44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 7, 2022 10:00AM
- Jun/7/22 10:14:37 a.m.
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moved:
That, given that,
(i) high inflation rates are driving the cost of living up for all Canadians,
(ii) the price of gasoline and diesel is hitting record-highs across Canada, making it more expensive for Canadians to get to work, transport goods, and to live their everyday lives,
(iii) the price of food is up more than 9.7% since last year, making it more difficult for Canadians to put food on the table,
(iv) contrary to the government's previous statements, heightened inflation is not transitory and is projected to persist,
(v) the decision to continue to impose ideologically-driven COVID-19 restrictions places a barrier on growth and recovery of the Canadian economy, the transportation of goods, and by consequence, the cost of those goods,
(vi) Canada has experienced the steepest decline in housing affordability in a generation,
the House call on the government to provide immediate relief to Canadians by:
(a) temporarily suspending the Goods and Services Tax (GST) collected on gasoline and diesel;
(b) suspending the carbon tax;
(c) eliminating tariffs on fertilizer;
(d) enabling the free flow of goods across the Canadian border, supporting the recovery of the tourism sector and protecting the jobs of federally-regulated employees by immediately removing all federal COVID-19 restrictions; and
(e) curbing speculation in the housing market by immediately launching a national public inquiry into money laundering.
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- Jun/7/22 11:19:25 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Jonquière for his question. I support carbon capture strategies.
I believe the carbon capture measure we put into our budget is one additional measure that we need to put into place to lower greenhouse gas emissions by working with industry. I will also add that the measures our government has brought into place since 2015 have been directly aimed at helping middle-class Canadians and middle-class Canadian families. We will continue to have their backs coming out of COVID-19 and working through this affordability situation that the whole world faces.
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- Jun/7/22 12:08:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this Conservative opposition day motion because I think it identifies a very real problem facing Canadians: inflation generally, and the price of gas, the price of food and the price of housing.
Unfortunately, it does something the Conservatives are wont to do recently, which is ignore the ongoing pandemic. It asks us to ignore health experts in favour of so-called freedom from mandates. I would just remind members of the House that in my home province of British Columbia, in the last week of May, 44 people died from COVID. We have many people, some of whom I know quite well, who are suffering from long COVID, and many members, or certainly many citizens of British Columbia, are receiving things like cancer treatments that compromise their immune systems, so there are lots of reasons why we should continue to listen to the health experts and not simply adopt some political position on mandates.
I would agree with the Conservatives on only one small aspect, which is that I think the government has an obligation to show its work, as we say, when it comes to mandates. I believe that public health officials will do what is right, but the government needs to show us the evidence it is using for the decisions it is making, which it was pretty good at during the early stages of the pandemic, but seems to have forgotten about now.
Having identified the affordability crisis, of course the Conservatives like to say the solution is more money in Canadians' pockets. Strangely, there is some agreement here. I believe there are some Canadians who need more money in their pockets. The problem is this: Which Canadians need that money in their pockets? The Conservative solution is to make sure that the pockets that get filled are those of large corporations and not the people who are actually facing an affordability crisis in their families.
When it comes to gas prices, let us look at the profits of oil companies. In the first quarter of 2022 only, Imperial Oil recorded $1.17 billion in profits. This was its best record in 30 years. Suncor recorded a profit, in the first quarter only, of $2.95 billion, which is four times its profits last year. What is going on here is profiteering. These are companies that are taking advantage of the international situation, of the climate crisis and of all kinds of things to line their own pockets. The Conservative solution here, first of all, is a bit ironic, because it is to increase the deficit by decreasing our tax revenues. It is also to trust that the oil companies would not just fill that space with their own price increases and scoop up all the benefits of any tax reductions. There is no mechanism to prevent that, and we have seen the record, over and over again, of the oil companies: they will take any advantage to increase their profits. The Conservative solution risks lining the pockets of big oil and providing nothing for families who are struggling with high gas prices on a daily basis.
