- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Hastings—Lennox and Addington
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $121,555.68
- Government Page
- May/2/23 12:54:32 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after serving on a municipal council for 15 years, I completely understand where the member is coming from, but what we need to recognize is that the indication of our housing situation is getting worse. It is not getting better.
The government is extremely crafty at announcements and reannouncing an announcement. It is not working.
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- May/2/23 12:41:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, since the government came into power, the cost of housing has doubled. Nine out of 10 young Canadians believe they will never have home ownership. Families from coast to coast to coast cannot even afford the interest on their mortgages. Numerous rankings regularly list Vancouver and Toronto as among the most unaffordable cities in the world. To put that into context, they are worse than those notorious for their high cost of living like New York. Perhaps the most illustrative comparison is that with our neighbour down south.
The United States has just shy of 332 million people living on 9.8 million square kilometres. In contrast, Canada has 38 million people living on 10 million square kilometres. In no world does it make sense that housing should cost twice as much here than in the U.S. despite its density being nearly 10 times our own.
The simple reality is that the government's mismanagement coupled with local NIMBY gatekeepers block development and drive up mortgages and housing costs. This is the only explanation of the fact that we have the fewest homes in the G7 per capita despite having the most space.
The Prime Minister has enabled municipalities that block development and rob our future generations of a chance of home ownership. A Conservative government would put an end to that. We would remove the bureaucratic gatekeepers from the equation, free up land and speed up the accreditation and permit process to get more shovels in the ground as soon as possible. This is a dire necessity that needed action yesterday, not tomorrow.
In eastern Ontario, a recent report stated that our region needed to build upward of 14,000 rental units just to meet demand. This does not include any actual growth, but solely takes into account what we need to build to meet the demand. This is ludicrous and a direct result of the failure of governments at all levels that acquiesce to activists.
This crisis is not just limited to housing. Just last week, I received an email from the Food Sharing Project, which serves Hastings—Lennox and Addington and the Kingston area by providing food and equipment to schools. It said:
The 2022-2023 school year has been unprecedented for The Food Sharing Project. Due to increasing demand and the skyrocketing costs of food, we are facing a significant budget shortfall as we are now sending out over $25,000 in food every week. We need your help to ensure that students do not go through the school day hungry.
This is the reality of the Prime Minister's Canada: kids who cannot eat and parents who cannot afford shelter.
Inflation is at a 40-year high. Canadians are sacrificing on food for shelter. Mortgages have doubled since 2015, averaging approximately $3,000 a month. Mortgage interest costs rocketed up to 26% in March alone. Red tape is costing an additional $200,000 on new homes. Average rent has nearly doubled for a two-bedroom apartment since 2015, increasing to $2,200 from $1,171 a month. Our youth have lost their dream of home ownership.
The current housing crisis is affecting every single riding across Canada. Each and every one of us in the House is elected to this place to represent our constituents. We have all been contacted by our constituents. On this side of the House, we have a plan to fix the housing crisis, with six simple solutions for Canada.
Canada's Conservatives would require large urban centres where the cost of living is particularly egregious, like Vancouver, to substantially increase home building in their borders. Those that cannot comply would face penalties in the vein of withheld federal funds. This is completely in line with existing legislation regarding provincial governments under the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act.
We would crack down on everyone's most annoying neighbours, the NIMBYs. We would implement a system for residents to raise concerns about the pedantic obstructionism. Should the decision body decide the complaint is well founded, we would supply infrastructure dollars to get those housing units built. In short, we would out-NIMBY the NIMBYs.
We would incentivize municipalities to increase their housing capacities by rewarding those that take the necessary steps to build homes in the form of a building bonus. This would give the latitude to municipalities to decide how to best address their individual needs instead of a cookie-cutter approach, which so often fails in a nation as large and diverse as Canada.
Further, we would require any municipality that seeks federal funds to pre-approve high-density and employment applications on available lands surrounding areas such as bus and subway stops. This would allow common sense residential zones to be built around accessible, walkable areas so residents will not need to choose between living downtown so they can walk to work and living in the suburbs but requiring a car. This is good policy, not only for the pocketbook, but also for the environment.
