- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Joint Interparliamentary Council
Whip of the New Democratic Party
Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- NDP
- Edmonton Strathcona
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $141,604.97
- Government Page
- Nov/8/23 3:01:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, every single Canadian deserves to have health care when they need it, public, universally accessible health care, but Conservative leader Danielle Smith just got caught trying to make health care more chaotic and more bureaucratic. She is not hiring more health care workers, not treating health care workers with respect and leaving the door wide open for more privatization. Does that sound familiar? This is right out of the Conservative playbook and on the Liberals' watch.
Why is the Liberal government sitting on its hands while Alberta has its health care privatized?
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- Feb/14/23 4:57:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the motion today talks a lot about expenses and what the government is spending money on. I know the member and I disagree quite a bit on what the government should be spending money on, but there is another side of that: revenue. The Liberal government has spent lots of money in Alberta to clean up oil and gas wells. The New Democrats asked for strings to be attached and they were not put in place. Now Premier Smith is giving $20 billion of Alberta money as a gift to her friends in the oil and gas industry.
I am wondering whether the member agrees with her decision and whether he thinks the federal government should put more strings on the provincial government to make sure that oil and gas well money is used to clean up oil and gas wells.
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- Feb/9/23 5:12:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, earlier, my colleague mentioned that he did not want to talk about Ontario politics, certainly not with the member from Manitoba. Perhaps he would like to talk with an Alberta politician about politics in Alberta.
He thought this particular debate was painful because we were not talking about things that were so important to his constituents, my constituents and Canadians across the country.
Would he agree that, if this debate is not what Canadians want to hear, Albertans are probably not terribly interested in debating Danielle Smith's sovereignty act, which, again, is an overreach of the provincial government?
Could he comment on the sovereignty act and whether or not he supports that?
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a great pleasure to stand in this place to represent the constituents of Edmonton Strathcona. It is my first time standing this session, so I want to wish everyone a late happy new and welcome them back to the House of Commons.
I am quite delighted that I get an opportunity to stand today to contribute to this debate. It is one of the most fundamental pieces of legislation that we could be looking at. Providing affordable, accessible, high-quality child care for families across this country is so very important. Many people here have talked about their own personal experiences. I am a mother. I have two children, Maclean and Keltie, and they are perfect, as all our children are. They are 15 and 17 now, so they no longer need child care. I will have even more to say when the debate is on post-secondary tuition.
I remember the challenges of trying to find child care, and trying to ensure the child care we had found was adequate. We were so lucky that we found spots for our children at Fulton Child Care Centre in Edmonton Strathcona. It has fabulous staff, and they worked incredibly hard to provide a learning environment for my children. We were very lucky. However, well before I was involved in politics, I recognized the challenges that faced families, and disproportionately faced women, as they looked for child care spaces.
There was one child care centre I had applied to for my children when they were young, and I got a phone message when one was eight years old to tell me that there was a space available. That is how long the waiting list had been for that child care centre. Of course, we need to make sure that child care is accessible. This is such an important piece of work for this Parliament to do.
We have to look back over the 52 years since the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women to see how long people have been fighting for child care in this country. We need to take time today to acknowledge those advocates who worked tirelessly to ensure that this became a reality. We have to look at the labour movement, the champions like those in the CLC, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the Alberta Federation of Labour. So many of our labour movements have been calling for child care for a very long time.
I also want to thank the leaders within the New Democratic Party because we, as New Democrats, have also been calling for child care for decades. Ed Broadbent was one of the very first members of Parliament to bring this forward. Jack Layton spoke extensively on the need for child care and how it would fundamentally change the lives of families, particularly women, across this country. More recently, the member for London—Fanshawe and Olivia Chow both brought forward legislation, in the 41st Parliament and the 40th Parliament respectively, to bring forward child care. This legislation is built on the extraordinary and hard work that has been done by advocates within the NDP and throughout the country.
This was a recommendation in the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. It should never have taken so long to make this law. It should not have taken a pandemic. It should not have taken the corporate sector to say that there would be no recovery from COVID without child care. We should have been able to hear why this was so important for gender equality much sooner than this.
I want to talk about the Alberta context as well. Some of the information is coming from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on child care costs. Before $10-a-day child care, in Edmonton the median monthly child care fee for preschool-aged children was $925, while the median monthly fee for infants was $1,050 a month and $950 for toddlers.
This is important to keep in mind, because in my riding of Edmonton Strathcona, parents were paying, on average, over $1,000 a month. Then the UCP in our province decided to cut what Rachel Notley had put in place, which was a program that had reduced child poverty in half: the $25 child care. That pilot program was cut.
In Alberta, we have a desperate need for child care. We have a desperate need for investment in child care. In fact, I will read a very important quote from Bradley Lafortune from Public Interest Alberta. He said, “This is a once-in-a-generation chance to make a massive difference in the lives of so many of Alberta's citizens. We need to work together to ensure that this agreement is a step towards a universal system of child care that truly works for everyone.”
I do not have quite enough time to tell members all of the ways that I think this would impact women and families across this country, but I will say that we will work within committee. Our party is very interested in improving the reporting and accountability, improving the working conditions for workers and making sure that there is a workforce strategy to make sure that we do have enough people who can take that spot.