The New Democrats have instead called for an excess profits tax not just on oil companies, but also on big banks and large food retailers. Scotiabank recorded profits of over $10 billion last year, the Bank of Montreal had over $8 billion, Loblaws had a net profit of $1.2 billion, and Sobeys, a smaller player, had over $600 million in profits. The Conservative proposal would increase the deficit and inflationary pressures, and there would be nothing about these record profits being racked up by the big corporations. It would take away necessary revenues for providing some help to those who really are hit by the affordability crisis. We know who is hardest hit: It is the seniors living on a fixed income, people with disabilities, indigenous people and northerners.
We must never forget that these impacts are strongly gendered, I will say, in that when we look at women over 65, a vast majority of them are living in poverty, especially single women over the age of 65. When we look at single-parent families who are living in poverty, the vast majority are headed by women, so when we are talking about these impacts of affordability, we have to remember that they hit particularly hard at Canadian women, no matter their age or their family status.
I want to thank the member for Nunavut, who continually raises the food insecurity problem in the north, for bringing our attention to it again today. The biggest impact of these rising costs for Canadian families is food insecurity.
I want to draw the House's attention to the report released yesterday by Food Banks Canada. Canada, one of the richest countries in the world and one of the major food-producing countries in the world, now reports that 23% of Canadians, over seven million Canadians, reported going hungry in the past year because they could not afford to buy food. One-third of Canadians earning less than $50,000 a year reported having to skip meals because they did not have enough money, and 43% of indigenous people, to the enormous shame of this country, reported food insecurity that caused them to go hungry for more than one day.
What is the solution? Food banks do their best to fill that gap in our income system and in our food system, but we cannot keep asking charitable, hard-working volunteers to solve the food insecurity crisis. We need to step up and solve that crisis by putting more money in the pockets of those who face food insecurity, immediately and in the long term.
Conservatives point to that problem of food insecurity in their preamble, but then when we look down into the solutions in today's motion, there are none. There is nothing to actually help people who face food insecurity, unlike New Democrats' proposed measures to put money in the hands of those most vulnerable to food insecurity right now and in the long term. We have always called for an increase to OAS and GIS benefits for seniors. Seniors cannot do anything about rising food prices, because most of them already spend all of their fixed income. Their only choice is to eat less and put their health at risk. Again, we would like to see an increase to OAS and GIS.
We have called for an immediate hike to the Canada child benefit. Even a modest hike as we are calling for, of $500 a year, would provide an increase on a monthly basis to families with kids trying to meet food costs. We know there are lots of parents who go hungry and will not report it so they can feed their kids. They skip meals. They do not eat the nutritious meals they need as adults, so they can provide that food to their kids. An increase right away to the Canada child benefit would help meet that crisis, and would continue in the long run to help people with food security.
A doubling of the GST tax credit for low-income Canadians would go a long way in the short and long term to helping to meet that crisis of food insecurity.
It is interesting that the data that was released yesterday by Food Banks Canada also shows that 60% of those who use food banks report that housing costs are the main reason they are at the food bank. They cannot afford to buy healthy, nutritious food for their families because they are already paying way too much of their limited income to meet their housing needs.
This time, the Conservative motion acknowledges the affordability crisis in housing, but it proposes a national inquiry in money laundering as if this would have some impact on the provision of affordable housing units. I believe that we need to crack down on money laundering, absolutely. I do not think we need an inquiry to know what we need to do. Nevertheless, I cannot find the connection between the Conservatives saying there is a crisis in affordability and that we should have an inquiry into money laundering. It just does not make any sense to me.
New Democrats, instead, favour measures to curb the use of housing for speculative investments. We need to crack down on corporate landlords who are gobbling up affordable housing in many cities across Canada, and then renovicting the people who have lived in that affordable housing and forcing them out onto the street or into their families' overcrowded housing units.
We also need to crack down on real estate investment trusts. Real estate investment trusts get privileged tax treatment. They get tax breaks for buying up affordable housing. I just cannot imagine why we think that is good public policy in this country. I would love to see us eliminate the special tax treatment for real estate investment trusts. Obviously, we would have to phase in something like that, because people have done a lot of their financial planning based on it, but still it is something in the short and long term that we could do to address using the housing market for speculation and profit.
