44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 17, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I am really pleased this morning to stand and reference various areas in the fall economic statement. It was a very good statement that gave us an opportunity to see a focus on some of the areas that the government and all members of the House, I am sure, are concerned about and supportive of, especially for the residents of Humber River—Black Creek. The help for the cost of living, for dental care, for rent and for numerous other issues has been received very well by the residents of Humber River—Black Creek.
When the government released the 2022 fall economic statement, it talked about making life more affordable, which is something we hear a lot about and something we know is very important, and how we continue to grow an economy that works for absolutely everyone. The statement outlines a plan for continued support to help all Canadians with the cost of living and to build a Canada where no one is left behind. We are committed to continuing to help families cope with the increasing costs that we hear about every day and that we see every day when we go to the grocery store and to checkout counters.
Part of this is about making housing more affordable, which is another issue. Even in this morning's news, the top story was talking about housing affordability, and I believe the fall statement tries to address some of that. It also tries to strengthen and build a thriving net-zero economy with opportunities and jobs of the future. Amid global economic uncertainty and a reckless trickle-down economics approach pushed by some here in the House that benefits the wealthy, we are staying focused on making life more affordable for everyone and building an economy that will work for everyone.
We are investing in Canadians, including by eliminating interest on student loans and apprentice loans. I have been here long enough to have met many times with student unions from all universities across the country. They continually talk to us about how difficult it is to get student loans and how the interest continues to climb. Finally taking some action on that is extremely helpful and is very appreciated by that particular part of the community. Apprentice loans are another issue, and giving people time to get a job and additional time before they have to start repaying loans is important. With interest rates rising, eliminating the interest on those loans would be very much appreciated.
We are also talking in the economic statement about helping people buy their first home. I can say how important that is. We all know that. We all have grandkids or kids who are looking to buy their first home, and the fact that now they will have a $40,000 tax-free first home savings plan will really be a boost for the housing industry. It will be very helpful for many young people who are trying to buy their first home. It will also continue to attract investment in our clean economy and help create good, solid jobs.
Everyone should have a safe and affordable place to call home, and this is one of the reasons that with the 2022 fall economic statement, our government would deliver $500 in additional support to low-income renters. I have many renters in my riding, as others have, and the struggle to keep up with the increased cost of rental accommodation is very difficult. Some people will say that $500 once is not enough, but $500 is helpful as they move forward to try to deal with inflation, which hopefully is coming to an end, here in Canada at least.
The $500 is additional support under the Canada housing benefit specifically for low-income renters. This federal benefit would be available to all Canadians with an adjusted net income below $35,000 for families, so we are talking about families that are truly struggling to make ends meet, or below $20,000 for single Canadians who pay at least 30% of their income toward rent. In Humber River—Black Creek, I know lots of families that are struggling in that situation.
We are also creating a new refundable multi-generational home renovation tax credit to provide up to $7,500 in support for constructing a secondary suite, which will help families who take care of an aging grandparent at home or help parents afford to support a child with a disability moving back home, starting in January 2023. That is another step forward, when we talk about affordability and the lack of housing in so many different parts of our urban and rural centres. To be able to do some renovation of one's home that would allow one to have a second suite that would either provide rental income or enable an aging parent to age at home, is much appreciated.
The fall economic statement is also big news for students, as I mentioned earlier. It proposes to permanently eliminate interest on Canada student loans and Canada apprenticeship loans, including those currently being repaid, beginning on April 1, 2023. This would save the average borrower $400 per year. Recent graduates could also wait until they make $40,000 a year to start repaying their federal loans. These things seem like common-sense issues. If we are trying to encourage Canadians and our young people to take additional courses, whether it is apprenticeship or advancing their education, so that they can earn a better income and contribute better to moving Canada along, then we all want to see that they are not penalized at the end of the day, so helping them in a variety of different ways is quite helpful.