There is a lot of work we can do, and I do not think this is legislation is perfect, but I am so happy that it has come forward. I am so happy that we are going to have a universal child care program in this country. It is vitally important, and it is very overdue.
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Mr. Speaker, this is difficult for me because I understand why the member from Quebec does not like everything about this bill. However, I am a member from Alberta, where we have a Conservative government. That is very important. I would like the member for Lac-Saint-Jean to understand why I want conditions imposed on the Government of Alberta, particularly when it comes to language.
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- Nov/23/22 2:20:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, defending and promoting French in Alberta are vital to my province and to my riding, Edmonton Strathcona. Sheila Risbud announced last month that she would be stepping down as president of the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta. I want to thank Sheila for her wonderful leadership skills and her many years of commitment. She will be greatly missed. However, thanks to several brilliant and exceptional women, the defence and promotion of French are in good hands.
I want to extend a big thank you to Sheila and to all these amazing women for their hard work.
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Madam Speaker, I agree with the member. What we all should be doing is working for jobs for workers, making sure that we have family-sustaining unionized jobs across the country.
I do not think the government has done enough for Alberta. I will say that the Conservative Alberta government has a $13-billion surplus, yet it has not invested in our community. It has not invested in workers. In fact, Alberta is one of only two provinces that has fewer businesses operating today than prepandemic.
Would the member agree that there is an opportunity for the federal government to do more to invest more in Alberta because, when we see governments like our provincial government not investing in Albertans and not investing in Alberta workers, what happens is the jobs leave, and we end up with massive surpluses that do not help Albertans and do not help Canadians?
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Madam Speaker, I want to take a moment today to wish all of my colleagues in the House of Commons a happy Thanksgiving. We have not been in this place since then, and I want to reach out to everyone and extend that greeting.
I want to note that I am certain that many of us, when we were in our constituencies last week, heard from our constituents that the price of food, the price of fuel and the cost of living in Canada is becoming untenable. It is becoming something that Canadians cannot handle. It is incumbent on all of us in this place to stand up and find ways to work together with other parties and other members to make life more affordable for Canadians. I am absolutely convinced that one of the ways we can do that is with dental care.
Our job here is to support those people who do not have the same things we have. It is to support people in Canada and around the world in meeting their human rights and needs. Therefore, it would be remiss of me, as an Albertan and an Alberta MP, to not take a moment here to deeply condemn the comments made by our very new Premier of Alberta.
I want to tell the House about people: people living in poverty; people who are houseless; people with disabilities; people living without drinking water; indigenous people in this country, particularly women and girls; the families and children who went to residential schools, and those children who lost their lives; BIPOC folks; LGBTQ2S+ and SOGI folks; members of the Jewish community; members of the Muslim community; and women in Iran, Afghanistan and Ukraine. These are the people the Conservative Premier of Alberta said were not as discriminated against as the unvaccinated in our province.
I want to add to that and say that we need to look at these lists of people who have suffered unbearably and not discount all of that to say that the people who have suffered the most are the people who chose not to take a free, safe, miraculous and scientifically proven vaccine. I spent much of last year in this place talking about how we needed to get vaccines to other places in the world that did not have access to them, but our premier, the Conservative Premier of Alberta, has discounted every other group that has suffered harm and suffered devastatingly during this pandemic. I would be remiss if I did not raise that in this place.
Today, we are talking about dental care, and this is another opportunity for me to point out that the Conservatives do not seem to have a clue at all. We are talking about dental care for children under 12 years of age. The Leader of the Opposition has had dental care for himself and his children for almost 20 years, and all members of the Conservative Party have a gold-plated dental package that allows them to take care of their teeth, their children's teeth and their spouse's teeth, yet they do not want that for every other person in Canada. My children will never not be able to get their teeth fixed because they have access to a dental program that allows them to get their teeth fixed. The idea that the Conservatives would not want that for every child in this country, the idea that the things they have and their children have are not things they would want children across this country to have, baffles me. I do not understand.
I walk around in my constituency, and I hope we all do as it is very important. Edmonton Strathcona is of course the most beautiful constituency in the country, but I hope we all walk around in our constituencies. I am hearing from folks across the board who are delighted with dental care. They are delighted this is finally happening. It was recommended in 1968, but it is finally happening because of the NDP.
Do the Conservatives not walk around in their ridings? Do they not talk to their constituents? Do they not understand what is there?
One of the other things I wanted to point out is that we are hearing in this place that this is not needed because there is a program already that helps low-income Canadians. In Alberta, one needs to make around $27,000 to be able to access some services. Basically, one needs to be living that close to the poverty line to be able to access just a few of those services.
If one does not believe children should have access to dental care and does not think it is important for the Canadian government to support that, is there an economic argument we can make? Can we explain to the Conservatives how much it costs when a child ends up in the emergency room because they cannot afford preventive dental care and how much more it costs later on when we do not do the basic dental care at the outset?
When Conservatives say not to worry because people have dental care, pharmacare and all of these things, it is not true. It is not true for the vast majority of Canadians, and they know that.