Instead, we should be doing something that I have always called for as a New Democrat and that we have always worked for. That is to get the government back into the business of building non-profit housing in very large numbers. The market will never provide the housing that we need at the low end. It will continue to build high-end housing until the cows come home, as they used to say where I was raised, but it will never provide those affordable housing units.
Non-profit housing could provide the housing security that is necessary for families. They do not necessarily have to own a single family house to feel secure in their housing. They could get a unit in a non-profit housing co-operative, for instance, and raise their kids in that security. It also creates a sense of community: of people who live together and have a common interest in taking care of their housing needs.
New Democrats are not the only ones who make the obvious link between the high cost of housing and homelessness, but it is something I do not hear the Conservatives talking about. It is something I rarely hear the Liberals or the Conservatives talking about. When I look in my community, I see the unfortunate complaints that are coming up about people feeling unsafe in the streets because of homeless people.
What is the solution? First of all, I do not think homeless people are the problem, in terms of safety locally. The solution is housing in the short term, so that those people are not forced onto the streets.
Of course, the member for Winnipeg Centre has been very vocal, this week and always, in calling for the government to immediately fund a low-barrier, safe shelter place for indigenous women in Winnipeg Centre, and it is a good example—
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- Jun/7/22 12:50:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, of course it does, but the government added to inflation long before there was ever a war in Ukraine. When $5 billion a week is printed for a year and a half, it is bound to put a lot of money into circulation in a country like Canada. When COVID hit, we had to help people out off the hop, but the government helped itself out by continuing to spend money that even the Parliamentary Budget Officer cannot keep track of, and he admits that only two-thirds of it was being used for COVID.
The member for Winnipeg North says that there is not enough input from the petroleum industry in Canada, if I can put it that way. It pays $20 billion a year in taxes. How much more does he think it should pay?
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- Jun/7/22 12:53:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I had the opportunity of being in my colleague's home city in Nunavut in a previous provincial life due to my responsibilities there.
I do agree that companies should not be taking advantage of a situation that we had with COVID. There is no doubt about that, but as I said earlier, while a lot of these corporations are making money, they are paying huge amounts of tax back into our Canadian coffers and we need to make sure that we are looking at the whole tax system and not just one specific region.
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- Jun/7/22 1:36:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, they were going to find those new resources only because of the tariff put on Russian fertilizer by the Liberal government. Again, we are not arguing that there should not be sanctions on Russia, but they should be sanctions that actually impact Russia and its economy. This tariff is only punishing Canadian farmers. If we have realized anything through COVID, it is that we must diversify our trade agreements and be much more self-sufficient.
The tariff that the Liberals put on Russian fertilizer is the only reason farmers are paying higher costs. I might add too that the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance did not even realize that Canada purchased fertilizer from Russia before putting on that tariff.
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- Jun/7/22 2:07:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if we want our country to recover mentally and financially, we need to support our tourism sector. We hear the Liberals tell us the pandemic is not over and people are dying from COVID, but why are they not talking about the people who are dying from stress-induced diseases after losing their businesses, their jobs and their livelihoods because of the unnecessary restrictions.
Independent duty-free shops located at land borders are in a crisis, and they need help now. Before COVID, the average wait time at a land border was 45 seconds per vehicle. Today, it can be as long as 38 minutes. Every second counts to move people and help our tourism sector recover.
Today I implore the Liberal government to immediately step up and help our land border crossings and all the locally owned tourism businesses that benefit from them. The Liberal government has two options. Number one is to create further debt for both business owners and Canadians and provide more loans so they can survive. Number two is to do the right thing and lift restrictions and barriers such as the ArriveCAN app, restore travel confidence and show the world Canada is open for business.
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- Jun/7/22 2:22:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has jetted off on another international trip, with no airport lineups for him. I bet we are going to see some more pictures of him with his mask off having a great time. He flaunts the personal freedoms he is enjoying abroad, while back here Canadians are suffering under his out-of-date restrictions. Tourism, federal employees, small businesses and families are all suffering. They are all pawns in the Prime Minister's COVID game.
