44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 24, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, the member spoke about specific aspects of the budget that tie back into helping rural and remote communities attract doctors and nurses by extending an offer to lessen debt for nurses. I appreciate that.
I come from a riding with communities like Port Hardy, which, an article just came out saying, is again going to have to shut down the emergency room during the day. Right now, the emergency room is open only during the day, not during the evening or the night. People have to leave their community and drive far away to get emergency services. It is the same on Cormorant Island.
Does the member think it would be important for the government to step up and make sure there are ties to small, rural communities struggling in this country in terms of health care, to get them a bit extra to get through this time? I know that, in B.C., the provincial government has stepped up, but it needs more resources to address this huge crisis.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the nature of the question. However, as it relates to whether a hospital emergency room is going to be open or not, it largely ties back to the decision of health authorities at a provincial level.
I appreciate that the member opposite said that requires more resources. I think it requires both more resources and an allocation of said resources in the province. We are doing our part, on the federal side, to make sure there is stable funding provided to the provinces. In fact, Premier Eby has recognized and endorsed the health deal the Government of Canada has put on the table.
As it relates to the member's rural communities, which I sympathize with, I hope she will take up with the provincial government what it is doing to make sure there are proper resources to service rural communities, because it is an important question.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise today and speak to the implementation of the budget. It is an incredible honour for me, as well, to be splitting my time with the great member for Edmonton Manning, who is a very valuable colleague. I am really looking forward to hearing what he has to say later. However, before that, members have to endure 10 minutes of my speaking.
It might not come as any surprise, based on the debate we have had over the last couple of weeks, but Conservatives have not supported and will not be supporting the implementation of this budget, mainly for three reasons. We laid out key priorities that we wanted to see in this budget ahead of time and they really were not met.
This budget would add billions of dollars in debt, with no plan to get back to balance. The Prime Minister has already added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined in this country and there is no plan to get to balance. That is the part that really worries me. Not only would this spending add fuel to the inflationary fire and increase the cost of living, but it would also threaten the sustainability of our public services for future generations. Each dollar we have to spend servicing debt is a dollar we cannot be spending on other services. That is something we all have to keep in mind, moving forward, and the government should keep in mind that, when it racks up billions of dollars in debt, it is threatening our social services for future generations. This budget would also raise taxes. As I just alluded to, we know there is a cost of living crisis with inflation. The government has chosen, once again, to raise taxes for Canadians further and there is truly no plan to build homes and get affordable units built.
For those three main reasons, Conservatives voted against the budget, and I have every expectation that, moving forward, we will be voting against the implementation of this budget.
I want to take a step back and talk about another major issues that I feel is neglected in this budget. That is about community safety. We have seen concerns with community safety around the region in northwestern Ontario in communities like Kenora, Dryden and Sioux Lookout. Policing calls for services have been up, as have, of course, the costs that go with this, to the point where municipalities are struggling and trying to figure out how they are going to be able to deal with those costs. We have seen assaults, slashed tires, vehicle break-ins and things like needles being found around the community, all happening with greater frequency around the area.
As I mentioned, we are seeing this right across northwestern Ontario, but there has been a certain amount of media coverage specifically around the city of Kenora. It is the largest community in the riding, so a lot of the notes I will refer to will mention Kenora specifically, but I would like members to keep in mind that it is something that is not unique to the city of Kenora but is right across northwestern Ontario.
We have seen articles with headlines such as “Kenora assault leaves one with life threatening injuries”, from March. The Kenora OPP has recently released figures showing that property crime has actually increased 10% year over year. It is now at the point where local professionals and business owners are scared to go to work. When I go door knocking and talk to people around the community, many residents tell me they are afraid to go downtown and certainly would not go downtown in the evening or at night. That is incredibly sad on a number of levels. Kenora is one of the smallest cities in Ontario. It has 15,000 people. We did not even lock our doors when we were growing up. It is really one of those tight-knit, small-town communities and people are now scared to go downtown. Many businesses have been locking their doors during operating hours; people have to ring the doorbell in order to gain access.
It brings up the question of what is driving all of this. Why are we seeing this increase in crime, and why are people feeling less safe? There is certainly no single answer and there is no single solution, but one of the issues we are seeing in Kenora and in the other communities of our riding is that, unfortunately, there are many homeless residents. Many of these individuals are struggling with their mental health and with addiction challenges, and they do not have proper supports around them. There is great work being done by people like Dr. Jonny Grek, who has been going around providing treatment to homeless residents on the street. I had the opportunity very recently to join him for a walk to see what he does.
