- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Churchill—Keewatinook Aski
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $142,937.96
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I am honoured to speak in the House in support of a historic piece of legislation, Bill C-35.
I want to begin by acknowledging the hard work of my colleague, the member for Winnipeg Centre, who has worked tirelessly on this bill and who has worked alongside our team to push the Liberals to create a stronger version of this bill on behalf of children, families, Canadian women and all of us.
For me, child care hits close to home. As many of us know, and as my constituents certainly know, I am the proud mother of five-year-old twins. I, like many mothers in Canada, faced real challenges when it came to accessing child care after I had my kids.
I was on a waiting list for child care in Ottawa for over two years, and then, of course, as soon as COVID hit and, knowing that our child care needs had entirely shifted to my constituency here in Manitoba, I was again on a waiting list, and of course, like all families, I faced the insecurities and disruptions caused by the pandemic.
Many who may have tuned into our online sittings throughout that time would have seen one or even both of my children popping up on Zoom during working hours, because that is what it was like to work from home with kids at home without access to child care.
While I treasure the time with my kids, as many mothers know, juggling all of that without access to child care when we want it and when we need it can be a real nightmare.
The reality is that the lack of access to child care in Canada has absolutely held women back and held families back. This legislation is an important step in standing up for women in our country, for families and for a better future for all of our children.
As I begin this speech, I want to say that this victory would not have happened without the decades of activism, of work that has been done by women across our country.
I want to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, with leaders like Judy Rebick. I want to acknowledge the many activists involved in the national action committee throughout the country, including people like my mother, Hariklia Dimitrakopoulou-Ashton, who has certainly shaped who I am and who was part of an organization that made it very clear that equality for women and justice for women means child care.
I also want to acknowledge the many women in the labour movement who have tirelessly fought for decades for access to universal, affordable not-for-profit child care. They include leaders like Barb Byers, Vicky Smallman and Bea Bruske, the current CLC president, and her team.
I want to acknowledge women across the country who have made it their aim to speak and fight for child care. In B.C., they are people like Sharon Gregson. Many women here in Manitoba have been part of this fight. Martha Friendly and many more have fought for child care for decades. They and many others are the reason we are standing here today.
I also want to acknowledge a former colleague who is in the news a fair bit right now and who I think many of us hope will soon be the mayor of Toronto, former New Democrat MP Olivia Chow, who, when she was in Parliament, fought tirelessly for child care. She was the first to propose an early learning and child care program for Canadians. Her leadership created the framework for a universal, high-quality, affordable and not-for-profit national child care program.
New Democrats have long called for universal early learning and child care in this country, and it has been a long road to get the other parties on board. I am thinking of long negotiations just to include this in the supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals. Our demands that this be implemented by the end of the year are the reason we are here, and I am proud that due to NDP pressures, we will see this bill adopted before the end of 2023.
Let us look at the figures. Roughly half of Canadian children under six years old do not have access to either licensed or even unlicensed child care. This impacts primarily women, delaying their capacity to return to work at a time of their choosing. Of the women in families that do not have access to child care, 42% end up postponing their return to work.
This is unacceptable. Our current piecemeal system leaves far too many women without the choice to decide for themselves, ourselves, when we can go back to work. Those lost years mean less income for women and fewer opportunities for promotions and furthering careers. It means being punished for starting families.
Every day that we do not have an early learning and child care program in Canada is a day when Canada shows the extent to which it devalues women and how little it wants us to succeed. Let us be clear. The provinces know this. Everyone in the House knows this. We have had commission after commission and report after report. Over half a century ago, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women identified publicly funded universal child care as one of 167 recommendations. For over 30 years, we have heard Liberal promises around child care. It was just around the corner, red book after red book and often heard about during the election, only to have the Liberals complain how hard it was to enact when they got into government.
Far too many women are waiting for far too many men, and some women, to figure out how to treat us with basic dignity and respect. Whether it is our earning power's resembling that of our male counterparts, our capacity to live safely and without fear of violence, equitable abortion access in communities in rural and northern parts of our country, or access to child care, women in Canada are tired of having to prove their basic humanity.
This bill is important, and no one should diminish that. Every parent across Canada deserves access to affordable, accessible, high-quality child care. This bill would enshrine this vision in law and would commit the federal government to long-term funding for provinces and indigenous communities. This bill sets out the vision for a national early learning and child care system and the principles guiding federal investment in that system.
