- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 60%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
- Apr/29/24 5:02:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, today, as we have heard, we are debating the budget introduced by the Liberal government a couple of weeks ago. We have also heard, time and time again, how Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. They are having a hard time finding housing they can afford, facing soaring rents and rising mortgage costs, or even finding anywhere to live at all. They are seeing rising food costs at grocery stores and paying more for gas at the pumps.
On the other side of the coin, Canadians are seeing big corporations, oil and gas companies, grocery giants, corporate landlords and big banks making absolutely record profits. The more we pay for gas, for food, for housing, the more those corporations and their CEOs are making billions of dollars in profits. People are looking for ways the government could be helping them get by, because it does not have to be this way.
In this budget, the NDP has used its power to force the government to help Canadians. It is a glimpse of what an NDP government would be doing, which is what is best for ordinary Canadians and not for big corporations and the wealthy. However, I will say that this is not an NDP budget, and I will certainly spend some time talking about how it could have been improved greatly.
What did the NDP accomplish for Canadians? First is dental care, which will change the lives of nine million Canadians when it is fully rolled out to all qualifying people next year. Free birth control will benefit another nine million Canadians who now have to pay for those products. Free diabetes medication will benefit 3.7 million Canadians with this disease. Insulin was discovered in Canada, but every year thousands of Canadians, many of them younger Canadians, die prematurely because they simply cannot afford the medication needed to control diabetes. These are completely preventable deaths, and it is shameful that Canada has been allowing this to happen for many years. Thanks to the NDP, this will get fixed.
These provisions are the leading edge of the NDP's program of a universal, publicly funded, single-payer pharmacare plan that will be developed over the next year through legislation outside of this budget. It is a program that will save Canadians billions of dollars every year. Estimates from the Parliamentary Budget Officer and expert studies done for the government estimate savings of between $4 billion and maybe more than $10 billion per year through a single-payer plan.
Thanks to the NDP, this budget also contains funding for school meals, which will help all children, no matter their situation, with the nutrition and energy they need to succeed in their studies. Education is the great equalizer, but we have to provide all students with the conditions for success, and this school meal program will be an important part of those conditions.
The housing crisis is affecting millions of Canadians and there are some real steps in this budget to address that, such as a rental protection fund, a program to use federal lands to build new affordable housing and a $400-million top-up to the housing accelerator fund. There is $1 billion set aside for non-market housing to build truly affordable homes, again, something the NDP has been asking for, in contrast to the Conservatives who seem to think that if we just build more units prices will magically become affordable.
In my riding, we are building more housing units than we have ever built before, but according to municipal planners, every day we have fewer affordable housing units. These additional units that are being built are simply bought up by people who already own homes and people who are using them as investments. We need more affordable units, and to accomplish that the federal government has to get back into the affordable housing business like it was 30 years ago.
I would like to highlight a couple of smaller line items that may not have gotten as much publicity but will still make a huge difference to all Canadians.
I entered politics to provide a voice from a scientific background to Parliament. Science and research are the real basis of a successful economy in this day and age, and I have been calling on the government for two years now to provide more support for researchers, especially young researchers.
Postgraduate students do most of the research in Canada and are expected to work full time at that job. The best and brightest of these are funded through federal scholarships and fellowships that have remained at the same level since 2003, over 20 years ago. Master's students have been expected to live on $17,500 a year. Out of that, they have to pay their tuition fees, which are $7,000.
Finally, in this budget, the government has recognized that shameful situation and has significantly increased the amount and number of these supports, as well as provided an overall increase in research grants to investigators, which will help even more young researchers do the work they want to do and that we need them to do.
On another front, I want to give a shout-out to my colleague, the MP for Courtenay—Alberni, who has been leading the charge for an increase to the tax credit for volunteer firefighters. Previously, those brave and generous members of communities across the country have received only a $3,000 tax credit for the work they do to keep us safe. This budget would increase that to $6,000, short of the $10,000 we were hoping for but still a significant increase for very deserving community members.
What is missing from this budget? How does it differ from one that an NDP government would bring in?
First of all, there is the Canada disability benefit, something the NDP has been fighting for. We were hoping that it would finally be there in this budget, to really lift people with disabilities out of poverty. It is there but it is a paltry $200 a month, a complete insult. The NDP will continue fighting for people with disabilities, to make sure this benefit will be enough and to make sure they will have at least $2,000 per month to live in dignity.
I was also disappointed that there is no provision for a national wildfire fighting force, which could really benefit every community facing the rising threat of wildfires every summer.
Once again, the government has been timid in its willingness to try to address one of the biggest threats to this country and its economy, and that is the growing gap between the rich and the rest of Canada. Harper Conservatives cut the corporate income tax in half, immediately putting a $16-billion burden on middle-class Canadians. That cut was made in the name of trickle-down economics, the outdated and debunked belief that, if we give tax breaks to the wealthy, it would trickle down to the rest of us in the form of more jobs and benefits. It has not happened. The profits of corporations have climbed steadily over the past 30 years, while wages have remained stagnant.
Most Canadians are paying more in tax and getting nothing in return. The Liberal government, and the Conservatives would certainly be no different, refuses to put a windfall tax on big oil and gas companies that are making a killing on the backs of Canadians. Other countries such as Spain and the U.K. have brought in such a tax, a measure that would bring in about a billion dollars a year. We could also bring in a wealth tax that would affect only those very few Canadians with personal wealth of over $10 million. Such a tax would bring in another $12 billion per year.
It is often said in this place that budgets are about choices. We have to make choices on both sides of the ledger, spending wisely to make sure that Canadians have the programs that make this the best country it can be and leave no one behind, and finding revenue options that ensure that the costs of those programs are borne by those who can afford it.
We know that this budget could have been better. We know that, under a Conservative government, it would have been far worse. An NDP government would truly put the interests of ordinary Canadians first, not the interests of big corporations or CEOs. We would listen to workers and other Canadians who are really struggling, not to lobbyists for grocery giants, fossil fuel companies and big pharma.
We are proud of what the NDP has accomplished by using the power we have to take a big step in making this a fairer and more prosperous country.
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- Apr/4/22 5:26:01 p.m.
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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.
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