- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I am glad the member for Elmwood—Transcona brought up signals that the current government and governments around the world are sending. Five years ago, I was at a G20 meeting on energy. The subject was this transition that we are talking about today. Germany, Japan, Argentina and even China were talking about the need to move to renewables quickly, and Canada got up and said we built an oil pipeline and would like to build more natural gas pipelines. It was a real face-smacking moment on the world stage. Workers can see that too. They see this transition is happening. Could the member talk more about how we need to involve workers in this process?
120 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, my colleague said she wanted to base her speech on facts, but there is apparently some alternate world out there about facts.
She mentioned that the fossil fuel sector has just less than 200,000 employees in Canada. The clean energy sector already has 430 employees, and it is expected to grow by more than 200,000 over the next 10 years. That is where her constituents and workers across Canada are looking.
I will close by saying she should read John Vaillant's book Fire Weather, which is about her province, about the world, about climate change and about the industry that she is such a fierce protector of.
112 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, I want to pick up on this idea of working on creating a clean energy grid and cleaning all our forms of energy in the Canadian energy ecosystem. One way we could do that to fight climate change, bring down our emissions, and keep Canadians safe is to have a really serious program to bring heat pumps to all Canadians. There is a small program in Atlantic Canada now. We really need this across the country. Heat pumps are safe and efficient, and they work everywhere across Canada. I wonder why the government is not really picking up on that in a big way.
106 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Oct/28/22 12:13:23 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition about the just transition.
The petitioners say that Canada must address the climate emergency, and they request that the government bring in initiatives that reduce emissions by 60% below 2005 levels, that wind down the fossil fuel industry and related infrastructure, that end fossil fuel subsidies, that transition us to a decarbonized economy, that create good green jobs and drive inclusive workforce development, that protect and strengthen human rights and workers' rights, that expand the social safety net through new income supports and that pay for the transition by increasing taxes on the wealthiest and corporations and financing through a public national bank.
111 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/4/22 5:26:01 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, today we are debating a motion to concur in the report of the finance committee regarding recommendations arising from the pre-budget consultations. As we often hear, budgets are about choices on expenses, services and the investments we are making to create a better Canada, and choices on revenues and who we ask to pay for those investments.
It is therefore good to look at where we are now, or at least where were before the pandemic, when the parliamentary budget office reported that 1% of Canadians shared 25% of the wealth and that 40% of Canadians have only 1% of the wealth shared among them. The pandemic has only accentuated and aggravated these inequalities and differences. Supply chains have been disrupted. We have had labour shortages that are still very critical. We have had climate disasters, droughts, floods and heat domes, a lot of them happening in my riding or adjacent ridings. We have seen the impacts of what climate change is bringing. Now we have an illegal war in the Ukraine that is further exacerbating the situation in the world economy.
How did the inequalities change during the pandemic? Well, billionaires got richer. Billionaires in Canada added more than $70 billion to their own wealth while the rest of those in Canada really struggled. This committee report fails to recommend any solution that would change or reverse this trend. The NDP feels that we need a tax on additional profits that were brought in by many of the big corporations during the pandemic. We need a wealth tax of 1% on superwealthy Canadians who have assets of over $10 million. Instead, we see superwealthy Canadians and big corporations taking money out of Canada year after year. We are losing over $25 billion in tax revenue every year because we are not taxing the people who can afford these investments and are, instead, taxing the people who cannot afford them.
In terms of climate change, there are many recommendations in this report on what we need to do about climate change, and we agree with many of those recommendations. However, we really want to emphasize that a successful transition to a low-carbon future in Canada must be centred on workers. As my colleague from Edmonton Griesbach so eloquently said, he has personal experience with that. We need a federal authority created and funded by the federal government that has a mandate to quickly implement a real plan to guide us to that low-carbon future.
Hundreds of thousands of new jobs could be created by bold work on retrofitting our buildings, as 40% of our emissions come from our buildings. The government came out with a plan a few years ago that would do a small part of that necessary work with a combination of grants and loans. It helps people who can afford to do the work up front. They spend thousands of dollars retrofitting their homes and then apply for a smaller grant, or they take on a loan, of $20,000 perhaps, to do the work. However, who that leaves out is the 20% of Canadians who live in energy poverty and cannot afford to spend that money up front and cannot afford to take on any loan, no matter how low the interest. The government recently came out with a plan for climate action that it said would help people in energy poverty, but it is in the form of loans. That will not work.
One area of expenditure that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives want to eliminate is the billions of dollars the government gives every year in subsidies to oil and gas companies. I could go on and on about this. One of the biggest ones, of course, is this obsession to build the Trans Mountain pipeline, which has now cost over $20 billion. This is $20 billion to build a piece of infrastructure that we cannot afford in light of climate action and that we do not need.
As to health care, it is a huge issue for all Canadians. Again, the pandemic has really emphasized that. Health care workers are at their breaking point. I met with the nurses union recently and it has just had it. We need a significant increase in the Canada health transfer. We need a pan-Canadian health workforce strategy that is led by the provinces and funded by the federal government.
Some of the witnesses who came before the committee asked for an end to for-profit long-term care. Canada has a horrible result, on a global scale, in terms of the deaths we saw in long-term care homes. We desperately need to fix this. It was clear from the analysis that for-profit long-term care homes had a much worse outcome than not-for-profit long-term care homes.
My colleague mentioned pharmacare and dental care. These are things that hopefully we will finally see. If we had a federal publicly funded universal pharmacare plan, we would save a minimum of $4 billion a year according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. We could have a dental care program that costs $1 billion. We could have four dental care programs funded by the amount we would save with pharmacare.
I talked to a friend of mine a few days ago who heard about the announcement of the dental care plan. She said that when she was a kid, her family did not have money for dental care and she never went to the dentist. I think when she was 12 years old, she went into the hospital and they pulled out a bunch of her teeth and gave her a bad-looking plate that tried to replace those teeth. She said that caused her irreparable damage in her confidence around people. She has been socially shy and uncomfortable around people ever since she was 12 years old because she could not afford to go to a dentist. This plan would change people's lives in Canada.
Reconciliation is another thing we have heard about again and again over the last couple of years, like just recently regarding the visits with the Pope and the Vatican. This is another area where there has been a shameful lack of political will. I am happy to see the recommendations in this report from the finance committee that deal with the 94 calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the calls for justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, as well as the recommendations to support the economic empowerment of indigenous people.
I could talk about housing for 10 minutes. This is a huge issue in my riding, where the lack of housing is an important part of the labour shortage. People simply cannot afford to move to my riding and work there. We have companies that are forced to buy accommodations for their employees. We need a real plan to create affordable housing in Canada.
I will also bring up a big part of my riding, the wine industry. It has felt a real blow because we lost the excise tax exemption for many wineries. The federal government has to come up with a long-term plan to replace the supports that the exemption created.
I will finish by reminding members that it is our job to focus on making life better for Canadians. Too often, our governments have made life easier for wealthy Canadians and big corporations. We need to refocus and make budget choices that benefit all Canadians, and create a fairer and more prosperous Canada for all.
1278 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
