44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2022 02:00PM
Mr. Speaker, for weeks we have been hearing the Conservatives talking about “triple, triple, triple” when it comes to the carbon tax.
In my province of British Columbia, the price of gas has gone up about a dollar a litre this year. The whole carbon tax, even if we got rid of the carbon tax, is just 10¢ or 11¢ of that. It is 1% of the greedflation we have seen from the oil and gas companies.
The increase that is going to happen this year is 2¢ a litre. Again, that is 1% of the price we are paying for fuel across much of the country. Today the price of gas was supposed to go up 10¢. If we got rid of the carbon tax, we would be back to where we were yesterday. This would not solve the problem of inflation for Canadians.
Could the member comment on that? All this talk about the carbon tax will do absolutely nothing for most Canadians. They need real help, and that is what the NDP is delivering tonight with Bill C-31.
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Mr. Speaker, as usual, it is an honour to rise to speak. Tonight it is especially an honour because rarely do we actually debate life-changing bills here in this Parliament. We talk about a lot of important things, but we do not often talk about bills that will literally change the lives of not a few Canadians but million of Canadians.
Bill C-31 is one of them because the main part of the bill is an interim measure to provide dental care to millions of Canadian children. It is a down payment on the full dental care program that the NDP has put forward to provide dental coverage, like two-thirds of Canadians have and one-third do not. Those people making under $90,000 a year, by the end of the three-year program, will have dental coverage just like most Canadians. This is a down payment on that. It is truly life changing.
I want to tell the story of my friend, Joan. I talk to Joan every month or so. She heard about the agreement between the NDP and the Liberals. Part of that agreement was that the Liberal government agreed to implement the NDP's dental care plan. When I phoned her just to catch up, she just said, “I have to talk about dental care.” I was a bit taken aback. Usually we do not talk about political stuff. She said, “I grew up in rural Alberta. We were a poor family when I was a kid. We couldn't afford to go to a dentist.”
Like most kids in those days, especially, she got cavities. Her friends who had parents who were more well off got to go to the dentist and have those cavities filled. Joan's parents could not afford that so they did not go to the dentist. Eventually, her teeth were in such bad shape that she had to have many of them taken out and replaced with ill-fitting dentures. She was a kid getting dentures. As a result, she was painfully shy about how her mouth looked and how her teeth looked. That shyness has followed her the rest of her life. She is still very uncomfortable in social situations.
She was very emotional when she was telling me this story. She said, “Not having dental care when I was a kid changed my life for the worse. It made me shy. I wish I wasn't, and if only I could have had that dental care when I was a kid it would have changed my life.”
This is life-changing legislation. Every child in this country should have access to dental care. Many of us here just take dental care for granted. We all, as MPs, have a dental plan. Many of us had jobs before we went into politics that had dental plans. We have had dental coverage for some time. However, a third of Canadians, 35% actually, do not have access to dental care.
There are seven million Canadians who avoid going to the dentist every year because they cannot afford to. We are not talking about one or two people here and there. This is thousands and thousands of people in the ridings of every one of the people here in this chamber. That proportion rises to 50% of low-income Canadians who do not have dental coverage and a majority of seniors. This not only changes people's lives but it costs our health care system a lot of money.
In British Columbia, alone, it is estimated that visits to emergency rooms by people needing emergency dental care who cannot afford to go to a dentist costs the province about $155 million per year. That is in British Columbia, so we could multiply that by 10, or $1.5 billion, a year across Canada, as a rough estimate.
The NDP are very proud of the fact that Tommy Douglas brought in our universal health care system in Canada. When he did, he fully imagined that it would cover all forms of health care, including dental care and pharmacare for that matter, but that did not happen.
When the NDP proposed to fix that in the previous Parliament, we brought in this dental care bill, and both the Liberals and Conservatives voted against it. However, now in this minority Parliament, the NDP has used its power here to make this happen. We will finally have dental coverage for all Canadians.
