- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
- Government Page
- Feb/27/24 12:00:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if I were to go back to Timmins—James Bay and say, “Hey, guess what, the Liberals screwed up again, and this time it is ArriveCan, so we are not going to go ahead with national dental care and we are not going to go ahead with pharmacare”, I would get laughed out of the room.
My focus is that we are going to force the government to deliver on things that are absolutely making it twist in the wind, thanks to a few percentage points over the Liberals in the polls right now, as they never would have come to the table on national pharmacare.
On these scandals, the Canadian public expects us to go beyond synthetic outrage to say, “What happened?” and “How was that money spent?”. As I said earlier, I was part of the investigation into Baylis Medical. I did not find anything that was problematic. If I had, I would have said so, but I did not. However, with the WE group we found major problems. We found major problems with ArriveCan. As my colleague, the member for Courtenay—Alberni, said, we need to scratch the surface on all contracting now, because there is an amazing amount of taxpayers' money that is being misspent through this process.
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- Feb/27/24 11:47:01 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise, and I will be sharing my time with the member for Courtenay—Alberni.
The question of how public money is spent or misspent is a fundamental question of an obligation for parliamentarians, because the Canadian people do not need to pay attention to everything that happens in Parliament. However, they need to know that there is accountability and that we respect their hard-working money being spent properly and through the right channels.
I have many years of experience in the House dealing with all the smut and corruption files that have come along. I was elected in my first year as the Liberal government was telling us that Jean Chrétien's golf balls were going to keep the country together. Fortunately, the Canadian people did not believe that. That was the first scandal I witnessed. I have lost track of all the scandals.
We can take misspending and put it into various categories. There are simply the tawdry ones, like with Bev Oda, who seemed to rack up as many bills as possible every time she travelled until people finally became fed up. There was the issue with Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright, where Mike Duffy was claiming all kinds of outrageous claims because he was a bagman and raised money for the Conservatives. We were presented with this bizarre case that it was okay to offer a secret bribe, but it was a problem to receive the bribe.
Those scandals did not just belong to the Conservatives. There was Mac Harb, a Liberal, who had this amazing grifter scheme. He was not eligible for travel, so he bought this dodgy little broken down cottage just 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa because if he lived 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa, he could hit up the taxpayer for all kinds of travel, even though, I was told, there was not even running water at that cottage. Mac Harb had to pay back $231,000.
People deserve to be outraged by that abuse, and it raised questions in the Senate of where the accountability is to make sure that the people who are there are doing their jobs. I remember Tony Clement and the $50 million that was taken out of border funds so that he could buy sunken boats and build a fake lake in Muskoka. That was an abusive process. It was not criminal; it was an abusive process.
There was the issue with Arthur Porter, which was one of the more concerning scandals I have witnessed over the years. Stephen Harper appointed him as head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and made him a privy councillor. We then, of course, found out he was involved in what CBC said was “the biggest fraud investigation in Canadian history”, and he ended up dying in Panama in a jail.
Those are elements of criminality, “griftership”, tawdriness and of people just misusing the public funds.
The ArriveCAN thing needs to be put in perspective of the time, and then analyze it from there. When we were hit with the pandemic, we were dealing with a completely unknown crisis that none of us had faced, and there was certainly a need to get a response out the door quickly.
Who did the best job at that? It was our public servants. They basically spent that Easter weekend in 2020 creating a program to get the CERB dollars out to people who were not able to work and to keep them going. It was the Public Service who did good, amazing work during that time.
However, there were a number of scandals that came up during that period, and ArriveCAN fits into that because it is a question of the lack of oversight and accountability. Certainly, Canadians deserve to know how a contract worth $59.5 million, divided up through 32 companies, for a program that did not work was allowed to go ahead. We ask ourselves how that was possible.
I would like to share with my colleagues some of the recommendations that came out of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which looked into some of the other elements. We looked at Baylis Medical, at Palantir and at the Kielberger brothers. At the time, again, the government wanted to get a youth program out. There was $500 million to $940 million set aside for the Kielberger operation without competition and without very clear oversight. What the committee found was that the incredible access Marc and Craig Kielberger had into the inner workings of government gave them an advantage no one else had.
