- 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
- May/21/24 11:18:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad to see the member holding back what he really thinks in the House. Yes, like the member, I am very disappointed that we are actually standing in the House of Commons in May debating the fall economic statement. It is unbelievably outrageous, and maybe we will still be debating it next fall if the Conservatives decide to do that. Who knows?
My question for the member is actually quite serious. He talked about housing. One concern I had with the fall economic statement and that I share with all my colleagues within the NDP is about the lack of commitment to helping with indigenous, Métis and Inuit housing, especially in northern communities, especially in Nunavut.
My colleague from Nunavut has stood in the House many times and asked why the government has not committed meaningfully to territorial funding for housing when we know that the crisis is desperate in her community. Why did we not see more in the fall economic statement with regard to indigenous housing?
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Mr. Speaker, today is the day we were supposed to be talking about the Senate amendments to Bill C-35, and the Conservatives have brought forward a concurrence debate with respect to food security in the north, which of course is an extraordinarily important topic. The issue, though, is that the Conservatives are using this as a tactic to delay a very important debate with respect to child care. The way I know this is that the Conservatives have had 10 opposition days when they could have brought forward the issue of nutrition in the north, and they have never chosen to do that.
In fact, when Stephen Harper was our prime minister, I believe that Pam Palmater, one of the indigenous experts, said that the Conservative government had actually set back indigenous relations 100 years in the 10 years that it had been there.
Why is the Conservative Party of Canada so eager to stop women from coast to coast to coast from being able to access child care, something that we know we need for women, for families and, frankly, for our economy?
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moved for leave to introduce Bill C-338, National Indigenous Teachers Day Act.
She said: Mr. Speaker, today, during Indigenous History Month, it is my great privilege to table this very important piece of legislation, the national indigenous teachers day act, which would designate February 22 of each year as national indigenous teachers day.
I want to thank the member for Winnipeg Centre for seconding this bill, but perhaps more importantly, I want to thank and acknowledge Theodore Anton, a grade 11 student from Old Scona Academic high school in Edmonton Strathcona, for the idea to recognize and celebrate the vital contributions and perspectives in education that indigenous educators bring to our schools. Theodore is the winner of my Create Your Canada contest, and he is in Ottawa with his parents to help me present this bill.
I thank Theodore and all the amazing young people who submitted ideas to make Canada a better place for everyone. I urge my fellow parliamentarians to support this bill, as it would mark an important step on the path toward reconciliation.
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- Jun/5/23 11:53:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his intervention today and for providing us with information about what is happening in his region.
Today, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about people in Alberta, of course, my home province, and certainly about the indigenous groups in northern Alberta, such as Chief Adam and the group in Fort Chipewyan. We know that people in remote communities, indigenous communities, are much more at risk for wildfires due to their location. I wonder if the member could speak a bit to that.
I know my colleague brought up, earlier, the idea of FireSmart programming and ways we can prepare our communities for forest fires. I wonder if he could speak to that a little more.
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- Jun/5/23 8:21:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always so enlightening for me to listen to this member speak. He wanted to speak a bit more. He asked for unanimous consent and, of course, that was not possible. However, I wanted the member to talk a bit more. We know that this bill does not go far enough with regard to indigenous housing. It does not go far enough with regard to the support for the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls national action plan. It is a start, but it has not gone far enough.
The member spoke about the Harper years. I was in the non-profit sector at the time and I know how horrendous those years were for those of us in the charitable sector. Perhaps the member could talk about the impacts of the Stephen Harper years on indigenous people in this country.
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- May/12/23 11:28:22 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada's corporate watchdog is responsible for ensuring that Canadian companies act ethically abroad, yet in five years, with an annual budget of millions of dollars, no investigations have been done to protect indigenous people, the environment or human rights. This failure allows bad companies to act with impunity. This harms Canada's reputation, and it makes Canadian companies complicit in rape, murder and the destruction of indigenous communities.
I put forward legislation that would strengthen corporate responsibility. When will the Liberals do what they always do, and copy the NDP work to fix the core?
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- May/3/23 4:50:25 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, this is the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and I appreciate that there has been some work done on this bill to make it stronger and very much appreciate the work that my colleague from Victoria has done on this bill. However, as I have been sitting on the committee listening to the testimony on the Kearl mine spill in northern Alberta, I have been listening to horrific testimony from indigenous leaders on what this has meant in their communities.