Our government is also doubling the GST tax credit to put hundreds of dollars in the pockets of those who need it the most. Starting November 4, 2022, so it is already moving forward, single Canadians without children will receive up to an extra $234, and couples with two children will receive up to an extra $467. Again, some people might say that is not enough, and ask why we bother. When we are stretching from one dollar to the next dollar to the next dollar, $234 is a lot of money, as is $467, to help feed the family and put the food on the table. Seniors, whom we talk about a lot and care immensely about, will also receive on average an extra $225.
We are also delivering much-needed relief for parents who cannot afford dental care for their kids under 12. That is an issue we have talked about for many years that I never imagined we would actually deliver, so I am glad we have started a program that truly is going to help our young children, because there are many of them who do not have any kind of coverage, so they do not see a dentist until something starts to hurt and they are forced to.
A third of Canadians do not have dental insurance, and in 2018 more than one in five Canadians reported avoiding dental care because of the cost, because it is very expensive. Our job is to help parents who struggle financially, by investing in their children's health care. Canada's dental benefit will provide parents or guardians with direct upfront tax-free payments of up to $1,300 over the next two years to cover dental expenses for their children under 12 years old.
Canada needs to also build the technology, the infrastructure and businesses to help reduce our carbon reliance, but this will not occur without rapidly increasing, and then sustaining, private investment in activities in sectors that will strengthen Canada's position as a leading low-carbon economy. That is why the 2022 fall economic statement launched the Canada growth fund, which will help bring billions of dollars in new private investment required to reduce our emissions, to grow the Canadian economy and to create well-paying jobs.
This fall economic statement also has support for hard-working Canadians, and that is in the new quarterly Canada workers benefit. We are moving this to an advance payment, because people who work really hard for really low pay cannot wait until the fiscal year is over to get a top-up. They need it while they are working, and they deserve it. We should be rewarding them for doing those hard jobs and encouraging them to continue.
I am very pleased to have had the opportunity this morning to speak to the fall economic statement, and I look forward to hearing comments from my colleagues in the House.
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Mr. Speaker, I must admit that this morning I am feeling a bit frustrated. I am sick and tired of seeing the Liberal government drop their little announcements here and there to get positive media coverage.
The Liberals tell us that they are handing out $500 for rent and then complain that the opposition parties think it is not enough.
Of course it is not enough. Of course we agree when they say that it is better than nothing. We will take the $500, but that is a ridiculous amount when we consider the real cost of housing. What we need is a massive investment in social housing.
It is the same thing when they say that this year people will receive roughly $400. Of course we will take it, but these are not meaningful measures. When I talk about meaningful measures, and I am sick of pointing this out every time I stand up, I am talking about an increase to old age security starting at 65.
I think this shows a serious lack of respect for our seniors, who are struggling to buy groceries. The Liberals merrily make their little announcements and then they will tell me they have helped seniors. I want a real answer.
When will they increase old age security starting at age 65?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. colleague for his important intervention holding the opposition members accountable. I believe as a member of the opposition that it is important to advance our program, the program that New Democrats fight for every single day in this place, which is to make the material conditions of Canadians better.
In my community of Edmonton Griesbach, I want to offer a respectful reflection of what they are experiencing. We know that across the country there is a housing crisis. People in my community cannot get ahead. We have 3,400 houseless folks across the city of Edmonton. We have nearly 470 people who died in the last two years of houselessness. These are folks I knew, real people who are affected. To give credit to the government, this fall economic statement does, in fact, help some of those folks with a $500 housing benefit. I know that is going to help Canadians. New Democrats pushed for that and we agree with that.
However, it was clear that the national housing strategy detailed by the Auditor General earlier this week is damning. What the government was supposed to build for folks did not hit its targets. It also said that the government would fail to ensure that the proper amount of housing is established by 2027 and 2028.
When will the government take housing seriously and when will it increase the supply?
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Mr. Speaker, that is a great question. I think it is a valid question. I want to thank the member for bringing it up. I would agree that there will always be more we need to do.
