44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 31, 2023 10:00AM
- Jan/31/23 2:56:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in the last nine months the Liberals spent $6.7 million for just 10 people to stay at a Calgary airport hotel. That is $670,000 per person. There is no justification for this. COVID quarantine restrictions were eased long before this time. That $670,000 could have bought a beautiful home in Calgary, a dream that, after eight years, is out of reach for so many people precisely because of Liberal waste like this.
I have two questions. How many other hotels did this happen at? Has anybody been fired for this waste?
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- Jan/31/23 3:16:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to draw your attention to a procedural matter relating to Question No. 974, which I submitted on November 4, 2022.
For the sake of time, I will spare reading the text of the question into the record, but my point of order relates to a passage found on page 523 of Bosc and Gagnon, which states:
While oral questions are posed without notice on matters considered to be of an urgent nature, written questions are placed on the Order Paper after due notice, with the intent of seeking from the Ministry detailed, lengthy or technical information related to “public affairs”...Members may request that the Ministry respond within 45 calendar days, generally by adding a sentence to that effect either before or after the text of the question, or by so indicating to the Clerk when submitting the question.
Standing Order 39(5)(b) states:
If such a question remains unanswered at the expiration of the said period of 45 days, the matter of the failure of the ministry to respond shall be deemed referred to the appropriate standing committee. Within five sitting days of such a referral the Chair of the committee shall convene a meeting of the committee to consider the matter of the failure of the ministry to respond.
The key word here is “unanswered”. I indicated my desire to have the question answered in 45 days, and at this point the question cannot be legitimately considered answered. To date, the government has failed to provide any answer on the substance of key aspects of my question. Due to this, I would argue that, per the Standing Orders, after 45 days my question remains unanswered and should be deemed to not have a response.
Before section 5(b) of Standing Order 39 came into effect in 2001, governments routinely ignored the 45-day deadline to answer questions. Following the adoption of this rule, the government began to respect the 45-day deadline. However, it appears that the government has found a way to circumvent this rule to thwart the intended protection offered by Standing Order 39(5)(b).
Your rulings have established that access to information from the government is a fundamental privilege of a parliamentarian. It is also a critical aspect of the functioning of our system of democracy. When the government flaunts its responsibility to provide this information, the system fails, and this is why, in a related matter, many members of the Press Gallery are raising concerns about the breakdown of the access to information system requests.
Coming back to the matter at hand in this place, my point of order simply asks you to rule that, when the government substantively ignores the substance of an Order Paper question, it should be considered a failure to answer for the purposes of Standing Order 39(5)(b). That way the government's refusal to answer a written question can be referred to a committee for review.
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Mr. Speaker, I believe it is imperative for our country that every person in this place agree on one thing: We have to equitably value the labour of child care in all its forms. It is through that principle that I believe people in this place should be considering amendments to this bill.
I want to speak about why this bill gets us part of the way but does not talk about the equitable value of the labour of child care. We need to do better. Better can always be achieved.
This bill does not address the lack of child care spaces across the country in an adequate way. We have to look at how we can work within the confines of our regionally and demographically diverse nation to see how child care is being undertaken and to see how we can incentivize people to undertake that activity. For example, not every person has access to a spot that would be considered under this bill. Some people look to extended family to provide child care or private home day cares, and some people would not have access to that with this bill.
As I have been listening to the debate, many colleagues have raised concerns about people who do shift work or who are part of the gig economy. Their hours do not neatly overlay with the way these child care spaces would be structured. I believe one of my colleagues from the NDP raised issues this morning about whether this bill adequately addresses indigenous child care needs, which are sensitive. This bill does not really address any of those things.
If we are going to talk about child care, we have to do more than just look at one frame of reference. That frame of reference is important for sure, but if we are only talking about that frame of reference, what happens to the people who are planning to have children or who are looking for child care right now, are struggling and do not necessarily fit in the very prescriptive box this bill puts together? They do not feel like they are part of the bigger vision. That is why we need to amend this bill, and I hope that happens.
There is another context this bill needs to be studied in. We say “affordable child care” or “affordable day care”, but the reality is that life is not affordable for many Canadians right now. I want to take a slightly different approach to explaining how the cost of living crisis could seriously affect our economy and where child care fits into this.
Right now, Canada's national fertility rate, when we factor out immigration, is about 1.4, and the natural rate of replacement of a population is about 2.1. This phenomenon is not unique to Canada or to any country in the world. In fact, we are seeing a rapid global decline of fertility rates across the board.
For example, I believe China now has a 1.1 fertility rate. China's fertility rate is actually lower than Canada's rate. When people are looking at China's long-term economic growth forecast or the ability of China to maintain its continuous growth, the lack of children is factoring into the economic equation. We have the same issue here in Canada.
