44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 29, 2024 11:00AM
- Apr/29/24 1:09:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for St. Catharines.
I will take this opportunity to highlight some of the transformative measures in our recent 2024 budget. A fair chance to build a good middle-class life, to do as well as your parents or better, has always been the promise of Canada. Today, for too many younger Canadians, that promise is not being fulfilled. Millennials and gen Z Canadians have so much talent and potential, and they need to see and feel that our country can work for them and that the promise of Canada can still be reached.
We know that Canada's success depends in large part on creating opportunities for each generation. Budget 2024 will make strategic investments that will create opportunities for workers today, driving productivity and economic growth for generations to come.
We are giving our children the best start in life.
We know that we have to start early when it comes to preparing our children to succeed.
That is why, for example, budget 2024 commits to powerful investments such as $1 billion over five years for the new national school food program, which is expected to provide meals for more than 400,000 children every year. The budget would also strengthen the affordable Canada-wide early learning and child care system, which is helping young parents, many of them millennials, to pursue their careers thanks to significantly lower fees. Budget 2024 would improve access by providing $1 billion in low-cost loans and $60 million in non-repayable grants to help build additional affordable child care spaces. The budget would also offer student loan forgiveness for early childhood educators who work in rural and remote areas.
With regard to coding skills for kids, starting in the early years, budget 2024 would help prime our children for success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The budget is committing $39.2 million over two years to advance the next phase of CanCode, a federal program that, since its launch, has helped over 4.5 million students from kindergarten through grade 12 to develop coding and digital skills. CanCode is helping young people unlock future opportunities in the increasingly digital global economy.
Next is increasing students grants and loans.
There is even more, including support for young Canadians who are pursuing their career dreams.
Budget 2024 will restore generational fairness by facilitating access to post-secondary education, investing in the skills of tomorrow and creating new opportunities for young Canadians.
Since 2016, the federal government has supported an average of 638,000 post-secondary students per year with $38.4 billion in up-front grants and interest-free loans, making it possible for young Canadians to continue their education, regardless of their origins.
This is real progress, and budget 2024 promises even more. The budget proposes to extend for an additional year the increase in full-time Canada student grants from $3,000 to $4,200 a year and interest-free Canada student loans from $210 to $300 per week, an estimated total investment of $1.1 billion in 2024-25. With this change, Canada student grants will have doubled in size since 2014. These are powerful steps that would empower so many young Canadians.
Then there is investing in homegrown research talent.
Canada's post-doctoral students and researchers are addressing some of the biggest global challenges. The solutions that they are proposing have the potential to make the world a better place and enhance Canada's prosperity. They represent the academic and scientific excellence of tomorrow in Canada. They will create new innovative businesses, develop new ways of increasing productivity and create jobs as they grow their businesses, if they get the support they need.
To foster the next generation of research talent, budget 2024 proposes to provide $825 million over five years starting in 2024-25, with $199.8 million a year ongoing to increase the annual value of master's and doctoral student scholarships to $27,000 and $40,000 respectively, and post-doctoral fellowships to $70,000. This would address a real barrier.
There are jobs and skills training for gen Z. Gen Z is a diverse group, from those starting to think about their future career years now to those just starting their first full-time jobs. Budget 2024 commits to investing $351.2 million to create 90,000 youth job placements and employment support opportunities. These investments include $200.5 million to create well-paying summer job opportunities through the Canada summer jobs program and $150.7 million to provide job placements and employment supports through the youth employment and skills strategy.
The budget would empower young entrepreneurs.
Budget 2024 does even more to create a bright future for Canadian youth. To empower young entrepreneurs, budget 2024 commits to investing $60 million over five years in Futurpreneur Canada, a national non-profit organization that provides young entrepreneurs with access to financing, mentorship and other business supports to help them launch and grow their businesses.
Futurpreneur will match this federal investment with funding from other levels of government and private sector partners. This will have a significant impact. By 2029, Futurpreneur estimates that this investment will enable 6,250 additional youth-owned businesses to launch and scale up.
We are also launching a new mental health fund.
Budget 2024 also aims to improve the well-being of young Canadians to ensure that they have what they need for a happy, healthy start to their adult lives. Young Canadians face high levels of stress and mental health challenges, including depression and anxiety. Many of them are still in school or just starting their careers and are struggling with the costs of private mental health care.