I would encourage any of my colleagues to read the Ethics Commissioner report on the former finance minister, Bill Morneau. It makes for a pretty shocking reading that these guys had an all-access pass into the corridors of the Liberal government and were not even registered to lobby. That certainly was a major factor in bringing down Mr. Morneau.
I want to raise this because if we have these scandals, we need to learn from them. We need to learn how money was misspent. We need to learn why there was no oversight, so that this is not repeated. Otherwise we become a laughingstock of repetition of failure from insiders, from misuse of public funds and from contracting out.
With respect to the contracting out that was to be done with the WE group, I am going to read what the all-party committee said. This is not my opinion but that of all of the political parties that participated. It reported this back to Parliament:
The Committee was unable to find any due diligence reports that actually tested the credibility of the claims made by the WE Charity. This group had never undertaken a project close to this magnitude and it remains unclear whether they had the means to ensure that students across the country could be put to work with credible results.
It was going to be given $500 million initially, and there were no due diligence reports that we could find anywhere. Then we found out that the money was going to be funnelled to a shell company initially set up to deal with some of its incredible real estate holdings. How is it possible that the Government of Canada would transfer between $500 million and $940 million to a shell company? Who was taking the enormous risk then? It was the Canadian people. I am going to read from the all-party committee report again:
The Committee is of the view that the decision of the Liberal government of Canada to sign a contract worth over $500 million with a shell company “WE Charity Foundation” is deeply troubling. The WE group stated they used the shell company to limit their liability. In reality, this procedure had the potential to put a huge investment of taxpayers funds at risk because the deal was with a shell company with no assets.
How does a G7 country sign on to something that concerning?
I am raising this because of the whole thing about ArriveCAN and the Auditor General's not being able to find anything on how the money was spent. One of the most disturbing factors is that after 10 months of study, we had to report to Parliament that we had no idea how the finances of the supposed children's charity worked. We could not tell the Canadian people who controlled its multitude of corporations. We did not even know all the companies that it controlled. We could not tell the difference between its so-called charity work and its for-profit work, or tell what its ownership structure was, yet the government, without doing due diligence, was going to sign over between $500 million and $940 million.
The report states:
The Committee notes that over the 10 months of its study, it was unable to get a clear picture of the financial structure of the WE group. We were unable to ascertain a clear division between how monies flowed through the charitable wing and their for-profit operations. We were also denied information on the ownership structure of their multitude of side companies. If the government of Canada is to sign future contracts or contribution agreements with WE Charity, its affiliates or subsidiaries, such clarifications must be required.
I raise that because we are looking at a very similar thing that happened with ArriveCAN. Where was the oversight?
This is the other question I am going to end on. We spent 10 months trying to get the CFO of WE to testify, just to tell us what was happening. We were told not only that he was on medical leave but also that he had a brain aneurism that, if we asked him questions, might cause his death. Certainly nobody in Parliament was going to wish that someone die under the pressure, but the WE group could not come up with anybody else who could explain its very complex financial structure.
On May 15, 2021, we received a letter from Mr. Li saying that he was too sick, had not been doing any work and was completely uninvolved, yet we found that in that period, in the state of California, there was a registration renewal in November 2020 on which he signed off as CFO. There was a New York state filing on which he signed off as CFO, an Internal Revenue Service report in 2020 and a Washington State report. All of these were signed off on by Victor Li, yet our committee was told that he was so fragile and sick that he could not even read documents. We were not in a position to do a criminal investigation, but we had to report back to Parliament that there had been a major failure of fundamental accountability.
Has the government learned lessons from what happened with the WE brothers, or do we have to repeat these tawdry, dumbed-down abuses of public funds because the accountability mechanisms that should have been there were ignored and the Canadian taxpayer is on the hook? I will be here all week.
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- Dec/7/23 2:49:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the people of Attawapiskat continue to suffer a brutal housing crisis. Now there are serious questions about their water supply, and with winter hitting hard, a crisis is looming.
We remember the winter of 2011 when Attawapiskat asked the Conservatives for help. The Conservatives falsely blamed them for ripping off taxpayers and then expelled a democratically elected council. However, under the Liberals, there has just been vague promises and no action.