One other thing I wanted to bring up in my speech today is that I am so incredibly proud to be part of the New Democratic Party that has brought dental care forward to the House of Commons. My colleague before me from Timmins—James Bay mentioned just how incredible it is to be able to say we were able to push the Liberals, and I think he called them Teletubbies, and get them to do this work, and to hold our horses because there is more we can do. That is kind of what I want to talk about.
Dental care is great, but what else do we need? We need pharmacare. We need eye care. We need mental health supports in this country. As people struggle with COVID, the cost of living and all of these things, there is the desperate need—
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Madam Speaker, my colleague's intervention in the House today was very interesting, and I listened with attention.
The member comes from British Columbia, and of course, I am a member from Alberta. They are arguably two of the provinces that have dealt the most with the climate crisis in recent years, with fires and flooding in my province and flooding in his region just recently.
One of the things I have always wanted to do in this place is to ensure that we have a robust climate strategy, and as an Albertan, the best way we can do that is ensure that there is support for Albertan workers to transition to a green, future economy. I wonder if the member feels that what we saw in this budget implementation act meets that desperate need to support workers as our economies transform.
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Madam Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to stand today to share my thoughts on this very important piece of legislation. I would like to begin by thanking the member for Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle for bringing it forward. This legislation should have come forward much sooner. The fact that we have it now is a testament to the work the member has done and a testament to her appreciation for, and efforts on behalf of, women in Canada.
I would also like to take this opportunity to express my support for this piece of legislation. The New Democrats have always looked for ways to do more to support women, protect women and children from violence and intimate partner violence and support necessary reforms to the judicial system. The New Democrats will continue to advocate for more action and investment from the Liberal government to continue to eliminate gender-based violence. As the foreign affairs critic for the New Democratic Party, I will of course be pushing for additional funding, additional support and additional action to support women and girls outside of the country as well.
This bill is an important step forward. It is an important step that needed to be taken. It includes judicial reform and allows for better support for victims to protect them. I think all of us in this place need to think about how it must feel to live in coercive situations, to live in abusive situations and to live in that fear and trauma. It is very, very important that as parliamentarians and lawmakers we consider this in the work we do.
There can be no greater job for parliamentarians than to protect the lives of children and women in this country. I know that intimate partner violence is not solely done to women, but it is predominantly done to women. I think we can all agree that violence against women in this country is a crisis. It is a national crisis.
Prior to COVID-19, globally, one in three women experienced some sort of intimate partner violence. We know that intimate partner violence occurs in low-income households and that there is a higher incidence of it in indigenous homes. We know that COVID-19 has resulted in a surge in gender-based violence. During the first six months of 2021, 92 women and girls were killed in Canada. In recognition of this upsurge in violence, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women has recently undertaken a study on IPV.
I want to give members a little sense of the situation in Alberta as well. In Alberta, one in three Albertans will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and the overwhelming majority of these victims are female. In Calgary, the Calgary-based Sagesse Domestic Violence Prevention Society had to expand its services, with demand increasing by more than 100% between 2019 and 2021. In fact, as Andrea Silverstone, the CEO of Sagesse, said:
After every natural disaster that we’ve seen in Alberta, whether it was the flood or the fires, the rates of domestic violence went up and they never went down again.
The effects of COVID on domestic violence and the rise in the numbers is going to continue for two to five years or even longer because there are issues of employment and economic stress that is also a contributing factor that we know is still ongoing and probably going to get worse before it gets better.
The number of victims of domestic violence was up 13.5% from 2019 to 2020, according to information provided by the Edmonton Police Service, and that is in Canada, but the increase that was caused during COVID is echoed around the world. We know that the impacts of COVID will be felt disproportionately by women and girls around the world.
I brought up earlier today that I am very proud of the fact that our country is one of the first countries to have a feminist international assistance policy. I am very proud that I was able to contribute to the building of that policy before I was a member of this place. I am looking forward to the day when the government tables and brings forward the feminist foreign policy. I think it is important, when we look at supporting women and and girls around the world, that this is not a development issue but a diplomacy issue, a defence issue, and an issue where I cannot think of a single ministry within this government that does not need to have a feminist lens applied to it.
Some of the ways that we can do more to protect women and girls in Canada and around the world is to do things like have predictable and targeted funding made available to ensure that those resources are in place. A key thing we can do to protect women and girls in Canada is to look at those 231 calls for action from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report.
We have seen the commission bring forward this road map for us. We have seen the commission outline exactly what needs to be done, and we could be doing those things right now. It would be additional support that we could do. However, that is not what the bill talks about. It talks about putting pieces in place that will provide that additional level of security for women who are experiencing violence from their intimate partners.
I think that everyone in the House agrees that this is an excellent step to take. We are all looking forward to bringing this to committee, to having the bill go forward and made into law. We can see by the unanimous consent that we saw earlier today that it is important for all of us.
Some of the things we also need to consider as we look at the bill before us and future bills to improve supports for women and girls are things like low-barrier housing, low-barrier shelters, so that more women can have shelter, find relief and be safe with their children against intimate partner violence.