I wonder if the member could tell me how on earth he can look those people in the eye and explain to them that tailings ponds would not be protected under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and that the water and land in their communities, where they fish, hunt and live with their families, are not worthy of being protected under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. How on earth can Liberal members stand and say that tailings ponds do not deserve any sort of environmental protection through this act?
It baffles the mind, and I certainly am not comfortable going back to those people and telling them that the government does not care about the environment they live and breath in.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like the member to think about just how far social programs could have gone in this country if an NDP government had been in place.
Of course, this government has been in place for seven and a half years and so one would think it would be able to put that in place. I would also like to raise the thought that when I have spoken with folks like Cindy Blackstock, they mentioned that the agreement was, in fact, fully insufficient in bringing forward child care for indigenous children across this country. Even then, the Liberals had a lot of work to do, and certainly they have had ample time to deal with it since then.
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- Dec/13/22 11:22:02 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, there have been some really incredible leaders in the House of Commons who have fought for human rights. I as a New Democrat often think of Paul Dewar and Hélène Laverdière and the work they did on human rights.
I have to be honest, though. I stand in this place knowing that many of the members of my caucus have fought for human rights. The member for Winnipeg Centre, for example, has been a tireless advocate for indigenous women and the rights of indigenous people in our country. While we do have a long history of fighting for human rights in this place, that history continues with some extremely strong voices that we have in this place right now. It is vitally important to depoliticize that and for us all to move in the same direction.
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- Nov/24/22 1:16:55 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-4
Mr. Speaker, my colleague's intervention this afternoon was very interesting. I was particularly struck by her personalized experience with youth incarceration, and she did speak about how we need to do much more to ensure indigenous people, BIPOC people and young people are not disproportionately represented within our judicial system. I am wondering what very specific steps she thinks would be next in line for the government to take.
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- Sep/29/22 11:51:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to start today by expressing my disappointment that what we are doing here today is talking about this motion, on the eve of the second annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, at a time when indigenous people in this country do not have clean water, do not have adequate housing and do not have their basic human rights met, and at a time in this country when indigenous people are finding the graves of their children. On the eve of that day, this is what the Conservative Party has brought forward.
I am shocked by this, but I want to start by telling a story. Something happened yesterday. Yesterday, I was talking to a Conservative member, and no, we were not on screen and it was not in public. She asked me why we got into the supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals. She asked me what was in it for us. That is how she put it. I sort of laughed and said that maybe she needed to sit with that for a minute and think about it. Then all last night, I thought about it. Does she really not get why we did that? Was that really not something she could comprehend?
What it comes down to for me is that we did it because we were trying to get help for Canadians. We did it because we were trying to get dental care, pharmacare, environmental care and support for workers. It was for Canadians. We did not do it to win. We did not do it to get points off the Liberals. We did not do it to increase our power. We did it for Canadians.
As we stand in the House and debate this motion, which I will get to, I want us all to remember that every member of the Conservative Party of Canada has access to a dental care program that is gold-plated. Every member has access to a dental care program for themselves and their children, and the Conservatives are voting against just the bare minimum for other Canadian families in the country. For me, that shows what we are dealing with; that shows who we are talking about.
As members of this place, we all have such privilege. We have such voice. We have such opportunity. We all have access to benefits and wages that regular Canadians do not have, and we have an obligation, when we stand in this place, to think of those people and make sure that all Canadians have access to those things, the same things we have and our families have.
With this motion, the Conservatives are trying to mislead Canadians. They are trying to turn “tax” into a four-letter word. I know and members know that “tax” is not a four-letter word. It is, in fact, a three-letter word, but we will get to that.
They are trying to convince Canadians that they are on their side with this motion, but we are not fooled. Canadians are not fooled. The Conservatives continue to side with big business and are throwing Canadians under the bus with this motion.
One thing I do like about the motion is that it gives us an opportunity to talk about taxation. We do not talk about taxation often enough in this place. However, this motion avoids the most important questions: Who is paying and what are they getting for that money?
Right now, the tax burden in Canada is on Canadian families. It is on the shoulders of working families. That is not fair. It means that even if they have two incomes, it is hard to make ends meet. It has resulted in an imbalance in our country. We have a housing crisis that is forcing more and more people onto the streets, rental costs are skyrocketing and young people have no hope of owning their own home.