As this winter hits, will the government send a team to assess the situation on the ground and help find a solution for the people of Attawapiskat?
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Madam Speaker, that is a double ouch. The Conservatives certainly have a raw wound there. I was talking only about the member who moved out of his home in Ottawa and moved into Stornoway, which is a fact. That is a 19-room mansion funded by taxpayers.
I was just saying that I had a job; I had many jobs. When I ran my own business, I had to go to dentists to try to get a deal on dental care for my children. The member who lives in Stornoway has never had to do that. He has lived pretty damn well off the taxpayer. He is telling senior citizens in 2023 that they have no right to dental care; he said he will do anything, including jumping up and down all night long in Parliament, to stop this from happening.
He should tell his chef in the morning to give him some eggs, some yogourt, some granola and some green tea to calm him, so he is not just a rage bucket. That way, he can actually show up in Parliament to do some work.
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Mr. Speaker, as always, I am honoured to rise for the people of Timmins—James Bay to talk about a very important issue. That is the situation facing senior citizens in this country and the systemic failure to ensure that those who built this nation are able to retire and live in the dignity they deserve.
I was just speaking today with the head of the Cochrane food bank. We are attempting to get supplies of food up into Fort Albany First Nation, which has been under evacuation because of flooding. They tell us the shelves are empty. If we go into the grocery stores in northern Ontario, the bins where people used to fill up with food are nearly empty. The cost of living crisis is hitting seniors more than anyone. They have nothing to show for it, other than these incremental increases that might buy them a Tim Hortons coffee but are not going to put food on the table at this time.
We have to look at the larger picture in terms of the absolute failure we see when seniors need us. They are the people who raised us, built our society, brought us up from being children to adults; however, when need us, we are not there. I look at what happened with COVID in the privatized long-term care facilities and the absolute squalor that elders were left in and died in. It was so bad that the army was sent into Quebec in order to try to keep people alive. We send the army into disaster zones; we should not be sending them into facilities that are run by provinces to protect and to look after senior citizens.
We saw this in Ontario, where the death rates in the privatized care homes were staggeringly high. Afterwards, Doug Ford built this iron ring of protection around all those investors so that they would not be held accountable for failing to keep seniors alive during the pandemic.
I was talking to a widow today who needs to get her teeth fixed. She has a right to have dignity. She should not have to get plates put in. She wants to have her teeth fixed, but it is an $8,000 bill. We have the Conservatives filibustering and trying to stop seniors from getting dental care. The Bloc Québécois members are supporting the attack on senior citizens in this country getting dental care. I cannot think of anything more shameful than that.
I do not know if the Bloc members or the Conservatives ever knocked on a door, but when I knocked on door after door, I talked to seniors, who said to me that they cannot afford to have their teeth fixed. Some people might think this is not that important, but it is so important for their dignity and their sense of health. This is why New Democrats pushed for a national dental care plan that, this year, includes senior citizens. The Bloc members and the Conservatives can fight this all they want, but we will make sure that by the end of this year, we can phone those widows back. We can tell them the $8,000 bill they are facing that they cannot afford to pay will be paid. They deserve it, and they deserve better.
We are very interested in Bill C-319 and this issue of fixing the shortfalls in the pension, but obviously, it would not go far enough. I remember just a few years ago when Stephen Harper flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he announced that Canadian seniors had it a little too good. He was going to increase the age of eligibility for the old-age pension. He did not bother to tell Canadians that. He went to tell the world's elites at the World Economic Forum. He went to tell Klaus Schwab, to whisper in his ear, that Canadian senior citizens were getting too good a deal, and he was going to raise the age.
The Liberals ran on it, saying that they were going to fight that. They said, “We are going to make sure that we restore the age.” Then what did the Liberals do in their budget? They created two classes of senior citizens. They told all our senior citizens aged 74 and under, “Tough luck, get by, it is not too bad.” They told them they had their health, and they said they were going to give a small incremental increase to those aged 75 and older.
Just before inflation hit, I was underground in a gold mine in Timmins. That is tough work, and I met a 70-year-old man working the jackleg drill. People have to be in the best health to run a jackleg drill, because it does massive destruction to the body. He told me that at 70 years old, he had to go back underground to work the drills because he could not afford to look after his sick wife.
