of how often per week I have to look at case files that are being managed by my constituency. What we are proposing here are very reasonable amendments to have greater accountability and transparency. It is an opportunity for members of the opposition to ask a minister questions.
I do not know why the government does not like this. During this whole pandemic, we have seen at every juncture and opportunity that the government has tried as much as possible to avoid any type of ministerial accountability for the legislation that it is putting forward. We have seen this with many of the pandemic bills that the government has put forward. The Liberals try to rush them through in a few days. We met in committee of the whole at different times. While we have longer question periods, at the end of those typical days, legislation would be passed. We would ask very technical questions and there would be no response, or sometimes we would just hear talking points or a promise that things would work out later on, but time and again we have seen that they have not worked out.
If we look at the Public Accounts of Canada reporting on how different funds have been spent and at the different Auditor General performance reports on some of the programs that were used during the pandemic, time and again we see that things have not gone according to plan. The criteria were not followed. People got different types of benefit programs that they were not eligible for.
Can we remember situations when it was on the opposite side? Here we have a situation in which the government wanted to help seniors, wanted to provide them with additional support, wanted to ensure they were looked after, but it failed to do that, even though it was warned by opposition parties and stakeholder organizations at the time that there was a problem in the way it was approaching the legislation and the regulations. It is not as if it was not warned at the time.
What we are talking about here, as shown by the government's own 2021 fall economic statement and fiscal update, is $742.4 million. That is what has been allocated. I would say to my constituents that this is not chump change. It is quite a bit of money. Three-quarters of a billion dollars is an incredible amount of money to be rushed through the House in order to patch a mistake that the government made.
As I said, I am not personally angry that debate was shut down. It was probably something I said, but hopefully not. However, I marvel at the fact that the minister says she appeared before the committee to talk about her mandate letter, but she will not go to the committee to talk about $750 million that her department will be responsible for spending or at least the actual execution of the mandate letter. She would not be willing to speak to the committee and answer questions from parliamentarians.
It is perfectly reasonable. We see it in question period, which is a much shorter period of time, but committee is where we really get to drill into the details, get down deep into how the departments function, on which dates people will be paid, what the mechanics are, how the government will ensure that people do not get missed, what will happen with single seniors between 60 and 64 and how they will be treated in the system.
Time and again, constituents who have fallen through the cracks come to my office. I think all of us in this House have this experience. People do not go to their MPs' offices if there is a simple solution, because there is so much information available online and seniors lean on their kids to help them out if they are not comfortable using the Internet. I find a lot of them are very comfortable doing it, but they go to their MPs because they have fallen through the cracks. There are layer upon layer of government programs, and they just happen to be in unique situations. Life circumstances are involved, and every single time, it is not something that can be resolved in an hour. It is a multi-day affair. The MP's office becomes like an ombudsman's office essentially, trying to touch base with every single department to try to sort out the problem.
Sometimes the constituent, though well-meaning, has made mistakes on the file. In this situation, we have an opportunity to get it right, to make sure there is no clawback, and we set things right for the future. Conservatives support it, which is what we have said all along. We just want that extra bit of accountability and transparency from the minister so that we can do the right thing from the beginning and get the details. I have often gone back to a parliamentary committee transcript to read the questions that were asked when I knew there were technical civil servants at the table being asked very technical questions so I could pass the information they provided on to a constituent who was interested in a particular issue.
I remember being at the OGGO committee, which is the government operations parliamentary committee of this House, on issues involving Canada Post. I travelled with that committee all over eastern Canada, the Maritimes and Atlantic Canada as part of a review. I read through the whole transcript, and it really got me ready so that when community mailboxes were being set up in some of the northern communities in my riding, I was able to explain to constituents how the system worked, why they were doing it and what the logic of it was.
I do not see why the minister cannot appear at committee. That is really what it comes down to. All Conservatives have been asking for is greater ministerial accountability on government spending. As I said, it is $740 million-plus that will be spent.
