- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
- Oct/31/23 5:19:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned housing, because that is one of the core issues we are facing today with immigration. I know he knows of my riding in the South Okanagan, how beautiful and attractive it is and how people want to move there. People go there for tourism, but it is almost impossible for people to find housing there. That is because, even though we are building more housing units every day in, for example, my hometown of Penticton than we have ever built before, every day we have fewer housing units that are affordable, because all those housing units being built are being bought by investors. People like immigrants cannot afford them, so there are hotels buying motels to house their workers. There are wineries buying big houses to house their workers.
I am wondering whether the member can comment on what we can do as a government to discourage housing as an investment and make sure that housing is built for people who can afford to live in that housing, such as immigrants.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Winnipeg North for that comment, because this is really what is at the heart of this bill. It is not forcing the government to pick and choose winners or losers. What it is aimed at doing, which has been its aim from the start, is shining a light on wood to say that we have been building with concrete and steel for decades and centuries, so let us look at wood. To do that, we need education. We need to not only educate the public to realize that this is a possibility, but also educate architects, engineers and construction people on the benefits and the how-to of building large buildings and infrastructure with wood.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on the question about housing. The member for Flamborough—Glanbrook just squeaked in the word “affordability” at the end. The real problem with building more houses is that we are not building more affordable houses.
I just had a housing round table in Penticton, and the city representative talked about how the city is building more housing units every day than it has ever built in history, but it has fewer affordable houses every day. That is because, naturally, the housing units that are being built are bought up by the people who can afford them. That will not bring prices down; it will make prices go up. Therefore, I would echo what the member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert said, which is that we need to get the government involved in building hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague is correct. We need to move forward.
She mentioned education. A lot of what the bill will promote will need the education of architects, engineers and construction workers across Canada to change their mindset about the construction of large buildings.
There is a wonderful program in Okanagan College, in my home town of Penticton, that is on sustainable building methods. We need that kind of program across the country so that not just governments but people building large facilities will think about wood when they make those decisions.
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Mr. Speaker, off the top, I would like to send out congratulations to Kimo Linders of Penticton for winning the small business of the year award from the Tourism Industry Association of Canada last night, as well as to the amazing Penticton Vees, who just won their 21st game in a row in the B.C. Hockey League.
I also want to talk about Bill S-222, which will be debated Monday morning. This is a small, but mighty bill that simply asks the federal government to consider the environmental footprint of building materials when constructing infrastructure. This was my private member's bill in a previous Parliament and I was inspired to bring it forward by the new mass timber technology pioneered by Structurlam in my hometown of Penticton.
With new materials such as mass timber, we can build safe and beautiful buildings that will also help us in our fight against climate change. I hope everyone here will support Bill S-222 to literally help build a better future for Canada.
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- Sep/26/22 8:39:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to talk about the experience I have had in my riding in Grand Forks, where we had flooding in 2018. The regional district did a study as to what could and should have been done better to help the recovery process. There were things that came up as things that hindered the recovery and the rebuilding process. One was the inflexibility of the federal government in taking into account local solutions. The local governments were putting forward innovative solutions that would have helped people quicker and at a lower cost, but the federal government programs were totally inflexible. Four years later, the City of Grand Forks is still waiting for the full amount of money that was guaranteed to it, and those people are very frustrated.
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