- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- Mar/22/24 10:37:29 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was not clear because I did not identify the member who accused my colleague of being “a terrorist”, and I think that is a very low comment. He is the member for St. Albert—Edmonton. I just want to make sure that—
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Madam Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise in the House and speak for the people of Timmins—James Bay. It is very powerful that we are having this discussion today on trying to move forward with dental care legislation and protection for Canadians who are low-income renters, in the midst of constant obstruction from both the Conservatives and the Bloc.
I will be sharing my time today with the member for Edmonton Strathcona.
Today, as we are discussing dental care, let us put it in context for people back home. We will be voting this afternoon on the New Democrat motion to take on “greedflation”, to actually shine a spotlight onto the massive level of profits that are being made as ordinary working-class Canadians and senior citizens cannot pay their grocery bills.
This morning, Galen Weston suddenly had his moment on the road to Damascus and announced that although he was not completely willing to stop the price gouging, he was going to put a price freeze on all of his No Frills products. Nice, Galen. It is nice to know that when the New Democrats start putting pressure on, the big grocery giants are starting to jump.
We are not done with it. We see that inflation has been hitting in two key areas. One is obviously at the grocery stores, and the other is at the pump. Those are the two sectors that have had unprecedented levels of profits over the last year. It is inexcusable for giants like Galen Weston and big oil to claim that they are just responding to the crisis that has been caused by the Ukrainian war and inflation, when what we are actually seeing is “greedflation”. Whenever the price at the pump has been dropping, we have been seeing that inflationary pressures have dropped.
Internationally, we see efforts in the EU, California and the United Nations, pushing for a windfall tax, to say that this upper level of profit, this unprecedented level of profit, is coming out of the pocketbooks of people who cannot afford to pay it and should be paid back. That is something that is happening at the international level. We have not seen the government go anywhere near that, but it would be interesting today to see whether the Conservatives and the Liberals will stand with us and actually take on “greedflation”.
I mention that because it is really important to frame how the New Democrats have come into this Parliament and how we have been proceeding.
When the Prime Minister called that completely unnecessary election last summer, in the summer of 2021, we went door to door and we listened to people, and we met family after family whose concerns were that their children could not get dental care. We met seniors who could not afford to get proper work done on their teeth.
We made a promise that if the Canadian people set up the cards in Parliament such that we had a minority Parliament, we would come back in and fight for a national dental care program. We ran on that, and we are delivering on that. We are very focused on that. I think it is very telling, because what obviously has my Conservative friends' backs up about this is that we are actually delivering.
We said that we were going to push for a doubling of the GST tax credit, because we need to get some money back into the pockets of citizens. We saw the Conservatives light their hair on fire, and then they flip-flopped, because how would they go home to their constituents and not say that they believed they should be entitled to having money come back?
What they have been doing is that they have a very different strategy from us. We are very focused on what we are doing. We announce what we are doing. We work on it. It is like siege warfare, I have to say, with the Liberals, dragging them kicking and screaming sometimes to do the right thing, but one can do that in a minority Parliament if one is focused.
We said we would get the dental care provisions in place, that we would double the GST tax credit and that we would get support for low-income renters, because they are unable to pay the bills at this increasing time of insecurity.
The Conservatives, for their part, God love them, love to jump down rabbit holes of conspiracy, to get people arguing about things that are completely inconsequential.
Obviously, we could not have this conversation without the new shadow critic for infrastructure. At a time when the issue of infrastructure and housing is the number one issue in the land, she is demanding an investigation into Pfizer, because she saw some crazy right-wing politician on YouTube making allegations. That is what the Conservative leader's new infrastructure critic is saying.
I remember when she was going on about the so-called Nuremberg Code and it took the very wise member for Parry Sound—Muskoka, whom I have a lot of respect for, to have to publicly say, “Being offered a vaccine that prevents serious illness and our governments' responses to COVID-19 are not the same as being tortured in a Nazi concentration camp.” He had to say that against a member of his own party.
I mention that because the politics of disinformation are about getting people upset so that they are not focused on what matters, and what matters right now are concrete solutions to addressing the growing financial gaps and insecurities.
If we want to talk disinformation, the front face of the Conservative movement in Canada right now is Danielle Smith. I mean, oh my God, where to begin? We find out now that she has been promoting pro-Russian, pro-Putin separatist propaganda. This is not acceptable when we see the horrific death rates, torture, killing and rape that are happening in Ukraine. However, she says that those who do not want to wear a mask are the most discriminated against people in the history of Canada. We need to see all leaders in this country standing up against Putin, because the economic devastation that is happening around the world is impacting us here. It is also from a basic human rights point of view that we need to stay focused.
Again, I mention this because this is the politics of disinformation that the Conservatives are opting for to cover the fact that they are not delivering real results for people. When we came in and said we were going to double the GST tax credit, the Conservative leader said that if we gave money to working-class people or senior citizens to help pay their bills, the money would be somehow “vaporized”. That was the term he used.
“Vaporized” is a magical Conservative economic term, kind of like cryptocurrency, and if we are talking about what got vaporized, how about the $1 trillion in crypto savings that disappeared after the Conservative Party leader told people to invest their savings in cryptocurrency? That is vaporization. What New Democrats are doing is delivering.