Is it not true the Prime Minister knows he needs to lift these restrictions but would rather do COVID theatre than do what is right?
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- Jun/7/22 2:22:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, from the beginning of this pandemic, we have been there for Canadians. Of course, it is the Prime Minister's job and obligation to travel to other countries to do his important work.
When we hear the opposition speak positively about public health measures but badly about vaccination, it confuses the public. We should be encouraging our neighbours to consider a third or fourth dose. We cannot have relaxed public health measures and more freedom without vaccination as COVID-19 continues to progress. We all have an obligation to ensure that our neighbours are aware of the opportunity for a third dose.
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- Jun/7/22 2:26:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives love to quote from the Parliamentary Budget Officer's reports so now I would like to quote the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who talked about inflation today. Here is what he said: “The ultimate impetus for the resurgence of high inflation can [be] traced back to the COVID‑19 pandemic. More recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has compounded inflationary pressures.”
That is exactly what is happening.
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- Jun/7/22 2:27:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, working Canadians and everyone else do not care what is causing inflation or why everything costs more.
What they do care about is being able to afford to buy groceries at the end of the month, making sure that their kids are not going to bed hungry, and being able to afford to fill up their vehicle so that they can get to work.
Whether it is the pandemic, COVID‑19, or anything else that the Liberals are going to blame, the reality is that they are doing absolutely nothing right now to help Canadians who need it.
Why are they so out of touch with Canadians?
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- Jun/7/22 2:56:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the other thing we hear from the government is lots of statistics with respect to health care: We hear that 6,000 people die every month from heart disease, 3,500 die from diabetes, 7,000 die monthly from cancer and 600 people die every month from overdoses, which is four times the prepandemic number.
Clearly, these numbers are meant simply for context. These diseases are a reality in our lives, but Canadians do not live in fear. It is time for us to learn to live with COVID also. These mandates are clearly political science and not medical science. Is that not right?
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- Jun/7/22 2:56:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not a medical doctor like the member opposite.
I would take note of the fact that he just referred to a few deadly diseases. However, COVID-19 is one—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Jun/7/22 2:57:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as I said, I am not a medical doctor like my colleague opposite, and we have been collaborating on the health committee. However, I do not think that just because Canadians unfortunately die from things like coronary artery disease, strokes and heart attacks means that COVID-19 is less of a priority for this government. COVID-19 is beatable. With vaccines and social distancing and by wearing masks, we can beat COVID-19, but we need everybody in this House to participate.
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- Jun/7/22 2:58:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his collaboration at the health committee as well. I was also there when we heard from Dr. Bogoch, who has been a consistent and sage advocate for vaccines from the first day of this pandemic. He was, this morning, on the news as well.
It is incontrovertible that vaccines will continue to save lives in this country. Only in the last month, over 1,800 Canadians died from COVID-19. We cannot wish COVID-19 away. We must continue to be vigilant. We must continue to ensure that our neighbours are aware of where they can get a third or a fourth dose, and we must be wearing our masks when we are in public.
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- Jun/7/22 3:14:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, experts are clear that we will not control COVID until the world is vaccinated, yet only 10% of people in low-income countries have received a vaccine, compared to 77% in high-income nations. The Liberals promised to send 200 million doses to COVAX, but fewer than 15 million have been delivered to date.
Last year, the WHO said we stood “on the brink of a catastrophic...failure”. Today, Doctors Without Borders says that we have fallen off the cliff.
Why are the Liberals failing to deliver for Canadians and the world?
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- Jun/7/22 4:11:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I find the motion actually pretty easy to vote against. Whoever wrote the motion has been quite brilliant at describing the issue, but not nearly so brilliant at describing the solution.
You might be interested in knowing, Madam Speaker, that I do all the family shopping. I also do the gas purchases and I buy materials for the house. I remember buying two-by-fours during COVID and I had to go to three stores to try to just get one two-by-four and the cost was 100% more than I paid in years previous. I agree with the description of high inflation for everyone, that gas is more expensive and that the cost of food is up. I have experienced that personally.