We can ensure that there are better supports for the training of judges. The bill is an excellent step for training of judges, but we have seen it around this country where judges do not understand intimate partner violence, they do not understand coercion and they do not know how to deal with that when it comes in front of them.
We have a case in southern Alberta right now, in Lethbridge. This is an example of where a mother has not seen her child for over a year. They have been separated. The father, who was awarded custody, has not followed the law that was outlined and has not provided shared custody to the mother. This is despite the fact that he has been charged with seven pending offences, including possession of a weapon, death threats, criminal harassment and stalking. This is a situation where the Queen's Bench justice does not seem to feel that this man is a risk, and I think this education for judges is vitally important.
I will conclude by once again thanking the member for bringing this piece of legislation forward. I was touched by her intervention earlier today, and I fully support what she has done to bring this forward. The NDP will be supporting this legislation. I also want to express my sympathy to all those for whom this bill did not come soon enough.
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- Mar/24/22 12:04:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for the question. We often see eye to eye as neighbours and members of Parliament for the wonderful city of Edmonton, but I have to say that my perception of where my constituents are on this is very different from what the member brought forward.
I am getting many emails from people who are deeply worried about those who cannot receive a vaccination, such as children. I am hearing from teachers who are absolutely terrified to be back in classrooms that have not dealt with the ventilation problems that we have had so far and that have not dealt with overcrowding. I am talking to health care workers who are exhausted. They are on their last straw, and hearing that the Government of Alberta does not care enough about them to maintain some of these restrictions that will keep them safe is heartbreaking. I am hearing about seniors who are worried about their own care.
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- Mar/24/22 11:53:12 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time today with the member for Vancouver Kingsway.
It is my great honour, as always, to stand in this place and address my colleagues, and I want to start by acknowledging something that I know we all know. We all know how difficult COVID-19 has been on us. We all know how hard it has been on children and we all know how hard it has been on parents and families. I am a mother myself, and to see my teenage children missing parts of their childhood and parts of their teenage years has been very hard. To be trapped in a house with a very active 14-year-old boy is not easy for any of us, and I sympathize with families across the country and around the world that have had to deal with that.
This pandemic has been very difficult on people's livelihoods and on businesses too. There are businesses in my riding that started right before the pandemic and could not access supports throughout this pandemic, and it has been heartbreaking to see that. We have seen the impacts on women, and not just women in Canada but women around the world, who have been set back decades by what has happened during this pandemic.
Of course, my heart breaks for the people who have lost their lives and for the families that have lost children, mothers, fathers, brothers or sisters. My heart breaks for them. In my province of Alberta, over 4,000 people died. That is 4,000 families. That is a massive impact in a province like Alberta.
When I think of all of these things and our best way forward and the best way we can work together to come out of COVID-19, what I keep thinking is that we cannot and we must not ever politicize something like a global health pandemic. We must listen to science. We must listen to medical professionals. I am not a doctor; that is not my role in this pandemic. My role will be to listen to doctors, to listen to scientists and to listen to experts. What I know is that experts are telling me that COVID-19 is not over.
I do want COVID-19 to be over. That is fine. However, that is not how global health pandemics work. It is not over. We have numbers spiking around the world. We have numbers spiking in places as far away as South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The numbers are climbing; the variants are developing.
I am going to talk today a bit about the need to have a global response. I do not think anyone in this place will be surprised that vaccine equity is one thing that is vitally important to me and a tool we need to use. I also want to talk a bit about what results when we politicize this pandemic, and I am going to use my province as the example for that.
Members all heard the Premier of Alberta tell us that last summer was going to be the best summer ever. My premier went so far as to print hats that said, “Best summer ever”. Do members know what it became instead? It was a cautionary tale for provinces and countries around the world. We know what happens when COVID-19 is politicized. All we have to do is look at Alberta.
Albertans have been hit hard by COVID-19, and when the premier's poll numbers were hit just as hard by his terrible decisions, he decided to do the wrong thing. He decided to politicize COVID-19. He put politics, or in this case his own political survival, ahead of the interests of Albertans. He said, “influenza...does not generally threaten life apart from the elderly and the immunocompromised”. He said it is a flu. He mimicked Donald Trump's lines and even pushed ineffective and potentially dangerous treatments.
During the third wave of COVID-19, Alberta had one of the highest infection rates in Canada. It had one of the highest infection rates in the world. This is what happens when we politicize this.
I also want to talk about an idea. I think all of us in here could recognize, at least intellectually, that if we want a global health pandemic to be over, we need to have a global response. We need to make sure vaccines are available for everyone. We cannot have a motion that asks us to ignore science and thinks that is a reasonable response to the global health pandemic.
What I would have liked to see is the Conservative Party bring forward a motion that said something like, let us update our Canadian access to medicines regime to include COVID-19 medications. Let us work together to make sure that Canada is playing an active role in waiving intellectual property rights so that countries around the world can produce their own vaccines for their own populations, and let us work with countries around the world to help with vaccine hesitancy, to make sure that when vaccines are delivered, there are supply chains, there are syringes and there are all those things that need to happen so that people can actually get vaccinated.