This was not always the case. There was a time in this country when corporations and the wealthy were shouldering their fair share of the tax burden, and our economy was booming. Workers were able to support their families, and the government was able to provide services because it was raising revenue from sources other than working families. However, successive Conservative and Liberal governments changed that. They have lowered corporate tax rates. They have created tax loopholes. They flipped the tax system on its head.
The last time people and corporations paid the same amount in income tax was 1952. Since then, the corporate tax contribution to our society has gone down steadily. Today, Canadians are paying four dollars for every dollar corporations pay in tax, but not all Canadian are paying that.
While Conservatives and Liberals were cutting tax rates for corporations and handing out corporate subsidies and tax credits, they were also cutting taxes for the richest Canadians and relying instead on regressive forms of taxation like the GST. It is not a secret. Everyone in this House knows that. We all know this, yet here we are debating a simple-minded motion that is designed to trick Canadians into believing that Conservatives have Canadians' best interests in mind. It is a motion that relies on making tax a four-letter word without addressing the most fundamental questions: Who is paying the tax, how much are they paying and why?
Which people governments tax, whom they take money from, whom they take revenue from and what governments spend it on indicate the governments' priorities. Over the past four or five decades, from Liberal governments to Conservative governments to Liberal governments to Conservative governments, on and on, we have seen a distinct pattern and an unbroken history of shuffling the tax burden to working Canadians and cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations.
Over and over again, Conservative and Liberal governments have demonstrated who they are and who they care about, and it is not ordinary Canadians. It is not workers. It is not students. It is not seniors. It is not indigenous peoples. It is not people living with disabilities. It is not people who are houseless.
We do not need to look back 50 years to see what is happening in this country. Within three days of the global health pandemic being declared, $754 billion went out to support financial markets, the big banks and the largest corporations. It took the government weeks and then months to get the support to regular Canadians who were actually paying for that $754 billion to big banks. Conservatives are not interested in talking about that.
While I welcome the opportunity to talk about taxation today and while I am disappointed in the simple-mindedness of this motion, I also think we need to talk about how we could reform our tax system. New Democrats have proposed an entire range of reforms, all of which the Conservatives have voted against: a steady return to reasonable corporate tax rates, a pandemic profits tax to recover some of the hundreds of billions that Canadians provided to these corporations, a wealth tax, closing tax loopholes that allow the wealthy to escape Canadian taxes and going after tax cheats.
If we enacted these reforms, we could provide dental care for all Canadians. We could have pharmacare. Canadians would not have to worry any longer about whether they can afford their prescription medicines. We could pay for a housing strategy. We could invest in our future. We could build a better Canada. Tax is not a four-letter word. It just becomes that when politicians are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes.
Finally, I will finish by talking a bit about EI and CPP. Despite what the Conservatives may think, Canadians are not fooled by their conversation and nonsense about whether this is a tax. Canadians see what the Conservatives are doing. I am from Alberta. Albertans see what is happening. We see our provincial government attacking our CPP. It is something I hear about more often from my constituents than anything else. I know how Conservatives are working to destroy the safety net that workers rely on. Workers need their pensions. They need an EI system that works. This is not government money; this is workers' money.
Last week, the EI system reverted back to its broken prepandemic status. The changes that I and my fellow New Democrats fought for so that Canadian workers were not left out in the cold in the pandemic are gone. Instead of pretending that EI and CPP are a burden on working Canadians, I invite the Conservatives to join us to make sure that 100% of workers are able to get the support they need from EI and that 100% of workers can afford to retire with dignity with adequate pension benefits.
Now is not the time for this motion. This political nonsense is designed to get the new leader of the official opposition some airtime and some retweets. Canadians do not want this nonsense. Canadians want all parties in this place to work together to make their lives better.
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- Mar/31/22 11:06:01 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today, on National Indigenous Languages Day, I will call you Uqaqtittiji, which is the Inuit word for “Speaker”, as I understand.
I would like to thank my colleague for his intervention today. Yesterday, I had the honour of meeting with Dr. Nils Schmid, who is a member of the German Bundestag. We talked about the need for tax reform. We talked about how tax reform across the G7 needs to be undertaken because what we are seeing right now are massive loopholes where the wealthy can hide their wealth around the world and can avoid paying their fair share, in effect. The government has said that it will act on this but we have not seen the actions we need to see.
When will the government be taking the steps necessary to close those tax loopholes and seriously look at tax reform so that the middle class and low-income Canadians are not the ones bearing the burden of taxation?
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