To help younger Canadians access the mental health care they need, budget 2024 proposes $500 million over five years to create a new youth mental health fund.
The actions I have just described are only some of budget 2024's bold measures to help younger Canadians achieve their dreams. We are building an economy where every Canadian can reach their full potential, where every entrepreneur has the tools they need to grow their business and where hard work pays off.
With budget 2024, we will give young Canadians the opportunity to excel in an ever-changing economy. In everything we do, we strive to keep the promise of Canada within the reach of our younger generations because that is what they have earned and that is what they deserve. That is what parents and grandparents want for young people, too.
As the member of Parliament who has the good fortune of representing the University of British Columbia, I have been hearing about these challenges, but also the appreciation of the support that students have been receiving from our government over the past number of years.
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- Apr/29/24 4:44:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, since my colleague and I both serve on the Standing Committee on International Trade, I will ask a question related to those issues.
Budget 2024 says that it reaffirms the federal government's commitment to introduce legislation to eradicate forced labour from supply chains. However, it is not reaffirming this commitment. This is a new commitment. Budget 2023 said the same thing. It said that legislation would be introduced by 2024.
My colleague and I both voted in favour of a motion that I moved in committee to remind the government of its commitment to introduce such a bill by the end of the year. We moved that motion with a month to go, saying that time was running out, but nothing was done. Now, we are seeing a new commitment and a new target date. However, time is of the essence for many reasons.
We can, of course, look at this issue from a social justice perspective. Obviously, forced labour is a terrible thing. However, we can also look at it from a geopolitical perspective. The United States has a law with real teeth and it sees Canada as a leaky sieve. The United States has seized millions of dollars in goods. I recently got an answer to a question on the Order Paper. Canada has not seized anything.
When will legislation be introduced?
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- Apr/29/24 4:45:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for raising this subject.
I think the government has made its position quite clear. We will keep working together to make sure we can do better. We will keep doing that work not only in committee, but also here in the House, to advance the agenda the government set forth in budget 2024.
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- Apr/29/24 5:18:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to the urgent action in budget 2024 that would help Canada build the homes needed to restore fairness for every generation.
Last week, our government released Canada's ambitious plan to build homes by the millions, to support renters and to lower the costs of home ownership so that no hard-working Canadians have to spend more than 30% of their incomes on housing costs. With budget 2024 and with Canada's housing plan, we are going to do what is necessary to put money on the table to build more affordable housing, to create the market conditions necessary to get more homes built and to change the way cities build homes.
We will restore the promise of Canada for everyone, building more homes faster. We know that the higher interest rate environments have made it difficult to build homes. That is why we are proposing significant action in budget 2024 to boost housing supply and to remove barriers that often slow down construction of new homes. For example, we are reviving and modernizing Canada's post-war housing design catalogue, which will provide blueprints that can be used across the country to speed up construction of new homes.
Budget 2024 proposes to allocate more than $11 million in 2024-25 to support the development of this catalogue for up to 50 housing designs, including row housing and fourplexes that provinces, territories and municipalities could use to simplify and to accelerate housing approvals and builds. This first phase of the catalogue will be published by fall 2024.
Speaking of supporting municipalities, our $4 billion housing accelerator fund is already cutting red tape across the country with 179 agreements with municipalities, provinces and territories, including Surrey Centre, enabling the construction of over 750,000 new homes over the next decade. To continue this momentum, budget 2024 would top up this program with $400 million to build more homes faster from coast to coast to coast.
Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member of Parliament for Whitby.
To help developers get that capital, they need to build more rental homes. We are also topping up the apartment construction loan program, or ACLP, with $15 billion, starting next year. This proposed investment alone would build more than 30,000 additional homes across Canada, bringing the program's total contribution to over 131,000 new homes by 2031. This program has already been kick-started in Surrey Centre with thousands of homes already under construction.
We know that there is no single player who could fill Canada's housing shortage on his or her own. That is why we need to take a team Canada approach to getting this work done for Canadians, and that means all of us working together and using every tool in our tool kit to get more homes built. To that end, budget 2024 announces Canada builds, which would help to leverage the apartment construction loan program so that we could better partner with provinces and territories to build more rental housing across the country.