There are other organizations, like Ne-Chee Friendship Centre; the Makwa Patrol, also known as the Bear Clan Patrol in other areas of the country; and the Morningstar Detoxification Centre. These are all incredible organizations with great people doing great work to help those who are vulnerable and those who are struggling. However, it is an indisputable fact that the current systems just cannot deal with the magnitude of the issue before us right now. This is truly a crisis.
Coupled with the addiction concern, there has been an increase in HIV. In 2022, there were more HIV cases in Kenora than in the previous eight years combined. Overdose deaths have increased 82%, year over year, and northwestern Ontario now has the highest per capita overdose mortality rate in the province of Ontario.
On housing, and I mentioned that this issue is coupled with housing, the KDSB, the Kenora District Services Board, for those who do not know, estimates that there are 100 homeless residents in the small community of Kenora. There are more than 1,300 households on an affordable housing wait-list; that is an increase of nearly 1,000 households from just nine years ago, to paint the picture of the broader housing issue we are seeing across the region.
This budget does mention housing a bit. It does mention treatment and recovery, but on treatment and recovery specifically, it is light on details. Given the fact that this issue has been spiralling for the last eight years and that there have not been proper supports put in place, I know that a lot of people in the Kenora district and northwestern Ontario, myself included, really do not feel the government will step up to meet this challenge.
On the other hand, Conservatives support policies that get people into recovery instead of spending a night in a cell, only to be released and continue that cycle over and over again. I have seen that far too often. I have done a few ride-alongs and have been able to go around the community, not just in Kenora but also in Pickle Lake, Dryden and others. I have seen people who have asked to be arrested so that they have somewhere to stay. I have heard of people who have chosen to commit a crime so that, if they do not have proper supports around them, they know they will have a few nights of somewhere to stay where they will have a bed and a meal.
Conservatives support treatment and recovery options. That includes giving Correctional Services power to designate all or part of a penitentiary as a treatment facility. We also support greater consequences for repeat violent offenders and for the drug dealers who are preying on these vulnerable people with addictions. We want to see greater consequences for those individuals, but, unfortunately, violent crime was not mentioned even once in this budget. Overall, those solutions, addictions treatment and recovery, are what I feel is missing from this budget and it is what Conservatives will certainly be focusing on over the next number of months and into the term in which we form government.
As I mentioned, there is no silver-bullet solution to this, but it would certainly help to address the crisis that we are seeing on the streets of Kenora, of Dryden and of Sioux Lookout, to help ensure that everyone in our community is safe, from the vulnerable residents, the homeless population, to the business owners and professionals and the visitors. Kenora sits on the beautiful Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario and it is an incredibly popular tourist spot each summer. We want to make sure that everyone in our community is safe.
This budget does not get it done, but Conservatives will.
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Madam Speaker, I have heard the hon. member repeat what I have heard a number of Conservatives repeat, which is, apparently, that they had three demands of things to be seen in the budget before they would agree to vote in favour of the budget. This member mentioned it. A number of Conservative members prior have mentioned it.
The only problem with that is that, the day before the budget was introduced, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, the member for Thornhill, during question period, said that Conservatives would not be supporting the budget. Nobody knew what was in the budget at that point. As a matter of fact, it is against the rules of the House for anybody to have known that, yet, somehow, the member for Thornhill, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, knew enough to know that those three items would not be in the budget.
This just leads me to assume that, really, Conservatives are just playing games with words here. They never intended to support the budget, regardless of their demands. I am wondering if the member can provide some insight into that.
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Madam Speaker, I have not heard from my colleague in a while in this chamber, so I appreciate his intervention.
The question gives me the opportunity to highlight the fact that the three demands we had were not met. We asked for a cap on government spending to help rein in inflation, and the government is adding billions of dollars in debt. We asked for taxes to be lowered on Canadians, and the government is raising taxes. We asked for a plan to get homes built by speeding up building permits and looking at ways to free up land and federal buildings for development, and that is not in this budget. That is why we are not supporting it.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague talked a little bit about housing, and I thank him for that, because it is a pretty important topic.
Unfortunately, when we listen to the Conservatives, it is not really clear what their solutions are and what they are going to do about it.
The Liberals are terrible, and they are getting nowhere. My colleague bragged earlier about $70 billion in investments over the last five years. In the last five years, 35,000 new social housing units have been built in Canada through this strategy. I have no idea where the billions of dollars went. According to studies by CIBC and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC, Canada needs to build 3.5 million units in the next 10 years if we are going to address the twin issues of affordability and accessibility.
If we want to help those most in need in this country, the government needs to intervene and be more effective. What are the Conservative Party's solutions?
