- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Hamilton Centre
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $131,250.15
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I am gobsmacked by the Conservatives who talk about economics. They talk about inflation, but yet they never talk about corporate profits. He just said that he believed there was automatic scarcity. There is no automatic scarcity. This is something that is constructed by capitalism. There are five families that run our food. We have a cartel with our telecoms. We have a cartel with our banking. It is neo-liberal capitalist design to take the value that is created by workers and to syphon it up to the corporate class, yet they never speak about the profits.
This is not the eighties. This is the result of failed trickle-down economics that, at the end of the day, leaves workers with less money to purchase their basic necessities of life. Will the hon. member please find within his spirit a bit of courage today to stand up and finally talk about the corporate greed that is driving inflation, the corporate greed of the banking class, the corporate greed of the grocers and the corporate greed of the Bay Street elite who are driving inflation, rather than trying to put it on the backs of working-class people?
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Profits, capitalism; it's an easy question.
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Mr. Speaker, we heard the Minister of Natural Resources reference the just transition, the transition to a renewable economy and we heard him reference the VW deal.
As a New Democrat, and recognizing today is May Day, one of the things I think is incredibly important in this conversation is the idea of equivalency. That when workers in the oil patches of Alberta are being transitioned, that they are not just being sent to some job retraining centre and they are actually given prevailing wages and equivalency in their work.
I have not quite heard the government tell Canadians, tell working-class people, those who are currently in a carbon economy, what its plan is to ensure that, when announcement like a $13-billion deal is set for a corporation, it is the workers who are not left behind.
I will say this on May Day, on international labour day, that it cannot just be about talking about jobs. It needs to be talking about good work, good unionized work with benefits and pensions and the security a collective agreement provides. Can the hon. Minister of Natural Resources please enlighten us on the government's plan to make sure the billions of dollars it is sending to corporations actually make it to the tables and bank accounts of working-class Canadians?
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Madam Speaker, I rather enjoy the hon. member for Edmonton Manning. I appreciate his wisdom. He often comes with some really insightful information for the House. He spoke today about a fantasyland. I feel like I am in a fantasyland because it seems that the Conservatives' only solution to housing is to supersede provincial jurisdiction and have the federal government, if I am getting this correctly, intervene in local planning decision-making.
In this new fantasyland from the party of Wexit, Alberta sovereignty and the Buffalo declaration, where does the federal government take over municipal decision-making and start eliminating the gatekeepers at local planning meetings?
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member speaks about common sense, but he has not shared any today. In fact, what he has done is list all the economic violence of capitalism and the impacts it has on everyday Canadians.
When the member talks about the housing market, he never talks about the insatiable greed of the real estate investment trusts, of the speculators, of the big corporate gatekeepers who are crushing our housing market. In fact, housing prices will not come down until the government acts to curtail inflationary investor activity in the residential market.
Just like the leader of the Conservative Party, this budget refuses to take on greedy private sector gatekeepers who are driving up the price of housing for their own corporate greed. Why are the Conservatives focusing only on municipal permitting when there are so many greedy, capitalist, private sector gatekeepers responsible for the current housing crisis?
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- Apr/19/23 4:50:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as a former city councillor, I was the first one in the province of Ontario to take on payday loans. I heard the hon. member mention the predatory practice of payday loan. At that point in time, it was a provincial Liberal government that was paying lip service to any kind of meaningful reform, yet in this budget, the remedies the Liberals have for payday loans are once again lip service.
The Liberals would go to the industry and ask it to lower the rates, while the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby has Bill C-213, a bill that is ready to go. It is a real, meaningful bill that would include amending the Criminal Code to lower the maximum legal interest rate from 60% to 30% and that would include the calculation of the interest rate within the overall charges for these payday loans.
Why is it that, when the Liberal government has the power and the opportunity and the willing partners in the NDP to make true reforms to the predatory usury and the loan sharking that are payday loans, it refuses to do it? Is it because the past association president was Stan Keyes, the former Liberal?
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