The government is trying to rush this motion through. The only reason I can imagine is that it wants to score some points, maybe win some favourable public opinion for seemingly doing something, but the Senate is not even going be considering this bill because it is not sitting. The other place, as we are supposed to call it, will not be considering this bill, so speeding the bill through the House of Commons will not resolve anything.
These things can be negotiated among the different sides. We Conservatives have shown ourselves to be fairly reasonable and we have shown that at times we support legislation. We say we support the principle and the content, but we would like to see accountability from ministers. I do not think it is a lot to ask of a minister to appear before a committee, for whatever length of time, and answer the questions that parliamentarians have. There are perfectly logical things we could do to address both the individual concerns we are hearing from our ridings and then the more operational, structural concerns with the government programs.
Between old age security and the guaranteed income supplement, these programs are some of the most expensive government programs that we operate right now on behalf of our seniors, especially lower-income seniors. They form the basis of the retirement system in Canada. When a person goes to a financial planner at a bank or an independent broker, they will avidly and strongly advise them to set up their finances so that they can access old age security. For some seniors who wind up in the lowest-income tier, they will completely rely on the guaranteed income supplement, which is why this clawback is so punishing for them.
Old security is the most expensive government program. However, during the debate that we had on whether we should shut down debate, the minister crowed about how good it is that we had this CPP supplementary kind of benefit that was being added on. The way she talked, it implied that all seniors across Canada are getting this benefit today, but that is not how the CPP works, and I am pretty sure the minister knows this. People accrue benefits as they pay into the Canada pension plan, and when they retire at the end of 30 or 40 years of working, they get to draw from that pension, but they have to accrue the benefit before they get it. I do not think it is right to give people the wrong impression that they would instantly have these benefits provided to them because the government made some changes.
However, this would actually impact geriatric millennials, or people in my age group. People, like those on my staff, who are much younger than I am are the ones who are paying more into the Canada pension plan, which is an awful return on investment for their generation, because there are so many benefits that have to be paid out. They lose control of that asset, of their income, when they could decide on what they want to save into for the future return they are supposed to get. I mean, potentially 30 or 40 years from now, they will be drawing a higher CPP than the same person with the same number of years of work would today.
Oftentimes when I hear this type of debate, with the Liberals trying to explain everything they have done for seniors, there is a lot of misleading going on. We have to be fair with people. Do not give people false hope. We have to be straight and up front with them, which is why we have parliamentary committees. That is where the opportunity comes to study the questions that our constituents are asking. I also get very technical questions from people who spend an incredible amount of time looking at OAS and GIS eligibility. They are trying to figure out their finances, because maybe they do not have a financial adviser, and are kind of relying on the office of their member of Parliament to fill some of that gap. Again, this is why I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for this type of work to be done.
Look at the context that we are debating this in. Our side is saying that we support the bill, but some of our members would like to raise individual case files and individual issues. I know the New Democrats did this too. When I was going through the transcript to see what the New Democrats had mentioned, they actually raised case files of individuals in their ridings who had been affected by this particular change. I give them credit for that, but I do not give them credit for voting with the government on this one and shutting down debate in the House.
The role of a parliamentarian in this place is to raise issues and represent our ridings in Ottawa, not to represent Ottawa to our ridings. I think there is a huge distinction between the two. When I think about the work we do and the context that we are in right now, we are debating a bill to fix an error the government made months and months ago. I think everybody recognizes that, but some of us admit it more readily than others.
Yesterday, the government basically said that it was going to invoke the Emergencies Act. This is the context in which we are debating a bill that we essentially agree on. All the opposition has asked for is just a little more accountability from one government minister, not all government ministers, but let us have that one minister appear at one committee of the House of Commons to answer some questions for an extended period of time. It would not grind this place to halt. We could all come to an amicable agreement on how long it would take to be done, and it is in our amendment that we proposed.
We are infinitely reasonable and trying to be constructive here on how we go about this, but let us look at the situation we find ourselves in. Our country is more divided than it has ever been before. We have some of the worst finances this country has ever seen. We have a situation where people have taken on more personal debt than at any other time, and the lower they go into the income tiers the more debt they have taken on. The people who have done the best are in the highest income tiers. For them, this pandemic almost did not directly impact their bottom line.