I would have loved, and would have been so supportive of, a Conservative motion that called for the Canadian government to finally live up to its obligations to deliver the promised doses to COVAX. COVAX is a system that was supposed to ensure that the world was vaccinated. However, that system does not work when countries such as Canada have bilateral agreements and take all of the vaccine stock, and leave countries that desperately need doses to vaccinate their health care workers and their vulnerable populations with none.
This is the opposite of a good global health response. This is the opposite of what we need to do. I have to say that I look at our response to COVID-19, and I think to myself: We face a global challenge with Ukraine. We face a fundamental global challenge with climate change, and our global responses have not lived up to that task. I worry that these are showing us what a global response will look like in the future for other challenges.
I am not a virologist. I am not an epidemiologist. I am not a physician. I am pretty sure there are few of us in this chamber who are. This motion that has been brought forward is asking us to be all of those things. It turns what should be a scientific decision into a political decision, and that is wrong. It is not up to us to make scientific decisions. It must never be our role to make scientific decisions. Our job is to develop policy and legislation that is in the best interests of Canadians.
In my province of Alberta, we have lost more than 4,000 people, and we are going to lose more. Yesterday we had 500 more cases reported, and variants continue to threaten us. Until we are able to vaccinate the world, and until Canada does its part to vaccinate the world, including by signing the TRIPS waiver, the virus is going to continue to evolve, and variants are going to continue to plague the world, including our country of Canada.
This motion asks us to give up the hope that we will get through this pandemic. This motion asks us to give up our fight against this virus. It asks us to surrender. It asks us to ignore public health and science. It asks us to pretend to know better than scientists. Canadians are better than this. We care about science. We are not about to surrender at the end. We are going to continue to care for one another.
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- Feb/20/22 11:08:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a very odd day in the House of Commons when the Conservatives are choosing to negatively attack the premier of Ontario and the Liberals are standing for him. It is a unique moment in time for us today.
My question has to do with Conservative premiers in this country. On February 4, the premier of my province, Premier Kenney, asked the federal government for help: There was a need to stop the blockades in Coutts. The provincial government was unable to manage the blockade there. On February 18, Premier Kenney decided he was going to sue the federal government.
I would like some information. How does the member feel about this sort of flip-flopping between requiring help and then wanting to take to court the same people he asked for help?
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- Feb/20/22 9:21:13 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a deep honour to stand in this place and represent the people of Edmonton Strathcona.
Today we gather to debate the enactment and bringing forward of the Emergencies Act. It is the enactment of legislation that has never been used before. I deeply feel the gravity and the responsibility of the work that we are doing in this place. I recognize the serious situation that we as parliamentarians, indeed we as Canadians, find ourselves at this pivotal time. I hope that every member in this place has spent time over the past several weeks thinking about our role as leaders in this country and the responsibility we have to make difficult decisions for the benefit of our constituents and for the benefit of Canada.
Before I share my thoughts on the implementation of the Emergencies Act, I want to take a moment, if I can, to acknowledge the staff and the security working on the Hill today. I want to thank all of those who have had to walk across a blockade to get to work. I want to thank all of those who are not spending the Family Day long weekend with their families because they are helping us in the House today, as well as the pages, as my colleague reminded me.
I want to thank the law enforcement officers as well. I walked home from this place last night in the dark, protected by the police officers who held the line so that I could get to my apartment in Centretown, the police who have put themselves at risk today and for the last several days to make the city safe again for the people in Ottawa. I want to thank them.
Finally, I want to thank the journalists, who, in frigid temperatures for days on end, have brought information to Canadians. They have been sworn at. They have been spat at. They have been assaulted. They have been threatened. They have stood on the streets of Ottawa to tell this story every day. That is a cornerstone of our democracy and every Canadian should be thankful that we have members of an independent media that will tell the story and share the information that needs to be shared with Canadians.
Where we find ourselves as a nation is heartbreaking. What we have collectively witnessed over the past three weeks makes it crystal clear just how crucial it is that we do what we can to restore order in our country and to clear our borders of blockades and the illegal siege of Ottawa and the threats and intimidation directed at those who live and work here.
More importantly, as parliamentarians we need to make sure that this cannot happen again. I want to be very clear. I am not happy with where we find ourselves. I am angry that our country has come to this. The deep failures of our municipal and provincial governments and, yes, the failures of our federal government, have put us in a position where we are required to use extraordinary actions to go forward. Today and every day, I use my voice and I use my role in this place, in this chamber, to fix the issues that have led to the use of the Emergencies Act. I will use my role so that it never has to be used again.
We need to take a close look at policing in this country. We have seen obvious, systemic racism across the police force on an almost daily basis. There are far too many examples of unnecessary and excessive uses of force directed at Black, indigenous and racialized individuals and against the unhoused and others who are living in poverty. We have seen vicious attacks on these individuals' bodies and belongings, yet we know that the RCMP can exhibit incredible care and restraint. We have seen it. We saw it demonstrated in Ottawa, in Windsor, in Emerson and in Coutts. We saw incredible restraint and a refusal to act from our police forces play out, not over minutes and hours but over days and weeks.
As I stand in this place, I want us all to try to imagine how it must feel to be an indigenous land defender and watch white blockade members in Coutts, Alberta hug the RCMP. I want us to think about how it must feel for an unhoused person in Toronto who has been brutalized by police to watch the Ottawa police employ unbelievable gentleness with the illegal occupation in Ottawa.
