44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 7, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for her speech. I really liked the phrase “bed-to-bureaucrat ratio”. However, I think the debt-to-bureaucrat ratio is important. Both the current Governor of the Bank of Canada Tiff Macklem and the former governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge stated this week that inflation in Canada is a made-in-Canada problem. It is the fact that we have more money chasing a lack of goods. At the same time, as I said before, since 2015, the government has hired 61,000 federal employees and has really bloated itself. We are looking obviously at motions. We want to help everyone, but like the member so eloquently stated, we have to do the basics: health care and housing.
Do you agree that we have a debt-to-bureaucrat problem also in government and that we need to address that to solve inflation as much as anything else?
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand up here once again on behalf of the residents of Bay of Quinte.
Canada's Bank of Canada governor finally admitted this week that inflation is a made-in-Canada problem not just a global phenomenon. Governor Macklem, this week in a speech to the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, said, “Some of this inflation reflects global developments that we don’t control, but inflation in Canada increasingly reflects what’s happening in Canada.”
This echoes former deputy minister of finance for the Liberal Party and former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, who stated two weeks ago that inflation was increasingly a made-in-Canada problem. This unjust inflation is hurting Canadian families, and for Canada, a G7 nation, it is embarrassing that we are seeing families affected by the lack of the essentials, the very basics the government of this country should be looking after: housing, food, paycheques and filling job shortages, which includes our military and housing for our military.
This made-in-Canada inflation problem is costing the average Canadian family with two children $11,000 a year. This inflation problem, this crisis in housing and health care and food shortages are really affecting families to the core. Food bank usage is up. In my riding, it is up 30%, which correlates to a 30% rise in grocery bills. With housing, there is a doubling of homelessness in my region, with 500,000 alone in Belleville. There are farmers who are struggling to pay their bills.
There is the government's announcement for next year, which will be a turducken of taxes during Thanksgiving, a tripling of taxes, including the carbon tax. For a lot of Canadian businesses, we will see rises in interest as we see the bank trying to combat this inflation. Should Canada not, as a G7 nation, need to look after the basics? It has been proven that more money chasing fewer goods causes inflation, a made-in-Canada problem. Should the government not have to look after the basics for its citizens?
This means Canadian families right now are choosing between food, heat, medication and after-school activities. Do we not feel the government should do the same? The government needs to choose where to put its money to be more active in investing in Canada and to ensure we are looking after the basics.
These are things like creating more hospital beds, doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners or making sure our natural resources like liquefied natural gas can go to Europe, create jobs and bring money into this country. Should we make sure that we create housing for our military and that we do not have a gap of 3,600 families waiting for housing on our military bases? Should we not ensure Canadians take home a greater paycheque?
We are stuck here in Parliament debating and, on our side, having to say no to dental care in Canada, a G7 nation, because we have spent so much money on so many things except for taking care of the basics in Canada. When we are spending money, we need to make sure we invest in Canadian basics and the necessities that are helping all families all the time. That means we are going to need to say no, just like families are saying no when it comes to their own bills. Some of them are saying no to food, housing, after-school activities or anything else Canadians need to make choices on for their families each and every day. It is absolutely disheartening.
The government's number one job is to make sure it is taking care of Canadians' basic needs and to ensure that when we are spending we invest in those things Canadians will find helpful and that will help their daily lives and looks after their families. I want to talk about those things.
For housing, there are 500,000 people who are homeless in the city of Belleville. It takes one step to become homeless. Sometimes it is a domestic dispute. Sometimes it is a rental cheque that was missed, or sometimes it is alcohol and addictions. It is three steps to come out of homelessness. It means we look at shelters. It is a basic need for all Canadians that they at least have a roof over their heads, which is a shelter, but second is transitional housing.
We have an incredible transitional house in Belleville, by the shelter called the Grace Inn. It is called the Shiloh House. It has six rooms and is helping the homeless transition out of shelters and into rentals. It can help with up to six units. It is not easy. It has transitional programs for mental health and addiction. It helps with employment and keeping a job, and it ensures that people are looking after themselves. I toured it a few weeks go, and it was inspiring to talk to individuals who were getting themselves into transitional housing and will eventually find a rental and a home for themselves.
However, it is not as simple as just throwing money at the situation and thinking it is going to fix our homelessness situation. The very basis of people having shelter and being able to find themselves in a home takes three steps. That means we have to work harder. We cannot just throw money at it. We have to ensure we are working with Canadians, municipalities and provinces to move people out.