What the hon. members from the Conservative Party do not seem to realize is that the supply chains were pretty badly messed up during COVID. Some were out because the countries were locked down. Some were not able to produce the products they had previously. Take for instance, microchips. We could not get any microchips for anything, including a car. Again, within my experience we live in a neighbourhood where we bought a couple of cars and for a considerable period of time there were no cars on the car lot. In fact, we could buy a used car for what we paid a year or two previously for a new car. Just a simple thing like microchips has in and of itself driven up the cost of living quite dramatically.
Add to that the great resignation. People simply do not want to do the jobs that they were doing pre-COVID and that in turn has driven up the cost of labour. I took note in the Report on Business Magazine last weekend that the Royal Bank of Canada has just given a 3% increase across the board to all of its staff because it knows it has difficulty recruiting and retaining staff. We have had representations from Irving, which is building our warships. Its biggest challenge is, again, recruiting and retaining staff, even with substantive increases in salary.
Add to that the Putin war, which took supply chains that were really badly messed up by COVID and only made them more difficult. Sanctions do mean something. They mean that certain products that we are used to purchasing simply cannot be purchased any longer from the Russian-based sources. Add to that the fact that Canada is about 2% of the world's economy. We are in effect inflation takers as opposed to inflation makers. Even for products that we have in substantive quantities such as oil and gas, wheat and various other mineral products, we do not actually get to set the prices. The prices get set by places other than Canada. As I say, we are price-takers, not price makers. We are inflation takers. We are not inflation makers.
On a point of information, as much as the Conservative Party would wish to pin the inflation upon the Prime Minister, I would suggest respectfully that it is a bridge too far even for them.
What is the Conservative solution? The Conservative solution is a reduced consumption tax, and if we do that on the GST and the tax on carbon, everything will be resolved. That is possibly the worst idea ever. Any economist in Canada will say, with the notable exception of Stephen Harper, that if we want to generate government revenues we should be taxing consumption and we should be reducing the tax on labour.
Income tax is a tax on labour. Consumption tax is a tax on consumption. In effect, it is taxing the person who works hard and reducing the taxes on the person who plays hard. If we reduce the consumption tax, it is practically a guarantee that large oil and gas companies and other companies as well will backfill with price increases, and I would expect that our Conservative friends would have recognized that before drafting this motion. The consumer gets no relief. The government revenues are drained. Rich companies get richer, and the working person gets increased income tax. Hardly what one would describe as a brilliant solution.
Finally, there is carbon pricing. The most effective way to reduce carbon consumption, short of turning down the thermostat or reducing unnecessary travel, is to apply a tax to it. If, in fact, the tax is collected and applied as it should be, then, in the end, the lower-income families will actually receive rebates in the mail. In Ontario, that means $745, and in Alberta, it means something in the order of just over a thousand bucks.
There are those who say they cannot adjust. For some that is actually true. For others it is simply a lifestyle choice. However, if we are going to be serious about carbon reduction, then we have to apply this sort of tax, which has repeatedly demonstrated to be the most effective way to reduce carbon consumption.
Given that inflation is real, given that we are just 2% of the world's economy, given that we are a trading nation and highly dependent upon external trade, given that the Putin war will not end any time soon and given that inflation is well beyond the Bank of Canada target, what is a relatively small but prosperous economy to do?
We will start with some of our strengths. We have a relatively low debt-to-GDP ratio, possibly the best in the G7. It is the same thing with jobs, as we have had 115% job recovery in the post-COVID era. We have a number of products that the rest of the world wants. There are, frankly, more jobs available here than there are people to fill them. Something about over a million positions are begging for people. Again, we have heard that from various employers who are looking for people to fill positions and simply cannot find them, so we are in a relatively strong position.
Then there are some direct relief measures. The Canada child benefit in my riding is worth over $100 million per year. That is a significant relief to those constituents of mine who have children. The $10-a-day child care plan, which is just being rolled out in Ontario, will help a lot of people and it will make a significant difference in terms of the choices that those who wish to take advantage of the program have. In some instances, particularly during the earlier part of this government, we were able to reduce the tax margin for those with lower incomes and apply relief to those who actually needed it the most.