In Alberta, we have a law that I deeply dislike. It was the very first law that was put in place under Premier Kenney: Bill 1, his first legislation. It was so that blockades could not stop our major infrastructure. It was to protect our major infrastructure from being clogged up. However, that law has not been enacted. If we ever needed something that proved to us that Bill 1 was never intended to be used against white people, that it was never intended to be used against the premier's friends, this is proof. That legislation was put in place to hurt indigenous people. It was put in place to stop environmentalists. It was never intended to be used against Jason Kenney's friends, who have shown who they are, who have shown that they are white supremacists, who have shown that they have attempted murder. This is an armed insurrection on the border in our country, and the legislation was not used.
We also need to fully examine and strengthen our federal hate crime legislation to make sure that it can address the white supremacist and neo-Nazi extremism that is threatening our society.
I was happy to second the bill put forward by my dear friend, the member for New Westminster—Burnaby, to ban symbols of hate, symbols like swastikas and Confederate flags, symbols we have seen in our nation's capital during the illegal occupation. However, we cannot only ban the symbols of hate; we must counter the radicalization of Canadians that is happening online and over our public airwaves, like the trash radio that radicalized the man who killed six worshippers at the Quebec City mosque, like the online hate that radicalized one of the men arrested in Coutts, Alberta, who was accused of participating in a plot to murder an RCMP officer. According to his father, this man was radicalized online by a far-right extremist group known as Diagolon, a group that seeks to overthrow our government through violence.
The Liberal government has promised to table legislation to stop online hate, and it has failed, as of yet, to act on that. In fact, we see misinformation on our radio waves; we see Russian misinformation happening with CRTC licensing. This is something we can and need to fix now. We have to review and update our money laundering laws to combat the funding mechanisms that fund hate groups and that hate groups use to bankroll their activities. We need ongoing measures to prevent the funding of hate groups, not Emergencies Act legislation. We need ongoing support for that.
As my friend, the member for Hamilton Centre, said yesterday, none of this is new. None of this is things that we have not heard before. We have known that these are things that have to be fixed, and we have not done it. We find ourselves in an emergency situation because those steps have not been taken.
COVID has been incredibly hard for all of us. We have all had to deal with the lockdowns, the restrictions, the protections put in place for years. It has been a challenge.
I am a mother. I have watched my children be challenged and I have seen the things they have missed. I am a daughter, and I have elderly parents whom I worry about every day. I have seen people in our community lose loved ones, and I have seen them lose livelihoods. I have seen the impacts of the opioid addiction crisis, the unsafe drug supply crisis in my province.
However, we do not end pandemics with illegal blockades. We do not end pandemics with sieges and occupations. Viruses do not care if we are done with them; they are not done with us. That is not how it works. The only way to end a pandemic is through public health measures that are based on science. If we allow bullies to intimidate us out of protecting public health, as we have seen in Alberta, we are surrendering to injustice. We are allowing those with the strongest voices, the largest vehicles, the loudest horns to rule. We are capitulating to mob rule, and we are sacrificing our democracy and our own values.
The speaker before me made it sound like this is not what is happening in Alberta. However, we are seeing the worst of it in Alberta. Thirteen armed men are directing our public health policy in Alberta. Think about that for a moment.
Today, we are debating the Emergencies Act to deal with illegal activities that the province and the police forces have not had the will to address, but the government must also address the underlying cause of the alienation that many people feel in our country.
Over the past two decades, we have seen the wealth and well-being of ordinary Canadians decline, while wealth and power have accumulated to the top 1% in our country, the billionaire class. Costs continue to rise. Electricity and heating costs, grocery costs and housing costs are all rising, while incomes are staying stagnant. The urge to lower taxes that has obsessed our governments over the past 20 years may, on the surface, look like a solution, but upon closer examination, it actually contributed to the problems we are facing. Taxes for the wealthy corporations have been slashed dramatically, while the tax burden has shifted to low- and middle-income Canadians. It is not fair, and it is not working.
We have a housing crisis in this country. We have an opioid poisoning crisis in this country. One in 10 Canadians lives in poverty, and more than half of those are seniors. We have more Canadians working more hours with less job security than we have seen since the 1970s. This is not a sustainable plan. This is not a sustainable way for our country to go forward. When a crisis comes along, when a global pandemic threatens the life and livelihood of nearly every Canadian, we should not be surprised that some Canadians start to feel alienated and left out. We should not be surprised that they turn to false prophets and misinformation and turn on those who govern.
In the just over two years that I have been sitting as a member in the House, it is true that we have worked together through this pandemic, but we have not worked together to address the underlying issues, the root causes of the alienation and dissatisfaction that so many Canadians feel now and the sense of hopelessness that pervades.
We do not know when this pandemic will end. No one in this House knows when this pandemic will end. We do not know how many times the virus will mutate. We do not know how many variants still await us or how many waves we may face. Yet, the government has been so anxious to cancel COVID support programs and so hesitant to address the underlying economic and social problems that the pandemic has laid bare and that have led to the sense of hopelessness so many Canadians feel.