We can look at some of the commentary from the member for Louis-Hébert on how the government was handling this pandemic. This program is in answer to some of the harm that has been done to the economic situation of many seniors. The member for Louis-Hébert noted, and this is almost a direct quote from him, that not everybody can work from their cottage on a MacBook, and he is right. There are many people at the lower income scale. I have a lot of construction workers in my riding, a lot of general labourers in my riding and a lot of people who used to work in oil and gas and who are out of work because of the government's harsh anti-energy worker policies. These people are just looking for a way out, just to make some income, just to get through. I have a lot of seniors who have gone back into the workforce with a lot of experience and they are competing with people who are entering the workforce for the same jobs. It is making it difficult.
The city of Calgary has one of highest unemployment rates in the country right now because of the economic policies, because of the pandemic, and now we have a lot of seniors returning to work, some part time. When they are looking at their finances and at accessing old age security and the guaranteed income supplement in some situations, this all has an impact. These are very complex government programs and I think we owe it to them to have the minister before a committee, with her officials, to explain how this is supposed to work. I would like an explanation as to how they could have ever made the mistake in the first place so that we find ourselves here.
Since this happened, about 21 months ago, we had a federal election. It was not even fixed before then. They knew this was going to happen, and it could have been fixed then.
To remind us of the Yiddish proverb, I am not angry that the government has now decided to and won the vote to shut down debate. It is a thorn in the heart to be angry. It is allowing someone to live rent-free in one's head. For our seniors in this country, this should not be how government functions. We should be putting accountability and transparency first, at the very front end. Asking one government minister out of 40 to appear before a committee is not asking too much. It is not asking too much to have 11 parliamentarians sit down and ask them pointed, direct questions about how this is going to fix this and if there is anything else we need to know.
In the minister's own words, this is a simple bill. This is simple legislation. If it is so simple, why can it not go to a parliamentary committee to be reviewed? I hope the government will reconsider its position and will vote with us to have a committee and to have the minister appear with her officials to answer our questions.
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Madam Speaker, listening to the member opposite, I am getting the opinion that he is actually in favour of the legislation and I do appreciate that. What I am a bit concerned about he made reference to indirectly when he talked about the Emergencies Act. Yesterday, we had another very important piece of legislation on rapid tests that was being debated. It is a very short week before the break week.
I am wondering if the member believes that, if we did not attempt to rush through these things, we would not be able to get it done before the break week. Is that a concern on his or the Conservative Party's part?
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Madam Speaker, the government runs the agenda of the House of Commons. They are responsible for the agenda. They could have tabled this bill before. They also could have not called an election in August. They could have had us return to the House to consider legislation right away.
It is not as if they did not know this was a problem. This is simple legislation. Why did it take so much time to recall Parliament? Why did it take so much time to consider this bill? Why did they not do evening sittings? Why will they not agree to a parliamentary review? All of these things could have been done.
It is not on the opposition to simply acquiesce and accept the fact that the government is on a timetable. It is for them to run the business of the House better and they have not been doing that. This is not the first time. Six years of this I have seen so far. For six years, they have been mishandling business of the House.
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Madam Speaker, I listened carefully to my colleague.
I agree with him that it would be more appropriate to study the Liberals' bill in committee.
He mentioned the importance of talking about the $750 million in additional expenditures. My biggest concern is figuring out how we can speed up the process. The Bloc Québécois has already proposed moving the date from June to March. These are things we could discuss in committee. My colleague referred quite often to all the seniors who are falling through the cracks and who are the most vulnerable. I wonder if there are ways to provide seniors with assistance more quickly.
I would really like to hear my colleague's thoughts on that.
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Madam Speaker, the GIS is definitely important to seniors in my riding.
I believe that our amendment provides a potential solution that would ensure that the problem has been dealt with once and for all. I would not want us to quickly pass Bill C‑12 only to realize six months later that it is flawed and that some seniors are still falling through the cracks. There are 204,000 seniors who are affected by these changes. I want a parliamentary committee to ensure that this bill resolves the problems of each and every one of them.
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