However, we should recognize that the Bank of Canada is the main player here. It has control over monetary policy. The Bank of Canada's monetary policy is independent from government, as it should be. It is possibly the worst idea in the world to have the government control monetary policy because government interests and central bank interests are not always lined up. As an example of that, I might point to Turkey, where the government of the day has taken over monetary policy. That has led to something in the order of 70% inflation. The central bank has renewed its 2% target. We need to recognize that interest rates are going to rise and possibly even dramatically rise.
Our strong monetary policy is our most effective weapon. We have a relatively decent fiscal position. We do not need to yield to the siren song of reduced consumption taxes.
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- Jun/7/22 5:25:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the U.K. has just announced a 25% windfall profits tax on the oil and gas sector. Suggesting that the current government is doing anything close to that is patently absurd. However, that is not my question.
I have constituents, as I know the parliamentary secretary does, who have chosen not to get vaccinated. It is a choice I disagree with, but it is a choice they have made and I feel that I have a responsibility to answer their question. Here is the question they asked me: “How does preventing me from flying within Canada contribute to combatting the spread of COVID-19?” Could the parliamentary secretary explain it to them?
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- Jun/7/22 9:47:25 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the opportunity to rise to speak to the estimates. Several important steps are being taken by the government to support the effective and efficient functioning of the justice system, in particular regarding access to justice for youth, indigenous and Black persons and those who are economically disadvantaged.
As the House is well aware, our justice system has been faced with mounting challenges in recent years. Some of these challenges, such as the increasing length and complexity of trials, preceded the COVID pandemic. Other challenges, such as the need to conduct trials virtually, were generated by the pandemic. Some of the justice system's challenges were felt most acutely by our provincial partners, as they bear the responsibility for the administration of justice, including the increased costs of technology and other public health measures.
Of course, many of these challenges affect not only governments, but also individuals. These include the many individuals who struggle to afford legal assistance when they need it. Many of them also experience systemic disadvantages and discrimination. In some cases, these individuals come into contact with the justice system.
Through the budget, our government made multiple investments to support the justice system to ensure that it treats those who come before it in a fair, equitable and effective manner. Budget 2021 announced an ongoing annual $43.3-million increase in funding for the youth justice services funding program. New six-year funding agreements for the April 21, 2021, to March 31, 2027, time frame were successfully negotiated and are now being put into place with the provinces and territories to implement this funding.
This funding will enable the expansion and sustainability of critical youth justice services and programs delivered by the provinces and territories. Priority funding areas under the youth justice services funding program include diversion and alternatives to custody programming, which will allow more youth to stay out of the formal youth criminal justice system and/or custody. This new funding will allow jurisdictions to further develop and expand the range of culturally safe and responsive programming available to better support indigenous youth and other racialized youth populations overrepresented in the youth criminal justice system. This is particularly true for diversion programming, for which an increased demand is anticipated resulting from the implementation of former Bill C-75.
While we are all pleased that there has been a downward trend in youth crime rates over time, this new funding is needed, as there has not been an increase in funding since 2006, when the Harper government came into power and implemented its failed criminal justice policy that did not focus on rehabilitation or diversion. We are fixing that through many measures, including budgetary measures such as this one and Bill C-5.
The general youth population is increasing, which is expected to affect the demand for youth justice programming and apply additional pressures on the provinces and territories. There is a need to respond more effectively to the diversity of risks and needs of today's youth population. The new funding will therefore enable the sustainability and expansion of critical and more responsive youth justice services and programs.
Our government also re-profiled $40 million in funding for criminal legal aid, provided through the 2020 fall economic statement to 2021 and 2022-23. The COVID pandemic generated significant multi-faceted and long-term impacts on legal aid in Canada. It also produced socio-economic conditions that foster high demand for legal aid, while simultaneously complicating the delivery of legal aid services and limiting non-governmental income sources such as law foundations. This additional investment of $40 million in criminal legal aid funding provided over two years is allowing legal aid plans to better align themselves with the reopening of the courts and provide services to accused people whose cases are backlogged. The additional funding also addresses deficits resulting from decreased law foundation funding and supports legal aid plans in fully implementing technological innovations and ensuring interoperability with the courts.