I want to thank the NDP for actually being adults in the room when it comes to the other parties. It is the NDP who can take credit for what is in this bill, which they do when they see it as appropriate. They saw a situation where it is a minority Parliament. Rather than just be obstructionist like the two other opposition parties, they decided to try working with the government to actually advance things for Canadians. They did exactly that.
If the member would like to continue talking about housing, I would be more than willing to do that because I think it is an important issue. I hope he keeps raising it.
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Mr. Speaker, it is ironic to hear the Liberals talk about health transfers and about how the Conservatives will offer less, when the amount is already so small. In any case, we will give them a fair chance.
I thank my colleague for sticking to the topic of the day for his whole speech. I appreciate it. He talked a lot about housing. This is an essential and very important issue. Housing costs are a major challenge for nearly everyone at this time.
What does my colleague think about a major investment in social housing, and how does he propose we go about it? It would take some people out of the market and relieve the pressure on prices. This should be done quickly with a significant amount of money.
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Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned a couple of things there and I appreciate his question.
First, on health care, the fact is that right now the Liberals are spending as much as the health care transfer amount on servicing the debt they created. Right there is where we would find savings to support health care, not service debt.
The other thing the member talked about is the housing crisis. He is right that there is a housing crisis, so what we need to do is increase supply. In Canada, we have the space to build more homes. We just need to get to a point where we are actually building those homes.
We need faster building permits. Under a Conservative government, we would have the fastest building permits around the world, and not only to build houses but to build projects and get this country moving again.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to continue on that theme of housing. If we listened to the Conservative leader, we would know that as long as there is this much capital in the market for bidding on new homes and new units of various kinds, we will have to build a lot of units to ever see the price of housing come down.
One thing in Bill C-32 is a pandemic dividend, or the Canada recovery dividend. It is really about going to the very same financial institutions that the Conservative leader has rightly complained about, which got a lot of liquidity support during the pandemic, and taking some of that money back into government coffers for it to be put out on things like the doubling of the GST rebate, the dental benefit and the Canada housing benefit.
I found it odd not to hear any support from the Conservative leader for the pandemic dividend, because it seems to me that it is very clearly an issue of justice, as we are talking about who should bear the cost of the moment we are in, in light of what has gone on in the pandemic. It also seems to be a pretty important tool for trying to right one of the structural problems in the housing market right now.
I wonder if the member might offer his thoughts on the pandemic recovery dividend.
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Mr. Speaker, we have been very vocal that we want Canadians to pay less tax. We believe it is more effective for Canadians not to have to pay out that money and give it back to the government. We want Canadians to make a choice of where to spend that money, and many Canadians would spend it on housing. Then they would be able to afford their rent and get into houses.
The other thing to note is that, yes, the member is right that we need to build a lot more houses. In fact, the government has a plan to significantly increase immigration, so we need housing. We have a construction industry that is ready to build those homes. We just need to get the gatekeepers out of the way so we can get them built.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
I would like to hear him talk about housing. We know that the housing crisis is one of the very important factors of the inflationary situation that we are experiencing at the moment. At the Bloc Québécois, we believe that we should invest massively in social housing. We even believe that we should make a permanent commitment to invest 1% of the budget in social housing every year to reduce the pressure on the market and remove a certain number of tenants from the market. We believe that this could be an effective solution. Of course, it would require a great deal of construction.
I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on this.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.
Of course, the New Democratic Party believes that we need to invest in social housing. The Conservatives propose facilitating the construction of houses on the private market. However, without real investment and without the construction of social housing, many Canadians will not be able to buy these homes and will not have access to housing that they can afford.
Yearly, recurring investments are really important. Non-profit organizations need to know whether they will receive an amount every year to make their own investments in the initial stages of a social housing project. If they do not know when these investments will be made by the government, it is really difficult for them to plan—
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
He talked about ways to fight inflation. A basic and very important way would be to significantly boost residential housing starts, which would reduce pressure on the housing market, and on social housing in particular. Social housing would remove low-income people from the current market and would reduce that pressure.