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Madam Speaker, the question gives me a chance to reiterate what I just said to the member for Kingston and the Islands around housing. What Conservatives are calling for, and what we will do when we form government, is to implement a plan to speed up building permits. We need to make sure it is possible to build things in this country again. We need to create those incentives so developers will be able to and will want to build the housing units we so desperately need. We also want to lean on the resources the federal government has, the land and the buildings that are being underutilized, so we can turn that into affordable housing units.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague spoke in his speech about the overdose drug crisis in this country. In 2010, I was part of the public safety committee that toured this country and studied the provision of mental health and addiction services in Canada's federal prison system. At that time, we came out with a number of recommendations to the Harper government, which included a number of positive things, none of which were brought in by the Harper government. Instead, the Harper government closed the Kingston farms, closed industrial training programs for prisoners and did not implement a single harm reduction measure in Canada's federal prison system.
It appears the modern Conservative Party has had a conversion on the road to Damascus and is now talking about progressive policy. Does the member agree with the NDP that it is time we gave access to timely treatment for anybody who wants treatment for substance abuse or addiction through Canada's public health care system? Does he agree that addiction is a health issue and it warrants access to treatment through our public health care system, like every other disease and affliction?
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Madam Speaker, I am always amazed by the NPD's focus on a prime minister who has not been in office in eight years. The Harper government was elected and lost power from office before I was even able to vote, so it is incredible that the NDP is so focused on the past instead of holding the current government to account.
To the specific question, which is an important one, I do not have time to—
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- Apr/24/23 1:38:14 p.m.
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Resuming debate, the hon. member for Edmonton Manning.
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Madam Speaker, economists are telling us that Canada is on the brink of a recession, and the response of the Liberal government is to offer us a grim budget. Not only is it grim in the dictionary sense of being depressing or worrying to consider, but it is also Grimm as if it were written by the Grimm brothers. In other words, the finance minister has offered us a complete fairy tale.
The minister thinks she is playing the role of Snow White, with her cabinet colleagues as the seven dwarfs. Of course, that would leave the Prime Minister the role of Prince Charming. However, the Disney version is not the original story. In the Grimm original version of “Snow White”, the one Canadians will experience with this budget, the Minister of Finance would be the evil queen, and her budget the poisoned apple. Only by removing the apple from Show White's throat can she be saved, and only by defeating this budget can Canada's economy be saved from this Liberal disaster.
Perhaps the finance minister has a starring role in another of the Grimm brothers' fairy tales: “Cinderella”. After all, she just bought some new glass slippers before presenting her budget. The minister wants Canadians to believe that she is the fairy godmother, handing out cheques from the government. Who could argue with the idea of free money, even if it causes more inflation? However, the money is not really free. Cinderella may spend, spend and spend, never worrying that the clock is about to strike midnight, but midnight is coming and she will have to face the reality. Her beautiful horses are really mice, and when the clock strikes 12, we will discover just how big a pumpkin she has stuck the Canadian people with.
This type of fairy tale is not a new thing for this government. After eight years, we should be used to the fantasies spun by the Liberal storytellers, by the Prime Minister and his cabinet. From the beginning, they have shown their inability to understand basic mathematics.
In 2015, the Liberal leader promised Canadians that if he formed government, he would balance the budget by 2019. Does anyone on the other side remember that promise? After eight years, he has not even come close to balancing the budget. Instead, he just piles on more and more debt with government spending that drives up the price of groceries and everything else. He thinks people should be grateful to him for breaking his promises, because his government, as he says, will always have Canadians' backs, which is easy for him to say since we have already had to give him the shirts off our backs to pay for his high prices and high taxes.
The Minister of Finance has learned from the Prime Minister. She has not promised us a balanced budget. Given the Liberal track record, I am not sure she knows what a balanced budget is. It may be because there was one thing missing from this budget, one small spending item that would have made a big difference if purchased and used: a dictionary. If the Liberals owned a dictionary, the finance minister might discover that the definition of “fiscal restraint” is not “spend the country into recession”. Fiscal restraint is not telling Canadians in the fall of 2022 that the government expects to run a $30-billion deficit, and then adding an addition $10 billion a few months later. Can the minister be so unaware of the true numbers, or was she intentionally misleading Canadians?
After eight years of this government, the deficits get higher, the national debt grows and our grandchildren will still be stuck with paying for Liberal extravagance. Rather than handing out cheques to Canadians struggling to feed their families due to high grocery prices, why does this government not actually do something about inflation, rather than making things worse? Is it because it does not have a clue how the economy works?
The government can be counted on to always say the right thing, but its actions speak louder than words. Simply put, it does not walk the talk.