Truthfully, we could not do any of this without Canada's builders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, construction workers and similar tradespeople. They are incredible people who love their jobs and who are good at them, and to whom we should all be grateful because we could not build homes without them.
To help train and recruit the next generation of skilled workers, budget 2024 proposes to provide $90 million over two years for the apprenticeship service to help create placements with small and medium-sized enterprises for apprentices, and $10 million over two years is also being proposed for the skilled trades awareness and readiness program to encourage Canadians to explore and to prepare for careers in the skilled trades.
In addition, budget 2024 proposes to provide $50 million over two years for the foreign credential recognition program, at least half of which would be used to streamline foreign credential recognition in the construction sector to help skilled trades workers build more homes. We need to do everything we can to make it easier to build homes more quickly and more cost effectively, and the measures I just outlined do exactly that.
Young Canadians in my community of Surrey Centre, and across Canada, are struggling to find housing that fits their budgets. That is why the government launched the tax-free first home savings account and why, in budget 2024, we would take action to unlock additional pathways for young renters to become homeowners and to protect middle-class homeowners from rising mortgage payments.
To help first-time homebuyers keep pace with rising costs, budget 2024 announces our intention to amend the Income Tax Act to increase the home buyers' plan withdrawal limit from $35,000 to $60,000. The budget also proposes to temporarily extend the grace period, during which homebuyers are not required to repay their home buyers' plan withdrawals to their RRSP by an additional three years. This first measure would enable first-time homebuyers to save up to $25,000 for their down payment, faster. For a couple who withdraws the maximum in 2023, extending the grace period could allow them to defer annual payments as large as $4,600 by an additional three years.
Thanks to our new Canadian mortgage charter, more Canadians know about the fair, reasonable and timely mortgage relief they can seek and receive from their financial institutions. Budget 2024 would aim to enhance this charter by enabling first-time homebuyers purchasing new builds to get 30-year mortgage amortizations, among other enhancements. The government would bring forward regulatory amendments to implement this proposal.
Additionally, budget 2024 proposes to call on banks, fintechs and credit bureaus to prioritize tools that would allow renters to opt in to reporting their rent payment histories to credit bureaus so that they could strengthen their credit scores when applying for a mortgage.
We are also committed to protecting tenant rights and ensuring that renting a home is fair, open and transparent. For that reason, budget 2024 proposes action to protect the millions of Canadians who rent and who have been exceptionally impacted by recent drastic rent increases across the country.
This action would include the development of a new Canadian renters' bill of rights to be developed and implemented in partnership with provinces and territories, a new $15-million tenant protection fund and a new $1.5-billion Canada rental protection fund that would help housing providers keep rents at a stable level for a long time. That is how one makes the playing field fairer for renters.
Our government is also redoubling our efforts to build homes wherever and whenever possible in the face of Canada's housing crisis. We are accelerating and streamlining the process of converting surplus federal properties into housing, and we continue to work with Canada Lands Company to enable the construction of additional housing units.
In fact, budget 2024 proposes $5 million over three years, starting in 2024-25, to support an overhaul of Canada Lands Company to expand its activities to build more homes on public lands.
Budget 2024 also announces that the government would take steps to enable Canada Post to prioritize leasing or divestment of post office properties and lands with high potential for housing, where doing so maintains high service standards for Canadians.
Lastly, as part of our work to build more homes on public lands, budget 2024 proposes to explore the redevelopment of National Defence properties in Halifax, Toronto and Victoria that could be suitable for both military and civilian uses. We are currently working to divest 14 surplus defence properties that have potential for housing and that are not needed for National Defence operations.
Recognizing that we need better infrastructure to support an uptick in housing supply, our government has also revealed that the budget would feature a new $6-billion Canada housing infrastructure fund to help communities increase their housing supplies and to upgrade water, waste water, stormwater and solid waste infrastructure.
Because many Canadians rely on public transit to go to school, to get to work and to see their friends, budget 2024 also announces that any community seeking to access long-term predictable funding through the federal government's forthcoming permanent public transit funding would be required to take action that directly unlocks housing supply where it is needed most. Our focus as a government is on building more homes at a pace and a scale not seen in generations and on restoring fairness and affordability for every generation. We did it when soldiers returned home from the Second World War, and we can build homes like that again.