I would like my colleague to expand on that and on the Parti Québécois's proposal to allocate 1% of the annual budget to social housing going forward.
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Madam Speaker, housing is a real issue. We have problems with affordable housing and housing affordability. Every dollar we invest in affordable housing saves multiple dollars in other social costs, so it makes a business case for investment in affordable housing.
I am proud to be part of a government that has committed a huge amount of money toward housing. Through the national housing strategy, we have committed $55 billion. Every single day, we are announcing new housing projects wherever possible. In fact, recently, the Minister of Housing announced the new stream of the rapid housing initiative and other things.
When people talk about affordable housing I ask them to bring in a proposal. Money is not the constraint. The constraint is getting the proposal, which we can fund.
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- Nov/17/22 2:18:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, CMHC, the federal government's housing agency, has spent $4.5 billion and committed another $9 billion to tackle homelessness, but it has no idea if anyone is benefiting from their work.
It has no idea. How can there be no accountability for billions of dollars when more Canadians are living in tents or cars and inflation is skyrocketing? This is absurd. If any member in the House takes a walk through their downtown, they will see the homeless crisis is getting worse every single day.
Lynn, a senior in her mid-60s, is homeless because she cannot afford rent in Toronto. She lived in her car for seven weeks before finding a place in a shelter system. Sage lives in a tent. She is 23 years old, from Portage la Prairie, and has been homeless for two years. These are not data points on a graph. They are people.
The Liberals plan to announce large amounts of funding that no one can access with zero accountability is not working. Canada needs leadership. It needs a plan. It needs accountability. It needs housing.
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Madam Speaker, I really enjoyed my colleague's speech. He seems concerned about the well-being of his constituents, and that is very commendable.
He talked about the cost of living and the cost of housing. We know that things are not easy right now in that regard. I talked about it earlier in the member's statement that I made. In Quebec alone, 600,000 people will experience hidden homelessness at some point in their lives. That is 7% of the population. Right now, there are 6,000 homeless people in Quebec alone. Those numbers grew during the pandemic.
What we need to do is build housing. I was talking to an economist from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recently who said that, if we allow market forces to run their course for the next 10 years, 500,000 housing units will be built in Quebec alone. However, 1.1 million housing units are needed.
Our Conservative friends are always saying that we need to cut spending, but somewhere along the way, the government needs to intervene to build 600,000 housing units if we want to address the issues of affordability and availability.
How do we do that?
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Madam Speaker, the way to get more houses built is to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of Canadian business people and to bring interest rates down so that housing is more affordable.
I was talking a home builder in my riding who wanted to put up a large project of 400 or so units of affordable housing within the definition of CMHC's rules about affordable housing. He cannot afford to do it. It just does not work out with high interest rates.
We are not looking for the government to spend more money. We are looking for the government to get out of the way as gatekeepers so that private enterprise could build more houses, 1.5 million across Canada, including in Quebec, and also in my province. That is what is required.
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Madam Speaker, I really enjoyed my colleague's speech on housing. It was very thoughtful, well-documented and well-written. He hit the nail on the head. The government's housing strategy includes a lot of numbers and promises, but it does not actually do much.
Let us talk solutions. The rapid housing initiative works fairly well because it fully funds projects. The program also makes it possible to build housing quickly.
Organizations tell us that all the other programs, such as the national housing co-investment fund and rental housing programs, which primarily offer loans, need to change. That money should go to not-for-profits so they can buy private property and get it off the market to ensure longevity. Does my colleague agree?
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Madam Speaker, it is a really great idea. In fact, what we need to have here is a situation in which all levels of government are working together. Let us not kid ourselves. Municipalities and to a smaller degree provinces are the front lines of the housing crisis in this country. The federal government has a role to play in working with municipalities and provinces and, frankly, with the private sector. This country requires trillions of dollars of investment in the housing sector. We need the private sector on board. We need community groups on board. We need to be all working together to solve this crisis, not pandering to grandiose fixes but getting to work and working together to solve the problem.
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