Speaking of funding, we need to be clear. There needs to be long-term, sustainable core funding directed at not-for-profit, accessible and universal child care programs. We need to make sure that ECE workers, who are incredible individuals and amongst the most patient people I know, make a living wage and beyond for the work they do. We need to make sure there is investment in infrastructure. I am thinking of indigenous communities here in our region, with some of the youngest populations in our country, that do not have access to adequate day care spaces. We need to make sure the federal government works with first nations, with Inuit communities and with indigenous communities across the country to make sure adequate child care centres are being built.
It is important to acknowledge that this bill would establish a national advisory council on early learning and child care and set out reporting requirements on the progress being made regarding national child care and the federal investments being made in the system.
Finally, it is meant to contribute toward the realization of the right to child care services, which is recognized in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This bill acknowledges Canada's international obligations under the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, as well as that a national child care system must respect the rights of indigenous peoples as affirmed by the Constitution Act of 1982.
Today's work in Parliament and the passing of Bill C-35 is nothing short of historic, but we need to make sure that subsequent governments live up to their obligations in this bill and ensure that there is adequate funding to invest in our most prized resource: our children and our future.
I end by thanking those who have come before us: the feminists, the women, the many people who fought for this day to be a reality and who will continue to fight to make sure that children, women, all of us, get the chance and the support that we all deserve.
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Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise today to debate Bill S-209, an act respecting pandemic observance day, proposed by the hon. member for Vancouver Centre, which would designate March 11 of each year as pandemic observance day to give Canadians an opportunity to commemorate the efforts to get through the pandemic, remember its effects and reflect on ways to prepare for any future pandemics.
First of all, it is important that we first recognize the incredible toll COVID has taken on our country and indeed our world. In Canada, already more than one in 10 Canadians has had some form of COVID. Almost 50,000 Canadians have died as a result of COVID-19. Around the world, the numbers are horrific: 625 million people infected and over 6.5 million deaths.
We know people's lives have been shaped irreparably, in some cases, as a result of COVID. Lives have been put on pause, finances have crumbled, and weddings, funerals, new births and last moments have been missed. Special moments and milestones with loved ones have been missed as well. I would argue there is not one family in our country that has not been touched by the tragedy of COVID-19.
What we are also here to talk about today is the clear fact that much more could have been done, both within our borders and abroad. If we look back to the last couple of years, we need to talk about the support Canadians so desperately needed. We cannot forget the Liberals only wanted to support Canadians with a one-time payment in the face of not just a public health emergency but also a financial crisis for many Canadians. It was the NDP that successfully fought for regular CERB payments, which helped to lift many people up during this time of crisis.
Now, unfortunately, the government is targeting the benefits of people who relied on CERB throughout the pandemic, including many in our region. All the while, wealthy CEOs, who used tax avoidance schemes to avoid paying taxes, and who received support during the pandemic, are getting a free pass. We need to see amnesty for those who needed CERB and applied for it.
Unfortunately, this is in character for the government. It cut the guaranteed income supplement for the most vulnerable seniors, leaving low-income Canadians in desperate situations until New Democrats forced it to reverse the cuts. Recently we learned it cut the Canada child benefit for families struggling to feed their children. It is clear whose side the Liberals are on.
Rich companies that used the wage subsidy, even though they were making profits and gave millions in dividends to their shareholders, are not being asked to pay the money back they received. The government is not hesitating to make hard-working Canadians, who are struggling to make ends meet, to pay back the CERB they desperately needed throughout the pandemic. The reality is that the COVID-19 crisis held up a mirror to the country we have built and the cracks at its foundation.
No one need to look further than the reality of first nations during the COVID-19 pandemic. First nations in our region, such as the Island Lake first nation, which does not have regular hospital access, communities such as OCN, Shamattawa, God's River and others, had such bad COVID outbreaks that the military needed to come in to help. A lack of PPE, testing kits and even nurses and doctors left communities fending for themselves. They were scrambling and without support.