That is the situation in Canada. To say that, because he is under 75, he does not need a top-up to his pension is an insult. It is also an insult to say that if we just top up those at 65 to where they are at 75, it will get them through in a time of high inflation, because it is not going to get them through. Any senior citizen will tell us that. What we need are much broader systemic changes to deal with an aging population and the way that we have failed. Certainly, the issue of access to dental care is an important first step.
We also need a housing strategy that works. It is not a housing strategy when the member for Stornoway, who lives off the taxpayer's dime with his personal chef, goes on about how all the gatekeepers have stopped any building. He is attacking the municipalities for being gatekeepers. That is not going to get us housing. What we need is seniors housing. We need a national plan to build seniors housing that is co-operative, reasonable housing. The Liberals promised that. We have never seen so many promises about housing, but where are they? We have not seen it. That is a systemic failure.
With respect to the inability of people to feed themselves at a time of high inflation, and the pitiful amount of money they get in old age security, is a broader, more systemic issue that has to be addressed. We have to rethink the CPP. We have to look at the ability of people, while they are working, to add to their own old age security funds so that, if they are working and saving, that fund will go with them wherever they retire. That is contrary to the member for Stornoway, who by the way has a 19-room mansion. He calls it a tax. Investing in pensions is not a tax. The Conservatives keep saying that because they do not want to put the basic funds in place to have a proper pension.
We need to look at a properly funded pension system, so I look at Bill C-319, and we will certainly support it going forward. It is an incremental step, a baby step, along a long path, but it does not get us there. What gets us there is saying that we cannot live as a society with values when seniors are out on the streets begging, which I see on Elgin Street now. There are senior citizens and widowed grandmothers begging on the streets because they cannot pay their outrageous rents or the cost at the grocery stores, as there is not enough in their pensions. I think we need a broader discussion, one that is across party lines, on how we reform CPP so people can make investments into a public pension, not a privatized RRSP. I know a lot of people who have tried to put money into RRSPs and have told me they will never be able to retire because it will never be sufficient, so we have to address those shortfalls.
We have to send an important message now to senior citizens to admit that Canada has failed them, and is failing them, but that it is not going to continue to fail them. At a time of high inflation, high costs, high rents, high medical costs and the need for access to either pharmacare or dental care, Canada needs to do for them what they did for us. They held us in their arms, raised us and took on immense sacrifices so we could be the society that we are today.
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Madam Speaker, one of the really important things for Canada is to position ourselves right now in response to the climate crisis, but also to the massive investments that Joe Biden is putting into the Inflation Reduction Act. The American president has said that within nine years 67% of all vehicles are going to be EV, which is going to lead to a lot of stranded assets for those who are still betting on oil and gas. We do have this TMX pipeline that has cost us over $30 billion. The total charges on that will go to the taxpayer, who will have to pay for 78% of every barrel of unrefined bitumen.
I want to ask my hon. colleague, given the fact that the U.S., China and Europe are moving so dramatically far in advance on digital and clean technology, why does the government continue to pay for TMX, leaving the threat of serious stranded assets in the oil and gas sector?
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- Apr/27/23 7:01:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I certainly think that speech should be watched by all Canadians. We are in very serious times. We are dealing with a war in Ukraine that has upended inflation. We are dealing with a climate crisis.
I find it telling that the Conservatives are telling us toxic nursery rhymes about how much they hate mice and how much the world would be better if we all hated mice. This is a party that believes the world is flat and does not believe there is a climate crisis. This is a party that believes that its leader is entitled to a chef and groundskeeper, that is paid for by the taxpayer, and he lives in a mansion, when he has a house that is only half an hour away from Ottawa.
What I find concerning is that the Conservatives want to present these toxic fairytales, rather than talk about the serious issues we need to address in this nation and whether this budget is doing that. There are some great things in this budget. There are real problems in the budget, but if the member is happy reading nursery rhymes, then he is probably very happy in the Conservative caucus.
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Madam Speaker, I was really struck by my hon. colleague talking about taxpayers being left to hold the bag. Let us talk about the bag that taxpayers have to hold for the leader of the Conservative Party's digs.