A government that broke its promises about balancing the budget and that has steadily increased the deficit and national debt and fuelled record inflation should not be entrusted with the finances of the nation. Then again, the Liberals spent $6,000 a night on a hotel room for the Prime Minister, complete with butler service. Perhaps the Liberals do understand the financial challenges faced by ordinary Canadians and instead just do not care.
I am not the only one who has noticed that the budget presented to us by the finance minister is a fairy tale. According to The Globe and Mail, this budget “is all a fiscal fantasy: the Liberal budget is built on a cloud of sleight-of-hand projections and the hope that Canadians are suffering from collective amnesia.” If finance minister Cinderella really wants to help Canadians, and I believe she does, she needs to abandon this reckless spending program that she described as “fiscal restraint”. She needs to recognize that people are suffering and she can act to make things better.
First, she needs to lower taxes and scrap the carbon tax so that hard work will pay off again. The grocery tax rebate she is offering does not make up for the increases in payroll taxes and the carbon tax. Her policies are fuelling inflation and making people poorer, which is why one in five Canadians is skipping meals and food banks are seeing record demand. Second, she needs to get government spending under control. The Prime Minister has added more to our national debt than all prime ministers in our history.
The finance minister says that she will balance the budget in 2028, but she has no plan. Continued inflationary deficits are driving up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. The finance minister's plan to balance the budget is probably the same one her predecessor used: keep on spending with even greater deficits and pretend that the budget will somehow magically balance itself in a few years. After all, we are living in a Liberal fairy tale where such things can happen, except they do not happen. As the government has never managed to meet a self-imposed climate change target, so too has it continuously failed to show any signs of fiscal restraint or fiscal responsibility. It is as if the minister knows the government is doomed so she does not have to worry about it or about balancing the budget. Instead, eliminating the national debt will be someone else's problem.
When the Prime Minister was staying in that $6,000-a-night hotel suite, he went down to the hotel lobby one evening for a sing-along. Perhaps the Minister of Finance should take note of the words of the song he sang:
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?Caught in a landsideNo escape from reality
For the Canadian people, this is indeed real life, caught in a landslide of a fantasy budget. For them, there is indeed no escape from reality. I urge the Minister of Finance to learn from the fairy tales and drop her starring role in them. The fiscal clock is about to strike midnight, and it is time for Cinderella to face reality.
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Madam Speaker, speaking of fairy tales, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech. The real fairy tale, however, is that it has been more than two weeks since we tabled our fine budget, which is a responsible budget for the economy, the future and our children.
I would ask my colleague what fairy tale he is referring to, since he has not asked a single question about the budget in two weeks. He is asking personal questions about the Prime Minister, but he has nothing to say about the budget.
If his party has concerns about the budget, would it not be appropriate to ask questions about it in question period?
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Madam Speaker, I was still on the definition issue with the government, and there is nothing in the budget to ask for. The budget is more spending, more inflation, no responsibility and no going back to balanced. What is there to ask for in the budget other than more bad news for Canadians? The government is looking for more and higher taxes, more spending and a more uncertain future.
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Madam Speaker, I have been touring Quebec recently, travelling all over the place to talk about the housing crisis, because I think it is a very serious issue. I have heard from a lot of people.
In Joliette, for example, an adult living with an intellectual disability found himself on the street, homeless, in other words, and he ended up committing suicide. There was nothing in the budget to help someone like him. I heard about a woman in Trois-Rivières who is a victim of domestic violence and is now living in her car with her two children. There was nothing in the budget to help her. I heard about a family of 17 people in Longueuil living in a three-bedroom apartment. There was nothing in the budget to help those folks.
Does my colleague have any solutions for the issues I just raised and the people I just talked about?
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Madam Speaker, of course, the housing crisis is a devastating situation, and it is heartbreaking to see a lot of Canadians who cannot find houses. Furthermore, our young generations do not even dream of owning or buying a house in the future. The proposed budget would not address any of that. The government is dominated by the idea of spending so much and achieving so little, and that is the problem we are facing right now.
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Madam Speaker, I rather enjoy the hon. member for Edmonton Manning. I appreciate his wisdom. He often comes with some really insightful information for the House. He spoke today about a fantasyland. I feel like I am in a fantasyland because it seems that the Conservatives' only solution to housing is to supersede provincial jurisdiction and have the federal government, if I am getting this correctly, intervene in local planning decision-making.
In this new fantasyland from the party of Wexit, Alberta sovereignty and the Buffalo declaration, where does the federal government take over municipal decision-making and start eliminating the gatekeepers at local planning meetings?