The third step is affordable housing as a whole. This country is short 1.8 million homes compared to the average of our G7 friends. We know that affects supply. When we look at the average affordable rental housing unit and affordable rent, it has to be about $700 or $800.
I am a hotelier. I have built hotels in the past. I can tell members that the travesty in our housing right now is that we are not seeing affordability when it comes to building homes. The average affordable housing unit that I have seen in Canada is well over $280,000 a unit. In 2015 I built a hotel, the TownePlace Suites Marriott, for $135,000 a door. That included a pool, and there was a kitchen in each room. It had almost everything it could have.
However, affordable housing is so expensive now that it costs $265,000 just to build the unit. There is no way, when developers build affordable housing units for $265,000 a unit, that they can charge rents of $700 or $800. Even if they get 50% or all the funding from CMHC, they still have to charge $1,200- to $1,500-plus for that rent. We have to find innovative ways that Canada can build affordable rental units so that our citizens can afford an affordable market rent.
Housing is a huge issue. It is top of mind. I am very passionate about it. It is something that we need to invest in and spend more time on. Of course, housing and shelter should come before dental care. Let us fix housing and make sure that is a priority.
With respect to food for our families, the average family spends more money in taxes than it does for food, shelter and housing in Canada, a G7 nation. When we look at the fact that we have people lined up for our food banks and what we need to feed those people through our farmers, our farmers are the most important part of that mechanism. They should be invested in and looked after. Instead, what we are hearing this week is that they are paying $45,000 on average in carbon tax per year, but getting back only $862 as a rebate. These are the farmers on whom we depend to grow our food.
By the way, by 2030, the world will need 1.5 times the food we have now. We will need 50% more food. Who grows that food, has the animals and has the farmland? Who fishes? It is our farmers and our farming industry. They need to be invested in. They have good technologies that will help them use the soil to produce double the yields and help them save on labour, because good luck to them finding labourers and employees right now, with one million jobs open in this country. We need to invest in farmers and to make sure that is there.
My last point is with respect to labour shortages. We are one million jobs short in this country, which is costing $30 billion in spiking inflation, because if we cannot get someone to truck our food, make our food and be there to serve our food, then inflation goes up because we have less. There is more money chasing fewer goods, and it is a made-in-Canada problem. We need to invest in Canadians. Unfortunately, we have to make the hard decisions to make sure we look after the basics. That means saying no to some things.
Looking at our future, we need doctors and labourers. We need to help our farmers. We need to make sure we get shelter and housing for our families. That is what we should be focusing on, and that is what Canadians need to be focused on with respect to the current government. That is what we are going to do on this side of the House.
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Madam Speaker, that is very interesting. I do not know, when you are talking to your residents at the door and telling them that inflation is higher in the U.K., how that helps the family that has to choose between rent, groceries and shelter. I do not understand how you think they understand that.
Residents are hurting and they want to hear relief for those tough things. They want to know their taxes are going to be lowered and that they are going to have more money in their back pocket at the end of the day.
We cannot spent all the money and do all the things and expect that Canadians are going to be helped every step of the way. It has been proven. The Governor of the Bank of Canada said that spending the money we have spent, having more money chasing less goods, has resulted in Canadians spending over $900 a month more than they did in 2019.
If your answer is to continue what we are doing, if you want to make it $1,800 or $2,000, our answer is to rein it in. Let us get focused—
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Madam Speaker, there is a common misconception that government builds homes. Government does not build homes. People build homes.
When I have talked to developers in our region, and I have spent a lot of time on housing, being a hotelier myself and building units, the best programs we could do as a government are zero percent interest loans. They would enable developers to look at solutions so that they can build, making sure they do not lose $1 million when they are building a unit, while hopefully allowing them to build more units that they can then offer for lower rents.
Rentals are what we need. We talk about 1.8 million homes. We talk about people finding themselves at our shelters. They need transitional housing. It is rentals.
The other big thing that we have learned about hotels is that if we have more rentals in Canada, if a landlord is stuck with an empty unit and there are four more empty units, they lower the price point for the unit in order to rent it. We just need more of them. Let us help developers build more rental units.
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Madam Speaker, we are not.
Yesterday the Conservative government voted for tax decreases targeted at our most vulnerable. When we look at how we could help Canadians, we have looked at targeted measures. We just cannot do all of them.
I know the member for Nunavut spoke yesterday about the increasing costs of food, and I believe it is the highest in the region in Nunavut. We need to look at that cost. Looking at the broadest population, how do we help get food to Nunavut and help those populations? I think that is the bigger necessity. I would focus more on that.
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