Today, we are hearing a million reasons Conservatives are telling ordinary Canadians they should not have dental care, and that it is not necessary. However, the bill before us today will affect 500,000 children who do not have access to dental care, and that is an enormous number of children who deserve it. We see that 50% of low-income Canadians have no dental care services, and only one-third of Quebeckers have private dental care insurance.
For anyone who has a child who needs their teeth fixed, it is an incredible pressure, and I know from talking to families about how they try to find ways to get dental care. However, this year, Bill C-31 will give two payments to low-income families with children under 12. This is not the full solution, but it is the interim step that is necessary in order to get this program in place. This was in our supply agreement with the Liberals.
Now, it must be said that just because we have a supply agreement with the Liberals does not mean that we get along with the Liberals. This is about pushing these guys, because I have to say that pushing Liberals to actually do something is like wrestling with the Teletubbies. Just trying to even get something to grip on with a Liberal is difficult at the best of times, but in this minority Parliament, we found where it was needed and we knew it was on dental care. This year, we pushed them. We actually pushed these Teletubbies and we are going to get that money to low-income families, but that is only the beginning. We need this national program because senior citizens have a right to it and ordinary working-class people have a right to it. We need to move on this.
Therefore, while my colleagues on the other side are going to jump down the rabbit holes of conspiracy and YouTube nut jobbery, we will stay focused on getting kids their dental care, on getting money to the working class and seniors, and on taking on the grocery giants and greedflation.
I will be here all week and I am ready to take questions.
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- Apr/25/22 2:14:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to two great Canadian athletes: Mike Bossy and Guy Lafleur. Every time they hit the ice, it made us feel that we were not watching a game, and that there was something magical and mystical about hockey. I remember, when I was a kid on the schoolyard, we would conjure the names of the great ones to try to gather their spirits. We would shout out their names, like Cournoyer, Savard, Keon or Mahovlich, but anyone who got to be Bossy or Lafleur was someone special.
In my 20s, I fell in love with the young Edmonton Oilers and, God, I hated the Islanders. They were like this impenetrable wall. I hated them, but I could not help but admire Mike Bossy. Regarding Guy Lafleur, I have to say as a lifelong Leafs fan, every time Montreal beat Toronto, it was okay as long as Guy Lafleur was on the ice.
In some ways, hockey and sports have become the domain of the super rich and sometimes seem megalomaniacal, but these two showed us that at the heart of the game was something very special: something that any kid could aspire to. They are with the angels today. I thank Guy Lafleur and Mike Bossy.
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- Mar/3/22 11:59:33 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would tell my hon. colleague that if the truth hurts, too bad, so sad, because the Conservatives have taken the crisis in Ukraine, the humanitarian suffering, the deaths, the murder of innocent people, turned it around and said this is a great opportunity for them to take billions in taxpayers' money to promote the interests of oil and gas. If they do not like the mathematics of how bad that is, then they should not be in the chamber. Too bad, so sad, because this is their motion. We could have been debating anything of substance. Instead, we are debating Conservative mythologies.
As I was saying, over the last few years, 60 financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings plc, Hartford Financial, the Japan Petroleum Exploration, have all pulled out of Canada. Why? It is because of the lack of a plan to deal with the climate crisis.
Not only are the Conservatives misrepresenting the facts in terms of the horrific humanitarian crisis, but they are misrepresenting the facts to workers because the transition is here. We see the potential. Calgary Economic Development and Edmonton Global are saying that if we start to invest now in clean energy, we are looking at an additional $61 billion for the provincial Alberta economy. If they continue with business as usual, there will be only $4 billion. Year in, year out, we see drops in employment in the oil sector and that is not because people are being mean to them. It is because industry is cutting jobs and making more profits. That is the thing.
That leads me back to the Forbes comparison. Forbes says that having lost the debate in Canada on the climate crisis, oil and gas have shifted, like big tobacco, to the global south, where the number one plan is to make some claims about greenwashing, shift massive exports to the global south where it does not count and then only invest enough in clean tech so it looks like they are doing something. Meanwhile, the market has moved beyond, and it has moved beyond in a substantial way. What we have been given, time and time again, by the Conservative Party is a fake, failed mythology when, year in, year out, jobs in the oil patch have gone down and the opportunity for a clean-tech economy is staring us in the face. There is a huge potential, but if we do not meet that, then we are consigning our children to no future.
To get back to the motion at hand in a very clear way, I have seen a lot of ways the Conservatives and the Liberals will bend over backwards to give taxpayers' money to big oil, to excuse all manner of abuses of accountability and to go along with all manner of fake claims about dealing with the crisis, but emissions have continued to rise, year in, year out. We are talking about the future of our planet, but we are talking about it now, within the context of a global crisis, a humanitarian crisis where people are dying. They expect more from us than this gaudy attempt to claim that our best response to Ukraine is to spend billions of dollars on an unproven, unplanned, unidentified pipeline, when the Europeans are already moving toward clean energy alternatives. This is exploitative and crass.
I have enormous respect for my colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills, so I will offer an amendment in order for us to come together and show a higher standard. I move that the motion be amended in paragraph (c) by deleting all the words after “Government of Canada to” and substituting the following, “greatly increase humanitarian aid for Ukraine and for countries bordering Ukraine that have already accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees and provide targeted supports to ethnic minorities who have faced discrimination in their attempt to flee Putin's war in Ukraine.”
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