The other phenomenon we see in Canada is that immigration is very important to our country, and we need to ensure we have adequate processes to incentivize immigration, to welcome people to Canada and to integrate them into our social and economic fabric. However, we are also seeing over time, through studies out of the U.S., that immigrant populations that have traditionally bolstered fertility rates within countries are seeing declines in their fertility rates as well.
When we are looking at child care affordability and the cost of living, we have to understand that people make a decision to have a child based on a wide variety of factors. It is a very sensitive topic, but affordability and the availability of child care is one of the big reasons. If we are just putting child care into the box we have in this bill and are not seeking consensus to look at valuing the labour of child care in all its forms, we are missing the plot here for people who need child care right now. We need to be talking about very urgently as a Parliament how we incentivize people to have children without leaving women behind and while progressing on issues of gender equity.
This is a very tough, very emotionally charged subject that many people will have a lot of feelings over based on their frame of reference and the personal experience in their lives. Frankly, the decision to have a child is about one person and one person alone in the context of a family. If we want more people to have children, we need to incentivize people so that when we are looking at all of the factors that somebody considers when deciding whether they are going to start a family, those factors are taken care of.
One of the things this bill does not consider, which I hope this place will sensitively and from a cross-partisan perspective look at, is the failure of our immigration system to process parents and grandparents' applications. Right now, I believe the wait time in that particular stream is over 38 months. That is just the service standard; we know it is a lot higher. We know there are a lot of Canadians who want to bring extended families here either through that stream or through a super visa in order to provide child care. I hope the committee that studies this bill looks at that as well. We cannot be talking about child care in a country as diverse as ours without looking at ways that we can make it easier for people to have their family engaged in that if they choose to be.
We also need to make sure that we have affordable child care spots, as this bill starts to lay out. However, we need to look at how those spaces affect people who cannot access them due to their work schedules. That is something this bill does not address.
The other thing this bill does not address is the fact that, at the same time that we are looking at child care and looking at a decline in fertility in our country, we have an aging population. On one hand we have people of a certain generation who are trying to figure out how to have child care, and at the same time, they are starting to ask the question of how to care for aging parents.
We cannot have the conversation about child care without talking about elder care for all of the reasons that have already been raised in debate, particularly around the issue of staffing, burnout and early child care educators. It is not just early child care educators who we are lacking. It is also people who are willing to be caregivers in the broadest sense of the word. We need to talk about labour and valuing the labour of child care. Again, this bill is a start, but what it does is put our perception of the response to this crisis into very narrow terms. We need to be looking at this a lot broader.
I also believe that for us to allow for gender equity and allow people to look at starting a family, should they so choose, we cannot do that without understanding that not everybody in this country will want to access programs under this system. That does not mean people should not have access to that system. It should not mean that these people are left in the dark without a solution. It should not mean that their labour is not valued.
I know somebody very close to me who chose to have a child at a very young age. They made that decision because people circled around them and made child care happen. How do we value the labour of those people? We understand that our country is diverse and is not homogenous, so how do we meet this need, particularly in the context of the fertility crisis that our country is facing?
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Mr. Speaker, I absolutely agree that women should have more opportunity and that overcoming barriers for women to participate in society, writ large, is something this place should be urgently seized with. However, I take issue with the characterization of this bill as providing universal access to child care, because it does not. Not every Canadian who wants to get a spot would get a spot under this program. The fact that this program has not been means-tested is something that should be considered in a committee study.
We should not be trying to say that this is universal when it is not. If we are going to use the term “universal”, we have to understand that we must value the labour of child care no matter where it happens, be it in a state-sponsored space, in a private home or by parents providing it at home. Those are all labours of equal value, and they are all legitimate choices that should be open to all Canadians. Framing this bill as universal when it is not is the point we need to move on in order to improve it.
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Mr. Speaker, the reality is that the paragraph my colleague just alluded to would benefit centres that currently operate on a regular nine-to-five schedule. That is just the reality. If we look to where most of the funding would go, it would be to those centres. If my colleague is concerned and actually wants to address this concern with members of the House, he should suggest an amendment at committee stating that a portion of these funds should go to something that provides spots for shift workers.
As much as the member is saying there is a straitjacket, the way the funding mechanism works right now is that funding will largely go to traditional state-run day cares, and I believe we need more flexibility to acknowledge a changing workforce and changing economy. I know how bureaucracies work. Funding would go to the system that is set up. We need to be incentivizing innovation and meeting the diversity of our country by spelling out changes that need to happen.
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