- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- 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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Madam Speaker, the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo briefly mentioned health care and seemed to indicate that we were spending too much money on health care. I am wondering what he had in mind for health care. If we want to move to a more private health care system, like the States, they spend twice as much on health care per capita than we do and they have a poorer outcome. Their life expectancy is five years less.
I am wondering what the member's plans are for health care.
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Mr. Speaker, I will not go into the whole spiel on inflation; I do not have that much time here tonight. However, when we look at the extraordinary profits of oil and gas companies and the extraordinary profits of the big box grocery retailers, it is clear that they have taken advantage of this situation. Because of factors coming out of the pandemic and because of the war in Ukraine, prices have started to rise, and they have taken advantage of that and added their own excess profits on top of it. That is one of the biggest factors in inflation.
Perhaps some of the government spending did cause inflation. If we look around the world, Canada is in the middle of the pack when it comes to how bad inflation is. However, what economists have been saying about the measures we are talking about here tonight, such as dental care for people who need it, a housing top-up for low-income families struggling to pay their rents and the GST rebate that has been doubled, is that those kinds of targeted programs do not cause inflation. If the Conservatives are concerned about inflation rising because of this, the experts will say they are wrong.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree that inflation is hurting Canadians. There are all these aspects to inflation. We have heard a lot about the price of gas. We have heard a tremendous amount about the price of housing and the impossibility of owning a home for new homebuyers in Canada. With the skyrocketing cost of rent in my riding, it is almost impossible to find rental accommodation of any sort, let alone afford it.
I agree that the top-up we are talking about helps people who are really in need of that help. These are people who are spending more than 30% of their income on their accommodation, on their rent. If someone were to tell them that $500 is not enough, they would say that it would be a big help.
We need to tackle the housing situation. The NDP wants the government to build 500,000 units of affordable housing to catch up to where we should have been had the federal government not gotten out of the affordable housing game back in the nineties. Yes, there is a lot for us to do to tackle housing and inflation, but Bill C-31 is an essential and very impactful, beneficial bill that would help the millions of Canadians who are struggling with their costs today.
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- Sep/26/22 11:21:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the member a question on the opening part of his speech. I think he was saying the government should be in it for the long haul to help the people of Atlantic Canada and other disasters across this country. The government always has their backs when there is a disaster, but sometimes it forgets about it fairly quickly.
I am wondering if the member might comment on the concept that we should be spending more money investing in the future in terms of these disasters that are getting more common, more serious and more catastrophic. Should we be investing more to adapt to climate change? Rather than always being reactive and spending billions of dollars after the fact, we should really be ramping up our investments every year in helping Canadian communities get ready for the future.
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