- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
- Nov/7/23 1:35:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is kind of obvious. Yes, that is what the New Democrats are proposing. I said in my speech that the GST was never meant to be charged on the necessities of life. We do not pay GST when we go to grocery stores and buy food.
However we heat our homes in Canada, and we have to do so, we pay energy bills, whether to electricity companies, natural gas companies or oil companies. We pay GST on that, and we should not. Yes, the NDP is asking that we take the GST off our home heating costs, even in the summer. Maybe in Winnipeg, people have to heat their homes in the summer. I do not usually in British Columbia. That is what we are proposing.
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- Nov/7/23 1:25:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the wonderful MP for Edmonton Griesbach.
I am very honoured, and frankly excited, to stand here this afternoon to speak to the NDP motion that sets out a truly fair, common-sense approach to deal with two of the most important issues of our time: the climate catastrophes we are living through every year across this country and the struggle that many Canadians are facing just to get by.
In a nutshell, the motion recognizes that Canadians are facing increasing costs, both the financial costs and human costs of the climate crisis. At the same time, they are facing rising fuel costs for gas at the pumps and in their home heating, while the fossil fuel companies that are charging them those costs are reaping record profits. On top of that, both oil and gas heating are contributing to the carbon emissions that are fuelling the climate crisis.
The NDP motion proposes three straightforward solutions to that situation: to take the GST off home heating; to provide heat pumps for free to lower- and medium-income families in an easily accessible program; and to fund the program with a windfall tax on the record profits made by fossil fuel companies.
Listeners at home may quickly realize that this motion is a reaction to both the Liberals' bungled program to provide relief to some Canadians by taking the carbon tax off home heating oil and the Conservatives' motion to extend that relief to natural gas for home heating as well. Both those ideas fail the fairness test of this Canadian federation.
The Liberal program benefits predominantly people in Atlantic Canada, where many homes are heated with oil, while the Conservative motion leaves British Columbians and Québécois out in the cold since families in those provinces do not pay a federal carbon tax. I have yet to hear a single Conservative from B.C. admit that fact in this place.
The NDP is proposing to take the GST off home heating bills. The GST is not supposed to be paid on the necessities of life. We do not pay GST on food. I think everyone would agree that home heating is a necessity of life in Canada, but right now, everyone across the country has to pay it. Removing the GST from home heating bills would save everyone across the country money on their energy bills, helping people to get by in a truly fair way.
We have had bad years for extreme weather and wildfires for the past eight years or so, but this year was in a different league of catastrophes. It started with a hot, dry spring that sent fires in Nova Scotia, Quebec and Alberta raging through forests and communities. As the season progressed, we had fires explode in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Several of those fires in B.C. were in the coastal rainforest where it is usually hard enough to start a campfire, let alone destroy a forest. Then Nova Scotia, which was still recovering from two catastrophic fires, suffered a devastating flood.
I live in the dry interior of British Columbia in the South Okanagan Valley. We all held our breath as we saw fires springing up in northeastern B.C., central B.C., then Kamloops and the Shuswap. At the end of July, the fires began in the Okanagan Valley and Similkameen Valley. One came within inches of destroying a large neighbourhood in Osoyoos.
In mid-August, the Shuswap fires swept out of the wilderness and burned through Celista, Scotch Creek and Squilax, communities that I used to live in during the summers of the 1970s. A fire in the mountains west of Kelowna roared down to devastate neighbourhoods on the west side of Okanagan Lake and then jumped across the lake two kilometres to terrorize neighbourhoods on the east side.
People struggled to breathe across the country this summer. Hundreds of thousands had to leave their homes in hastily planned evacuations, including the entire city of Yellowknife. People lost their homes. Some people unfortunately died. This was a summer that marked another shift in public opinion. It was public awareness that climate change is not a theoretical event somewhere in the future. We are living it today and we have to adapt to it.
The climate data back that up. This year has been literally off the charts. Air temperature records were shattered every day around the world. Ocean temperatures were so high that scientists could barely believe what was happening.