We have so much work to do here, together, to create a better, fairer and more just Canada.
We know why we are here today. Ottawa has been under siege. Our borders have been blockaded. Our democracy has been threatened. We have witnessed some of the greatest failures of leadership our country has ever seen. Where was the coordination between the federal government, the province and the City of Ottawa? Why did it take so long for the Prime Minister to act?
So-called leaders, like Doug Ford and Jason Kenney, have completely failed their provinces. They have failed to act, they have failed to lead and they have failed to protect their citizens. They have failed to protect jobs and the economy. They have failed to protect health care workers. They have failed to even address the racism and violence that undermine our democracy.
A government member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in my province joined the illegal blockade at Coutts. Another Conservative MLA in Alberta actually urged police officers not to follow the orders of their superiors. They have encouraged lawlessness. They have taken selfies with extremist leaders.
Imagine what it feels like to be a racialized Canadian and to see the Conservative member of Parliament for Cypress Hills—Grasslands posing with Pat King, proclaiming his support for Pat King, the notorious leader of the convoy, the famous racist, the anti-Semitic and Islamophobic person who told us this thing would not end until bullets start flying.
Imagine what it feels like for people who live and work in Ottawa to not be able to go to their job, not be able to make an income, and to see the MP for Carleton handing out coffee and donuts to those who torment them.
Canadians have had enough of Conservatives playing footsie with radical extremists, with racists like Pat King and violent hate organizations like Diagolon. Canadians are fed up with the mob mentality of the Conservatives, and I would ask the Conservatives to apologize in this House.
I accept the profound responsibility that the Emergencies Act entails. I will do everything I can, alongside my colleagues in this House, to ensure that the government does not abuse the powers granted to it by this act. We and other parties in the House have the power to stop the emergency declaration should that become necessary. We will not hesitate to use that power if the government exceeds the authority necessary to deal with this emergency.
My Canada is filled with kind, caring, intelligent people who care for their community. My Canada has frontline workers, doctors, nurses and health care workers who have literally risked their lives for years to protect us. My Canada has teachers who have worked every day despite all the challenges COVID-19 has thrown at them.
However, it is also very important that we acknowledge and recognize that my Canada also has racists. It also has anti-Semites. It has violent, hateful people, and until we acknowledge that part of our Canada, we will not be able to move forward.
We have work to do in this country, and that task belongs to all of us. We need to work together, even when we disagree, to heal this country. I honestly believe that every member in this place wants a stronger, more resilient Canada.
Despite our differences and the disagreements we have on how to move forward, we must, as Canadians, work together. It is the only way to protect our democracy. It is the only way to protect our freedom.
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- Feb/10/22 11:37:12 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to address my colleagues in the House of Commons today to talk about the opposition motion. I will be splitting my time with the very articulate and intelligent member for Vancouver Kingsway.
I want to start off by saying what I know we all are aware of: The actual enemy, the enemy we are all trying to fight, is COVID-19. It is not each other; it is not convoys or individuals. It is a disease. It is a global health pandemic. We know that this global health pandemic has been incredibly hard for so many people. In this place, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that people have lots their loved ones. Almost 35,000 Canadians have died, and that is 35,000 families, parents, children, brothers, sisters and friends.
Over three million Canadians have become sick, and we still do not know what the implications of that will be for the future. We are hearing some specialists say that one in four Canadians will have long-term impacts from COVID-19. Three million Canadians have been sick. That is just to date and those are just the ones we know about. It is important to remember some of these things in this place.
People's livelihoods have been deeply impacted too. In my riding of Edmonton Strathcona, a number of entrepreneurs have tried to start businesses and they have not been able to get the support they need. There are the workers and people in the artistic community. Edmonton Strathcona is the heart of the artistic community. It is where the Fringe Festival is and where the Edmonton Folk Music Festival is. All of these artists have not been able to earn an income and have not been able to do what they do for a living.
As terrible as that has been, we also need to consider what has happened to our teachers, who we are asking to go online and off-line, and consider the difficulties they have had to deal with if they have families at home they are trying to protect while also trying to protect our children. We have put an immense pressure on health care workers and other essential workers. We have an overwhelmed health care system. We have the opioid crisis and our mental health challenges. All of these things are terrible and we really do need to look at them, but we cannot lose sight of the real enemy here and the real enemy is COVID.
I understand the restrictions have been hard, but I honestly believe they have been necessary. A personal hero of mine is a doctor in Alberta named Dr. Vipond. He keeps saying that we are using the wrong word. These are not in fact restrictions; they are protections. Maybe that is how we need to look at this. Maybe that is a way we can look at this going forward, that these are protections.
We do not know how successful these protections have been. We do not know how many more people might have died if these protections had not been in place. We do not know how many more variants we would have had or how much longer we would be in COVID-19 if these protections had not been there. We know masks, smaller social gatherings, vaccinations and PPE help. All of these things make it easier for our health care systems to continue on and make it easier for us to keep our loved ones and ourselves safe.