We would take advantage of the recent remote work paradigm by selling off 15% of federal buildings and have them turned into affordable housing. These buildings are generally already located in urban centres and are already built. The only construction would be converting them and rezoning them to be residential. We expect this would result in 5,500 new residential buildings capable of housing dozens, if not hundreds, of units each.
However, perhaps most importantly, we would stop printing money. Taking inspiration from the Harper era's one-for-one rule regarding red tape, we will require every dollar that we spend to be matched by a dollar saved. This would end the constant cycle of inflationary bubbles caused by out-of-touch central bankers who, on occasion, have helped created the current housing and market crisis.
I would also like to take a moment to address a somewhat different housing crisis affecting some Canadians, our armed forces. The federal government recently implemented changes to the post living differential. This is essentially a top-up for CAF members based on where they live. The government rightly sought to update the formula to better address the current economic climate of the posting areas, as the initial computation was done years ago.
While the formula was due for an update, the government completely revamped the benefit in a manner that has massive financial implications for longer-serving members. They get penalized for being promoted, changing bases, being married to CAF members and succeeding. They are, quite literally, being more penalized the longer they serve. This is having massive consequences for troop morale in a time when retention is quite literally an institutional crisis that cannot be understated. This will add to the already ongoing dearth of long-serving members, as they are looking to transition out of the armed forces. This is unacceptable, and it needs to be addressed. Those men and women who are serving, or who are thinking of serving, should know that a Conservative government would have their backs.
Canada's Conservatives will build and bring it home.
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- Apr/27/23 2:45:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years under the Prime Minister, many Canadians cannot afford a place to live. The Liberals have committed $90 billion to housing, and what do they have to show for it? It is a record of unprecedented mismanagement and ineffective governance.
Mortgages and rents have doubled. It now costs an average of $2,500 a month to rent one room in a townhouse. Where is the Prime Minister during the crisis? He would rather be gallivanting to New York City. I cannot wait to see the outrageous bill he will foist on struggling Canadians for this junket.
When will the Prime Minister and the government get serious and get back to work?
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- Apr/25/22 11:14:10 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Avalon for bringing this incredibly important issue to the floor of the House of Commons. It goes without saying that the issue of long-term care is perhaps, along with the cost of living, one of the issues heard most from concerned constituents by all members in this place.
The population in my riding of Hastings—Lennox and Addington has one of the highest percentages of seniors in this country. If we couple that statistic with the rural nature of a large majority of the riding, suitable housing for seniors is a real issue.
Not only do we need to make sure there are enough beds in facilities, but we need to ensure that those facilities are spread throughout the riding to accommodate the decentralized population centres across thousands of kilometres of Hastings—Lennox and Addington.
Many of my rural counterparts do not benefit from having the centralized smaller footprints of our urban colleagues, which means much more costly overhead in terms of capital and staff in getting our facilities set up.
While this is certainly daunting, recently Hastings—Lennox and Addington served as a good example of how the provinces can start the process on their own. Recently, the Ontario government announced $1.8 million of additional funding for long-term care facilities in Hastings—Lennox and Addington, and Kingston and the Islands.
This affects over 500 beds across these two ridings, and I am sure my colleague for Kingston and the Islands would be happy to join me in thanking the Conservative government of Doug Ford for this very important investment in long-term care across our riding. While this is certainly a positive step in the right direction, far more work needs to be done in Hastings—Lennox and Addington and across our country.
The reality of the situation is that the COVID-19 pandemic shed a jarring light on a problem that has been festering in Canada for decades. It was the dirty little secret that millions of Canadians did not want to acknowledge: Many of their parents were living in dismal conditions in our long-term care facilities.
In my opinion, the most eye-opening example of this was when the Ontario and Quebec governments called in the military to provide logistical support for their overworked caregivers in Operation Laser. Following this deployment, the Canadian Armed Forces released a document that contained five annexes titled observation reports. These chronicled concerning shortcomings that were further exacerbated by COVID-19 at five long-term care facilities.
I want to apologize to my colleagues for the graphic nature of much of these reports, but as someone responsible for the seniors' portfolio, I believe that it is incumbent on me to remind the House of the contents of the reports and read them into the record.