It is a 19-room house at 9,500 square feet. He has a private chef and servants. Who is paying for that? It is not him. It is the taxpayers. There are two water metres at his house. One bill was $4,107 in April, and then there was a bill for $7,556 in June. What is this guy doing with all that water? There has been $1.4 million in repairs over 10 years, but then it costs $170,000 a year just to keep it clean for him. Let us not even talk about if someone gets invited to his summer parties.
Canadians cannot afford this guy, and he has the gall to tell senior citizens that they should not be able to get free dental care. I am not buying that.
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- Jun/17/22 11:04:55 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, food prices are going through the roof and working-class families are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. We know that Vladimir Putin's illegal war in Ukraine is driving fears of a global food shortage, but those fears are the perfect cover for the giant food conglomerates that are jacking up prices, not because of inflation but to gouge us.
Cargill's profits were up 64% in a single year. Loblaws' first-quarter profits are 40% higher than last year.
What is the government doing? The Liberals, remember, used taxpayers' money to fix Galen Weston's fridges while Loblaws was scamming us over the price of bread, and the Conservatives? Well, their would-be leader says to invest our savings in crypto-Ponzi schemes to beat inflation. I mean, a financial genius this guy is not.
What we are dealing with is not inflation but old-fashioned price gouging and corporate giants ripping off Canada's working class. The New Democrats say that it is time we took on these corporate giants and got this money into the pockets of working-class families.
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- May/17/22 11:07:46 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very interested in having my hon. colleague explain to me the fact that there was no business case for TMX. The public was told to buy it for $4.7 billion. Then it was $17.3 billion. Now there is another $10 billion on top of that in loans. That is public money to export and expand oil production. That oil production of an extra 800,000 or a million barrels a day goes offshore and does not count in Canada's emissions.
My hon. colleague said this is a global issue, and I totally agree with her. Would she not agree that it does not matter where the oil is burned, as it is still affecting the planet? If we have 2025 as a target to stop increasing production, why is the government using taxpayers' money to export oil to be burned in other jurisdictions, which will not be counted on its register?
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- Mar/3/22 11:49:57 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will take this moment to apologize to any European soccer player who has never played the game and never shown a great propensity to lie on the ground and howl. I apologize to them greatly.
We are dealing with something serious here. We are dealing with a party that is using a humanitarian disaster to exploit falsehoods. I will call that out and I will not be silent, because they are trying to fake out Canadians that there is somehow an economic argument. Let us throw mindless amounts of money that will somehow get to Ukraine and make some money.
If members want another example, it is like coming upon a horrific car accident, and as we are trying to pull people out of the car accident, someone is climbing over them and saying, “Hey. I'm from Abe's Honest Used Car Service. Let me sell you a car.” This is not what we do in the middle of a humanitarian disaster, because right now, as I said, 12 major LNG projects are not going ahead. Things are not further ahead, but the Conservatives want to build a pipeline of 2,000 kilometres. In Europe right now, stocks in clean energy have taken off. Why have they taken off? It is because Europe knows that its future is in clean energy.
Let us talk about Conservative mathematics, and certainly Liberal mathematics too, because the Liberals are now on the hook. They bought a pipeline because Kinder Morgan knew it did not have the financial capacity to build a $5.4-billion pipeline. It went to the Conservative government in Alberta in 2014 and asked it to backstop the TMX pipeline. Alberta said no since the money was not there and the economic case was not there.
The Conservatives and big oil accused the Liberals of hating the oil sector, so the Prime Minister signed up and hooked us into a pipeline that is now at $21 billion. Here is the thing. We paid Kinder Morgan for selling us a leaky pipeline and it used taxpayer money to give the CEO bonuses for hoodwinking us.
Here is the other thing that is important to know in the scam that we are dealing with in continually giving money to big oil. The cost overruns are locked in at $7 billion. Those are all the extra overruns in the pipeline. For the tolls that run the oil through the pipe, all the extra costs are being paid for by the taxpayer. Not only are we paying $21 billion, but every barrel of bitumen that goes overseas from here on in will be paid for by the taxpayer. That is a pretty good deal for big oil and, again, it is being paid for by the taxpayer. However, that is perfectly normal mathematics in the world of the Conservatives, who think that this is how money should be spent.