As many members know, Alberta will be lifting all of the protections. Some of my Conservative colleagues enthusiastically cheered this earlier today. However, before people get out their “best summer ever” hats or “best spring ever” hats, I want to remind members in the House that since the best summer ever, thousands of Albertans have died. That is thousands of Albertan families that have been devastated.
Why is Alberta lifting restrictions? Alberta is lifting restrictions because a handful of angry men have blocked our border and the premier cares more about what those “truckers” think, and I use quotes very deliberately, than about the health and wellness of the people of Alberta. We have a premier who is more concerned about his polling numbers than he is about enforcing the actual laws that he put in place. Bill 1 was the first law Premier Kenney put in place. He is not interested in using it because that law was never intended to be used against people who vote for Premier Kenney. That law was intended to be used against indigenous people. That law was intended to be used against people protecting our climate.
COVID-19 does not have to be a death sentence, yet a person in Alberta is now more likely to die of COVID than heart disease, lung disease or any other single cause except old age. Why is that? In a word, it is because of politics. It is because we have a premier in Alberta who cares more about his poll numbers than about the health and well-being of Albertans.
Public health should not be subject to the whims of politicians. Public health must be guided by science and the science on COVID is very clear. Vaccines work. Masks work. Restrictions on indoor gatherings work. We should be using every tool we have to prevent the loss of life and the long-term impacts of COVID. Knowing that long COVID is with us, knowing that the impact will be with us for a long time, our health care system is going to be spending resources on COVID long after this virus is gone.
There are other solutions we can look at. I have stood up in the House many times and talked about vaccine equity. I have talked about how important it is for Canada to play a role. We all know there is no way we are going to get out of this pandemic in Canada while we fail to ensure that people around the world are able to get the vaccines and the protections they need. We know that, yet we have a government right now that refuses to donate the doses that are required.
The Liberals are proud of the fact that they have not even met the 50% mark of their promises almost three years in. They have continually failed to work with the WTO to have the TRIPS waiver signed so that countries around the world can access the recipes to make those vaccinations. It is so important to think about the fact that they do this to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies. These pharmaceutical companies are making tens of thousands of dollars a minute, and they developed these vaccines with public dollars.
I saw a quote yesterday on Twitter where someone made the point that having pharmaceutical companies be in charge of a vaccine rollout is the equivalent of letting oil and gas companies be in charge of climate change. Think about that for a minute. We are giving the ability to make vaccines that save people's lives to pharmaceutical companies whose entire reason for being is a profit margin.
We need the government to act more on this. We need it to change the CAMR, Canada's access to medicines regime. We need it to sign on to the TRIPS waiver. We need it to do more on COVAX, to actually care about those vaccines and care about getting them out the door. We need to support people around the world to have syringes, to have cold supply chains and to have PPE. It is not the same thing to try to vaccinate someone in a rural community in Uganda as it is to try to vaccinate someone in downtown Toronto. We need to support countries as they go through that.
In addition to what we can do around the world and the role we have to play there, we need to do more here. Our health care system in Canada has been decimated year after year. We should be having federal transfers that are 50% of the cost of health care. We do not have that anymore. That is not possible anymore.
I look at what the Conservatives are doing with this motion. They seem positively gleeful about removing all health restrictions, all the things that will ensure our ICUs can continue and all the protections for our doctors and essential workers. I try not to be cynical in this place and sometimes that is very difficult, but I do wonder: Are the Conservatives trying to destroy our health care system? Do they want to see our health care system crumble so that they can bring in the two-tiered American-style health care we have seen Jason Kenney and the UCP try to bring to Alberta?
We need to use science-based decision-making. We need to listen to experts. We need to see this pandemic as a global pandemic that requires a global solution. It is time to stop making this political. It is time to stop the empty words. It is far past time for us as parliamentarians to do the right thing for Canadians, for ourselves, for our children and for our parents.
It is way past time for us to do the right thing for people around the world.
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- Dec/7/21 2:16:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are seeing the impacts of climate change in Canada, from the recent floods and mudslides in British Columbia to the storms that have threatened Atlantic Canada and the wildfires, floods and droughts that have wrought havoc in Alberta.
However, Albertans are actually facing two crises. One is the climate crisis and the other is the economic crisis. Albertans are caught between the need to reduce emissions and our reliance on the oil and gas sector. A total of 140,000 Albertans work directly in the sector, and hundreds of thousands more jobs rely on it. If we do not support workers in Alberta, Canada will not be able to meet its climate obligations.
After decades of Alberta's contributing to building Canada's economy, it is time for federal leadership to help Alberta secure a lower-carbon future. We need targeted investment to reduce emissions within the sector and targeted investments to create jobs outside the sector. Alberta has the knowledge base, and we just need the federal government to invest in Albertans. This cannot wait. The government must invest in a federal jobs plan now.
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- Dec/2/21 12:47:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague will not be surprised by the question I am going to ask him today.
I agree with him that there needed to be much more focus on agriculture within the throne speech, and I was very disappointed we did not see that, but I have spoken to people in his riding who are very concerned about the attacks on water in the very drought-prone area that would be the result of coal mining in that area.
I just wonder if the member would be willing to work with me to push back against the attacks on our water, our wild spaces and our endangered species by coal mining in his riding.
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