This year was even worse than 2021. That year British Columbia, there was a heat dome in late June followed by an unprecedented atmospheric river event in November. The Town of Lytton burned down after reporting Canada's record-high temperature three days in a row. The cost of the climate destruction in 2021 in B.C. alone was over $5 billion. However, even as we said that 2021 was the worst year ever, and now people are saying that 2023 is the worst year ever, the projections are saying that these will actually be the best years for the rest of our lives. Extreme weather events will only get worse as we pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
What many people forget, or do not even know, is that 619 people died in Metro Vancouver in one week during the heat dome of 2021, which was the real tragedy of that year. What most of those people had in common was that they lived in the lower-income parts of the city in neighbourhoods with no access to shady, cool, green areas and in apartment complexes with no air conditioning. They died with their windows closed against the stifling heat. We cannot let this happen again. We need to provide people, especially lower-income Canadians, with air conditioning, even in places like Vancouver and Halifax, where maybe they did not need it very often in the past. They will need it in the future. That would save hundreds of lives during future heat events.
If we do that with heat pumps, switching out oil and gas heating units, it would not only save lives but would also cut emissions, and people, including landlords, would save significant money on their energy bills all year round. At the same time, we must make it easy for people to properly insulate their homes. We have to make sure we are not building new buildings, new housing, with fossil fuel heating infrastructure. New builds should have electric heat, preferably heat pumps. There is a growing movement in cities across Canada to ban fossil fuel infrastructure to heat new homes and buildings. Montreal and Nanaimo have done that. Vancouver almost did it but then backed off to a partial ban. It is being discussed by communities in my riding.
While Canadians are struggling to pay for fuel costs, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits. The top five companies in Canada posted $38 billion in profits last year alone. Meanwhile, Canadians saw prices at the pump go up almost a dollar a litre over the last three years. The Conservatives' big bogey man, the carbon tax, went up five cents over that time. The fossil fuel companies are not paying any more to make gasoline or natural gas; they are just benefiting big time from a rise in world oil and gas prices. These are windfall profits. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has determined that a windfall tax on these profits would bring in over $4 billion. The NDP has been calling for such a tax for over a year but has gotten no support from either the Liberals or the Conservatives. Therefore, we are proposing today to bring in a windfall tax on the profits of fossil fuel companies and use that money to fund our proposal for an easily accessible program that would install free heat pumps in Canadian homes.
The Liberals are handpicking what regions get help with the cost of living, and leaving the rest of Canada behind. The Conservatives have absolutely no climate plan. For over a year, the NDP has called on the government to remove the GST from home heating and help everyone across the country, but the Liberals and Conservatives have ignored those calls. The NDP wants to make eco-energy retrofits and heat pumps free and easy to access for low- to middle-class Canadians, regardless of their initial home heating energy source. We are calling on the government to fund those changes by finally implementing a windfall profits tax on the excess profits of oil and gas companies.
These are common-sense, effective ideas that would save all Canadians money and save lives and heartache from climate disasters in an increasingly dangerous future. I am sure all members here will support this motion to help all Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
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- Sep/26/22 11:52:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member has pointed out here many times the dangers that we face. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions in the world right now, we would still be in this situation for centuries where we would be having these incredible hurricanes, catastrophic forest fires and floods. That would not stop. What we are trying to stop is making things worse.
This is only going to get worse. There is this case for adaptation. We have to deal with the situation as it is now. I just wanted to touch on the heat dome, whether it occurs in B.C. or Alberta or wherever next time. This brings me back to P.E.I. as well. P.E.I. has a program around heat pumps. A really serious investment by the federal government in a heat pump program would allow people to have cooling, especially for low-income Canadians and especially in British Columbia, where not many people have air conditioning. That is what killed people. They were stuck in their homes. They basically got too hot.
We could save a lot of people if we provide low-income Canadians with heat pumps that would get us off natural gas and other forms of heating, and at the same time provide the cooling necessary to perhaps save them in a heat dome event.
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