Why is TMX so fundamentally important to the ideology of the Conservatives and the Liberals? It is because they were never focused on supplying Canada's energy needs. They were not interested in that. They stand and rant about how Saudi Arabian oil, Venezuelan oil and Nigerian oil are coming down the St. Lawrence, but it is not true. Quebec refineries are not using that. This is about export. Why is export so important? It is because none of the emissions of burned bitumen count as part of Canada's total. Right now, our emissions total from exports is more than all the emissions in Canada combined. Talk about the burning the planet. We are looking at an increase of 1.2 million barrels a year thanks to TMX and thanks to the money that is being invested by the government.
I will refer to a recent article in Forbes Magazine from January 28, 2022. It says that big oil is using the big tobacco playbook because they realize they have lost the argument in Canada on the energy crisis. People don't believe them anymore. What they have done is turned to export. They are looking to create markets in the global south. They are looking to China, where there are lower standards. That is the economic model and none of those burned barrels of bitumen in places like China or in markets in India will ever be counted in the global total. That is how we burn the planet while getting to net zero.
The Conservatives have tried to tell us that this pipeline is some kind of humanitarian grain mission. We do not deal with food in pipelines. I know the Conservatives would love to add it in the mix, but it is not there. However, they keep talking about how this is a clean fuel. The problem is that Canada has failed on this time and time again.
I will refer members to the problem with methane. The Prime Minister made a promise of cutting 45% by 2025. We never got there. Now he is saying we are going to get to 75% by 2030. I mention methane because if we cut methane emissions on natural gas, then we can say this is a transition fuel. However, methane is a planet killer. Everybody knows this, but we have not seen the industry take any steps to deal with methane. We can do this. I talk to people in the industry. We can get to zero on methane, yet this planet killer is leaking out of abandoned wells, leaking out of pipelines and leaking out of refineries. What do they do? Of course, they go to the government and say, “Help us.”
The Liberal government has held 6,800 backroom meetings with the oil lobby since the Liberal government came in. The Conservatives say the Liberal government is against big oil, but it is just a myth. We have had $121 billion in oil subsidies. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has come forward and said it wants $75 billion in carbon capture. We are paying $21 billion for TMX. We are on the hook for $1 billion for abandoned wells.
Then big oil came forward asking to be given money to deal with methane, and the government gave them $132 million to clean up methane. Now here is the thing. What were the goals of the methane reduction program? Number one was to attract investment. Number two was to increase competitiveness. Well, that is not saving the planet. Then down at number three was finding some equipment to help reduce methane emissions.
Why does this matter? It is because the environment commissioner has said that Canada, which used to be a world leader, is now at the back of the G7. This methane reduction program was not used to deal with the planet killer. It was used as a subsidy to big oil and it allowed them to increase production. What the environment commissioner also found was that they are not even tracking any of the background emissions. They do not even know how bad methane is. They have not bothered, yet we are writing cheques for $134 million and we do not even know how it is spent. Meanwhile, the planet is burning.
The Conservatives have a whole series of myths they try to perpetuate about how hard done by the west is on this and how hard done by oil and gas is. This is a group that is belligerently fighting for billions in taxpayer subsidies to support the typewriter when the rest of the world is moving to the cellphone.
I want to point out one of the myths I have been hearing. It is that rules on environmental standards in Canada are somehow scaring off investments. That is simply not true. I refer members to a Wall Street Journal headline that says financial giants are quitting what they call “one of the world's dirtiest oil patches”. That is something they also do not want us to know. Canada's—
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- Mar/3/22 11:10:46 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am absolutely appalled to see the Conservatives' use of talking about children going hungry as a reason for us to spend billions on a pipeline. We are dealing with a world crisis of people dying in the streets, being killed, and they see this as another reason to turn on the taps of taxpayer money.
We have spent $121 billion in subsidies to big oil in the last seven years, $75 billion on carbon capture, $21 billion on TMX and $1 billion on the abandoned wells, and the Conservatives are talking about using a humanitarian crisis for more.
Will the Liberals agree with us that this motion is undermining Canada's reputation of standing up for Ukraine because the Conservatives are more interested in satisfying big oil?
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