This dental care plan will not be a universal plan. Not every Canadian would get it. It would be only for those who need it, for those who do not have dental care now and who make less than $90,000 per year, but it would give everybody who cannot afford to go to the dentist the ability to go to the dentist and have their teeth cared for like most of us do.
Why is this important? As I said, dental care is essential to overall health. I am going to go through some of the details of it. It is estimated that 500,000 Canadian children would benefit from this bill. It would provide payments of up to $650 per child per year for families with a net income under $90,000. That will be pro-rated. If someone makes under $70,000, they would get the full amount, and someone would get something else up to $90,000.
I would like to give some quotes from experts in the field as to how they see this plan and what they think about it.
The first is from Lynn Tomkins who is the president of the Canadian Dental Association. I talked to Dr. Tomkins back in August. She says:
[The Canadian Dental Association] welcomed the federal government’s commitment...of a multi-billion-dollar, ongoing investment in enhancing Canadians’ access to oral health. It comes after years of CDA encouraging federal investments in dental care. All those who have advocated on this issue in the past, whether on behalf of CDA, provincial or territorial dental associations...should be proud that their hard work has led to this once-in-a-generation opportunity.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We cannot miss it and cannot let it go by us.
The Canadian Dental Hygienists Association said:
After months of hard work, meetings with parliamentarians...the Canadian Dental Hygienists Association (CDHA), representing the sixth-largest regulated health profession in Canada, was excited at yesterday’s announcement about the Government of Canada’s proposed new legislation (Bill C-31) to deliver targeted supports to Canadians as part of its affordability plan.
Brandon Doucet, who is the founder of the Coalition for Dentalcare, is a dentist from Nova Scotia. He said, “by the end of this year, we could have one of the most important additions to public health care since medicare’s founding if the federal government delivers on its promise to create a public dental program for low-income Canadians.”
I do not want to sound too much like K-tel, but there is more. This is just one part of Bill C-31. The other part is another important pillar in affordability and that is the rental benefit. That would be a $500 top-up, a one-time payment, that would go to individuals with net incomes of up to $20,000, so these are low-income Canadians, or household net incomes of up to $35,000. This would help 1.8 million families across Canada.
There are two parts to this bill. The dental care, I think, is the most important, but also, people are struggling with their rents. People are struggling to find places to live. This would help them as well.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree that inflation is hurting Canadians. There are all these aspects to inflation. We have heard a lot about the price of gas. We have heard a tremendous amount about the price of housing and the impossibility of owning a home for new homebuyers in Canada. With the skyrocketing cost of rent in my riding, it is almost impossible to find rental accommodation of any sort, let alone afford it.
I agree that the top-up we are talking about helps people who are really in need of that help. These are people who are spending more than 30% of their income on their accommodation, on their rent. If someone were to tell them that $500 is not enough, they would say that it would be a big help.
We need to tackle the housing situation. The NDP wants the government to build 500,000 units of affordable housing to catch up to where we should have been had the federal government not gotten out of the affordable housing game back in the nineties. Yes, there is a lot for us to do to tackle housing and inflation, but Bill C-31 is an essential and very impactful, beneficial bill that would help the millions of Canadians who are struggling with their costs today.
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Mr. Speaker, I will not go into the whole spiel on inflation; I do not have that much time here tonight. However, when we look at the extraordinary profits of oil and gas companies and the extraordinary profits of the big box grocery retailers, it is clear that they have taken advantage of this situation. Because of factors coming out of the pandemic and because of the war in Ukraine, prices have started to rise, and they have taken advantage of that and added their own excess profits on top of it. That is one of the biggest factors in inflation.
Perhaps some of the government spending did cause inflation. If we look around the world, Canada is in the middle of the pack when it comes to how bad inflation is. However, what economists have been saying about the measures we are talking about here tonight, such as dental care for people who need it, a housing top-up for low-income families struggling to pay their rents and the GST rebate that has been doubled, is that those kinds of targeted programs do not cause inflation. If the Conservatives are concerned about inflation rising because of this, the experts will say they are wrong.
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