Vulnerable populations, including low-income individuals and women, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. In view of their mandate to help the disadvantaged, some legal aid plans relaxed eligibility guidelines early in the pandemic to support individuals facing job loss.
As the courts reopen, they are dealing with backlogs of cases accumulated during the pandemic. The additional funding for criminal legal aid will enable jurisdictions to meet increased demand, thereby reducing the number of individuals who self-represent. Self-represented accused people cost the system both money and time because of adjournments, multiple court appearances, a lack of information and confusion about proceedings. We are continuing to provide additional needed support to the legal aid system to address these systemic pressures so the justice system remains accessible to all Canadians.
The past decades have seen a criminal justice system characterized by the increasingly disproportionate representation of indigenous and Black persons and vulnerable persons such as those experiencing a mental health and/or substance use disorder. The 2020 fall economic statement announced $6.6 million over five years, followed by $1.6 million annually, to support the implementation of impact of race and culture assessments, or IRCAs, nationally. From this, $1.3 million is available for 2022-23. IRCAs are better pre-sentencing reports that help sentencing judges better understand the effects of poverty, marginalization, racism and social exclusion on the offender and their experience with the criminal justice system.
Federal funding will support the development of training curricula for IRCA writers, professional development programs for criminal defence lawyers and Crown prosecutors, and education programs for judges on IRCAs and on the preparation of IRCA reports for eligible racialized accused. The Government of Canada is committed to providing fair and equal access to justice for Black individuals and other racialized people by addressing systemic racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system and overturning a decade of failed Conservative criminal justice policy.
Building on previous investments, budget 2021 also announced an investment of $26.8 million for 2021-22 to support the delivery of immigration and refugee legal aid services. This funding supports access to justice for economically disadvantaged asylum seekers by ensuring that provinces delivering immigration and refugee legal aid have the capacity to maintain service delivery levels. This includes the processing of many asylum claims from individuals who arrived in Canada prior to the pandemic-related border closures, those who made asylum claims from within Canada during the pandemic and those who are now arriving at Canada's borders.
Additionally, the 2020 fall economic statement provided $49.3 million over five years, starting in 2021, and $9.7 million in ongoing funding to increase the application of Gladue principles in the criminal justice system to help address the overrepresentation of indigenous people and address systemic discrimination. As the House is aware, Gladue principles seek to ensure the systemic or background factors that may have played a part in bringing an indigenous person in contact with the law are considered in criminal justice decision-making, and that community-based, culturally appropriate restorative and traditional indigenous justice supports are available to help individuals meet the conditions of their sentences and implement healing plans.
This investment includes funding to support the development and expanded use of Gladue reports, including the training of Gladue report writers, and will support community-based and indigenous-led post-sentence Gladue aftercare. This funding will also support projects focused on addressing systemic barriers and bias in the criminal justice system. The implementation of Gladue principles in the criminal justice system is also a key federal initiative in the Government of Canada's federal pathway to address missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people.
Finally, building on the success of our existing work to address overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, and to improve indigenous people's access to justice in all areas of the justice system, budget 2021 provided $27.1 million over three years for indigenous community-based justice programs to address long-standing program integrity needs and to provide trauma-informed training on working with victims of crime. Funding will also help indigenous families navigate the family justice system and access community-based family mediation services.
Among other objectives, these efforts seek to prevent crime and protect victims by addressing matters before they escalate. They also aim to help decrease the disproportionate number of indigenous children in care across the country and allow these children to remain with their families where appropriate and connect to their communities and culture where possible. In tandem with support for the implementation of Gladue principles, this work will further support the Government of Canada's efforts to advance reconciliation with indigenous peoples in Canada, eliminate systemic discrimination from the justice system and respond to the MMIWG final report's calls for justice and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action.
Through the main estimates, we are seeking to access the funding to support these initiatives this year. I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on the critical steps we have taken to support the justice system, and I hope that all members of the House will support these estimates to advance this important work in criminal justice reform.
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