With this upcoming budget, we would make it easier for every Canadian, no matter who they are or where they come—
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- Apr/29/24 5:34:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have been a member of Parliament for almost nine years now, and the number one thing I try to do is listen to what my constituents want in terms of how we operate here in this House and the resources that we are able to provide to them to make sure they are able to thrive and succeed in everything they want to accomplish.
Over these past eight-plus years that I have been a member of Parliament, in all the budgets we have been able to deliver to Canadians to deal with what was a phenomenon across the whole world, the coronavirus and COVID-19, we were able to provide support to Canadians. Now that we are trying to recover from that time, I think budget 2024 really does make sure that we are looking out for every single generation that has been impacted over these past number of years, with all the challenges we have been faced with.
I talk to my constituents, and in fact, earlier this week, I was at my local high school for an announcement, where we talked about the national school food program. We learned how many kids are going to school hungry. I personally watched, as part of delivering the food program, how many kids put an apple in their pocket for later. I now understand and appreciate what food insecurity means. It is something that our government has really tried to tackle in this budget with the national school food program. It will have a significant impact in building our next generation of Canadians who are going to take the helm, fight climate change, make sure that the economy is where it needs to be and make sure that Canada is a successful nation, not just internally but internationally as well. This is a good program for us to invest in.
When I talk to seniors about the New Horizons program, for example, I see the local impact of our government providing supports to seniors who are going through isolation, health issues and so many other challenges internally, giving them support to enable them to thrive. That is what our government stands for.
When we talk about the disability benefit, it is about creating a foundation of what a disability benefit is going to look like over the next number of years for those who really need the help and support from our government that we can deliver. The question is, are we going to be able to deliver it? I challenge every single member in this House to say that it is our brand as Canadians and who we are to support one another. Whether it is about the disability benefit, or whether it is about ensuring that seniors have the support they need through the New Horizons program or the dental care program, are we providing support to Canadians when they need it the most? It is not about supporting people who have support already. It is about providing a foundation to those who need it the most, so they can give themselves a boost up and take care of themselves. That is literally what our Liberal government has been all about. It is about providing support to people who need it at the time they need it.
When we went through the COVID-19 pandemic, what did Canadians expect from us? As they were told by their provincial governments that they had to stay at home, that they could not interact with friends and family, that they could not go to work, it was our government, the federal Liberal government, that really put in the effort to make sure that we were delivering CERB to everyone, that people had the ability to put food on the table, that they were able to pay their rent through our rental subsidy program and that they were able to run their small businesses through our CEBA program. That is really what the role of a government is all about. It is about making sure that Canadians have the support they need.
When we talk about fighting climate change, it is all of Canada coming together and making sure that we are all pitching in a little bit, but through the carbon rebate program, Canadians are actually getting more into their pockets than they would without having to pay into this program.
When we are talking about building housing for every single person in my riding of Mississauga—Erin Mills, for people in the region of Peel and indeed across Canada, we are talking about ensuring that our millennials, our gen Z Canadians, or whatever name we want to call it, are able to have secure housing that they can afford. In my region, we have been able to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that Canadians have the ability to afford housing within our region.
When we talk about ensuring the safety of Canadians, we have put in investments to make sure that auto thefts are taken care of, and we are doing our level best to make sure that auto theft is curbed within our communities. We are also talking about gender-based violence to make sure that women and gendered communities within the communities that we all serve, that we all represent, are going to be safe and have the security to be able to live healthy and safe lives.
We are trying our level best to ensure that Canadians have the supports they need, and budget 2024 is a great reflection of that. It is reflective of the young people who are trying to buy homes, trying to look for jobs and trying to ensure that their careers are secure. It is a great support for those who are raising young families, to ensure that our young people are secure, as well as for our seniors, whether it is through the dental program or ensuring that GIS and old age security are there for everyone. We are really doing our level best, as the Liberal government, to ensure that everybody in our country has the best to be able to boost themselves up.
A lot of people say that it is not the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that every household is taken care of. However, I believe that it is the responsibility of our government to ensure that we give everybody the leg-up they need to be able to thrive and to live with respect, dignity and prosperity within our communities. That is how we build a better Canada, and budget 2024 is the way to do that.
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