I want to reiterate that while the following excerpts are, for lack of a better term, horrific, they are not indicative of all facilities. However, the fact is that these situations occurred. Even if they were isolated instances, it is one time too many.
In the first facility, the report noted the following, among many other issues:
Reusing hypodermoclysis supplies even after sterility has been obviously compromised (e.g. a catheter pulled out and on the floor for an undetermined amount of time);
Poor palliative care standards—inadequate dosing intervals for some medications...
Generally very poor peri-catheterization care reported. Example: retracting penis foreskin to clean isn't happening on a widespread level. CAF have found nearly a dozen incidents of bleeding fungal infections....
Extra soaker pad: residents who routinely soil their bed despite incontinence products are not permitted to have an extra soaker pad or towel...to help protect sheets and blankets from soiling.... [The] rationalization used is that an extra pad is undignified....
New staff that have been brought to LTCF haven't been trained or oriented.
[LTCF] is “severely understaffed during day due to resident comorbidities and needs....
[Medical doctors] not present and have to be accessed by phone....
CAF [members] have witnessed aggressive behaviour, which ACC staff assessed as abusive or inappropriate.
In a second facility, the following were noted:
Little to no disinfection had been conducted at the facility prior to CAF operations. Significant gross fecal contamination was noted in numerous patient rooms;
Insect infestation was noted within [the long-term care facility]—ants and cockroaches plus unknown observed;
Delayed changing soiled residents, leading to skin breakdown....
Forceful feeding observed by staff causing audible choking/aspiration, forceful hydration observed by staff causing audible choking/aspiration;
Patients observed crying for help with staff not responding for 30 minutes to over two hours....
SNO reported incident of patients' enteral feed bottle not being changed for so long the contents had become foul and coagulated; date and expiration of the contents not noted on the bottle;
SNO reported incident of permanent catheter being in situ three weeks beyond scheduled change date....
and,
[Personal support workers] often rushed and leave food on table, but patients often cannot reach or cannot feed themselves, therefore missing meals or not receiving meals for hours.
This is just a small section of the report covering two specific facilities. It is disturbing, yet these same scenes are being played out across our nation and have been going on for decades. We in this nation seem to be content with treating our senior citizens, the people who literally built this country and raised our entire nation, no better than we would treat an animal. It is a national tragedy and a national shame that thousands of Canadian seniors consider the previously mentioned incidents to be part of regular life.
As I have previously mentioned in the House, in 2018, the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities released a report entitled, “Advancing Inclusion and Quality of Life for Seniors”. That report identified a number of issues surrounding long-term care and suggested a number of actionable recommendations to address those issues. It is extremely unfortunate that, over four years later, we are still moving motions to crassly declare our great outrage over an issue this Parliament was directly made aware of at the time, but did not move fast enough to address.
Unfortunately, it seems to be the modus operandi of the current government to move a non-instructive motion, develop a framework, strike a working group, create a road map and do anything except actually address the issue at hand.
This year's budget is another perfect example of this mentality. Despite all of the grandstanding from the government about it having the backs of our seniors, it provided $20 million in its support for seniors budget line. That is $20 million out of $56.6 billion in proposed new spending. To put that into perspective, for every dollar the government has proposed to spend, Canadian seniors get less than half of a tenth of a cent.
To finish off, I would like to reiterate that I am not assigning blame to my hon. friend across the way who moved this very important motion, but more so to his colleagues on the front bench, who dither away while our Canadian seniors are suffering. I really want to thank him for bringing this motion to the floor. I hope that he will continue to advocate for Canadian seniors and press his caucus colleagues into meaningful action on this file.
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- Apr/8/22 11:50:29 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday’s budget will not put money into the pockets of young families in Ivanhoe. It will not build houses for people in Tamworth, and it will not fix the labour shortage plaguing the entire construction industry across my riding. What Canadians want and what Canadians need is a foundational plan from the government to fix our broken housing sector. This means lowering inflation, lowering the debt and letting Canadian families keep their hard-earned money.
When will the government stop holding ambitious home-seeking Canadians back and start helping them?
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