Then we had communities such as Pukatawagan, where the government decided the best way to help community members to isolate was to give them tents in the middle of winter, which nobody from that community asked for. It was not quite the heartlessness of the Harper government sending body bags during the SARS pandemic and H1N1, but it was awfully close. The worst part is that no one in the community even asked for this. We looked into it, and it turned out a board member of the company that made the tents also sat on the COVID-19 supply council, whish was designed to advise the government on procurement during the pandemic. When this came to light, that person was forced to step down.
COVID showed us how vulnerable so many of our institutions are and how ill-prepared we were. A COVID outbreak at a Cargill meat processing plant highlighted how unserious our country is about workers' safety. Over 1,000 cases were linked. People died because they worked in unsafe workplaces.
Throughout the pandemic, we also saw how ill-suited our institutions were in ensuring that the most vulnerable in our society were protected. Our health care system, for which the Prime Minister and the government never replaced the cuts to transfer payments brought in by the previous Conservative government, was stretched beyond its absolute limit. Nurses complained about the lack of PPE while they put their lives on the line to keep people safe and to save what lives they could.
Our behaviour as a country was no better abroad. It was the Liberal government that blocked countries like Bolivia from accessing a Canadian-produced generic vaccine, preferring to put the economic profits of giant pharmaceutical companies ahead of the lives of people around the world. Do not forget that Bolivia reached an agreement with the Canada-based drug manufacturer Biolyse to acquire desperately needed vaccines for a country that, at the time, had only been able to vaccinate 5% of its population. The government, despite publicly stating that it was doing everything in its power to get the vaccine to the global south, worked to block Bolivia's efforts at the WTO. Canada has put lives at risk.
It is abundantly clear that much more could have been done and could still be done, both at home and abroad. The government did the bare minimum and it was up to Canadians to pick up the pieces, with people checking in on their neighbours when they were sick and helping them out with things like groceries and basic necessities.
When we talk about the cracks in our foundation, we also saw the way in which the loss of our vaccine production capacity rendered us at risk. The inability to produce the PPE we needed here at home put us at risk. Publicly owning the capacity that we need to be safe in a pandemic is something that we as Canadians need to act on. We cannot be vulnerable the way we were during the pandemic.
I also want to highlight that many have pointed to the lessons we should be learning from this pandemic. I appreciate the work of Nora Loreto, who wrote a book called Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the Covid-19 Pandemic. It talks about how the media, in many cases the mainstream media, overlooked the reality that was afoot in our country, and how politicians and public health officials were mostly given the benefit of the doubt that what they said was true and that they acted in good faith, when, in many cases, we know that this was not necessarily the case.
Her book documents each month of the first year of the pandemic and examines the issues that emerged, from the disproportionate impact on racialized workers and the people who died in residential care to policing. Her book demonstrates how politicians and uncritical media shaped the popular understanding of the issues. It very much argues that we desperately need to move beyond the idea that individual actions will keep us safe and move toward collective action, backed up by the political will to ultimately put people's lives ahead of profit, something that we did not see happen the way it should have throughout the pandemic.
In wrapping up, I want to share my thoughts with the many people across the country, including here in our north, who lost loved ones to COVID-19. Our thoughts are with them.
We also know that thoughts are not enough. What we need is clear action, so that lives that were lost were not lost in vain and so that we are there to protect workers, people on the margins, indigenous communities and people living in long-term care. We need to protect them going forward.
This requires political will. This requires public investment. This requires supporting our health care system and our health care professionals. It requires public ownership when it comes to the production of vaccines, PPE and the materials we need to keep our community safe. It requires ending the housing crisis in first nations and building hospitals where they are needed for indigenous communities. It requires lifting people up in concrete tangible ways and ultimately making it clear that lives, whether they are in Canada or around the world, are much more important than profit.
We need to act now.
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Madam Speaker, I think we can all agree that, no, communities certainly do not have what it takes, but what we do know is that the federal government has incredible resources to do the work that needs to be done.
We saw during the COVID pandemic the extent to which Canada's federal government stand up and made historic investments, and certainly part of this was the work that we did in the NDP, to keep people in our communities safe in the face of this devastating pandemic, which is ongoing.
Climate change is the greatest threat we are all facing, so let us see that same kind of bold investment. Let us use our Crown corporations. Let us do everything we can to invest boldly and take the action necessary to fight the climate crisis. That starts with supporting our communities and with seeing federal leadership on that front.
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