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Madam Speaker, there is another fantasy world. It is the planet the NDP is living on right now. That is the bottom line. We are trying to remove gatekeepers and streamline the system. We are trying to help provinces by offering real help, not just a bunch of spending that would achieve nothing. That is the plan. It is a logical plan that makes sense.
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Madam Speaker, the budget contains much inflationary pressure. There is $15 billion for an infrastructure bank that never built a project and another $15 billion for a slush fund in the Canada growth fund with no details on what that is about. Although there is such an crisis in affordable housing, as there is in my riding, the budget has $5.5 billion dollars to build only 4,500 spaces and remove barriers to building maybe another 100,000. That is a huge gap, and it is another inflationary pressure.
Could the member comment on that?
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Madam Speaker, that goes back to the same idea we noticed here. The government spends too much and achieves too little. If this continues to be the case, there is no hope that we will see any actual results.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Kingston and the Islands.
I am pleased to rise today to talk about our budget. As the member for Argenteuil—La Petite-Nation and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Rural Development, I am pleased to talk about its impact on rural Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
This budget is based on our plan to grow our economy, fight climate change and continue to make life more affordable for Canadians in every community. The previous Conservative government cut the rural secretariat; by contrast, our Liberal government appointed the first federal minister of rural economic development to ensure that federal programs are adapted to the unique realities and needs of rural communities and allow those communities to finally have a dedicated voice at the cabinet table.
Our government recognizes that rural communities are the cornerstone of our economy. When rural Canada succeeds, the rest of Canada is stronger for it. The Minister of Rural Economic Development and I have travelled across the country to remote and indigenous rural communities and they shared their priorities with us directly. They also talked about how we can work together to ensure that every community has what it needs to prosper.
From what we heard, the top priority of rural communities is to close the connectivity gap to ensure that every Canadian has access to reliable, affordable high-speed Internet no matter where they live. We are making this happen.
Since 2015, our government has made $7.6 billion available for expanding access to this essential service. The universal broadband fund, with its budget of more than $3.2 billion, is the largest federal investment in broadband in Canada's history. That is 10 times the investments of all the previous governments combined. We have consistently increased funding for the fund to ensure that we are on the right track to exceed our objective of connecting 98% of Canadians by 2026 and 100% of Canadians by 2030.
Last fall, we added $485 million to the fund to continue our work. I want to point out that the Conservative Party voted against those essential investments every chance it got. Those significant investments helped compensate for the previous Conservative government's 10 years of inaction. In 2014, only 79% of Canadians had access to high-speed Internet, while today 93.5% of them do. That is real progress.
Since the fund was launched, over $2.2 billion in funding has been announced for 260 projects and six federal-provincial funding arrangements. The money announced will make it possible for over 950,000 households, including over 29,000 indigenous households, to get affordable and reliable high-speed Internet access. The universal broadband fund has already helped provide high-speed Internet access to over 200,000 underserved households across the country, and 80,000 additional households should have improved access by the end of the year.
In Quebec, almost 100% of households are covered by projects that will get them connected to high-speed Internet. That would not have been possible without the investments that we made and our partnership with the provincial government. The fund makes it possible to offer access to reliable high-speed Internet at an affordable price. Affordability is an issue that is of concern to many Canadians living in rural areas.
Despite the progress made on connectivity and rebuilding our economy following the pandemic, global inflation means that many Canadians are still finding it hard to put food on the table. That is why the 2023 budget includes new targeted supports for the most vulnerable Canadians to help them with the cost of living while working to build the economy of tomorrow, an economy that benefits all Canadians and gives them the means to prosper.
I would like to focus on one of these affordability measures, the new grocery rebate. We know that staples are more expensive today, especially in rural areas where the cost of living is higher. These higher prices are a source of great stress for families. That is why we are proposing $2.5 billion to lessen the effects of inflation in a targeted manner for 11 million low-income families. On average, a couple with two children will qualify for up to $467 more, single Canadians without children will receive up to $234 and seniors will receive up to $225 more. We have shown that, as a government, we are there for Canadians when they need us, as is the case with the Canada child benefit. This measure will put more money in the pockets of Canadian families and seniors who need it most.
Investments in budget 2023 will strengthen Canada's health care system, allocating $198.3 billion for reducing backlogs, expanding access to family health services and ensuring that the provinces and territories can provide the top-quality health care that Canadians deserve. The budget also introduces a new Canadian dental care program that will benefit up to nine million Canadians. This program will guarantee that no Canadian family will have to choose between dental care and paying bills at the end of the month. These investments will bring real changes to the daily lives of Canadians in rural regions. Parents should not have to worry about the cost of their child's dental checkup. Seniors should be able to consult a doctor without having to worry about travelling too far because there are no doctors in their community.
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