Adam Vaughan

[Telecommunications, February 23rd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, it is a point of order. Because this is a virtual Parliament and because usually late shows are not governed by the same rules, the member opposite, who asked me the question, repeatedly interrupted me during my answer. I am sure that while the question will get a lot of social media replay, I have the equal right to have my answer uninterrupted. I would like to restate my answer to the question.

[Housing, February 23rd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, solving this crisis is not as easy as booking a ticket to Disneyland for one's family. It takes a lot more work and dedication.

Let me quote what the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada said about our announcement. It states:

“We are very pleased by this news, which closes the final gap in our ‘You Hold the Key’ campaign objectives,” said CHF Canada President Tina Stevens. “Supporting vulnerable households is more important than ever, so we thank [the] Minister...for this decision.”

The co-op housing sector knows what we are doing and is thanking us for it. The homeless sector knows what we are doing and is thanking us for it.

What is completely unclear to me is why the member opposite chooses not to report the facts and build on truth as opposed to skewing the numbers to prosecute an argument. Let us deal with real numbers and let us get real results. Like the national housing strategy has delivered, let us deliver real housing to real people in real time with real investments.

Quite frankly, the Parliamentary Budget Office misses the key component of the national housing strategy, which is that it has opened the door to every single indigenous housing provider to apply every single component of the national housing strategy in order to receive funding.

We will not stop until we properly house every Canadian we possibly can. The goal is to eliminate chronic homelessness and get everybody who needs housing housed by the end of the national housing strategy's first chapter as we prepare to write the second one.

[Housing, February 23rd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, there is a whole lot to correct there, starting with the fact that it was a $15-million announcement, not a $12-million announcement. This was done without any suggestion from the NDP that money was needed. I would further add that it is not our government that allowed those agreements to expire; the previous Conservative government did. While we have picked up all other agreements in the meantime through the national housing strategy, we have now announced an interim measure to re-enrol lapsed agreements in the provinces identified and have committed to enrolling all of them in the upcoming budget.

All of that said, the indigenous housing program to which the member speaks of, which is identified as a key core need in the national housing strategy, is currently being studied at committee after we made a commitment in the throne speech to fulfill the commitment to deliver an indigenous-led urban, rural and northern housing strategy. That work is under way and those funding opportunities are under way.

I wish the member opposite had attended committee to hear the Parliamentary Budget Officer answer questions. He said the bulk of the funding is transferred by the federal government to provincial governments, but he has failed to provide us with the details of exactly how that has impacted indigenous households, 53% of which live in subsidized units. Those dollars are funded through a provincial-federal accord, which is also accomplished under the national housing strategy.

The national housing strategy now stands at $70 billion, and it is immediately addressing needs through a rapid housing initiative, with a $1-billion investment to get more than 3,000 units of housing into the hands of housing providers across the country to meet the needs of the homeless. We are on the verge of launching the next three chapters of the national housing strategy, which are to fortify the co-op sector; build the urban, rural and northern indigenous housing stream; and fulfill our commitment to end chronic homelessness in this country.

I will add one last thing to this point, and it is very critical. What is going on in Vancouver East is serious, and for the member opposite to bring issues to our attention on a daily basis is good work on her part to represent the needs of her constituents. She says we are walking away from the commitments we are making and are not addressing them, and she characterizes them as insufficient. That is fine insofar as we need to do more, as I will never disagree that more is better. However, to pretend that we have not done what we said is wrong, and to pretend that we did not take the initiative to fix the co-op sector that had lapsed is wrong as well.

In the question she asked that led to this late show discussion, she suggested it was just end-of-year funding. It is not. It is bridge funding to get to a permanent solution. She criticized us for having it end in 2028. The reality is we will put the entire co-op sector into one funding envelope so that the practice the Conservatives had of allowing operating agreements to expire in the middle of the night will, thankfully, come to an end in this country.

The co-op sector is stronger because of our government and stronger because of the national housing strategy, and I really wish the NDP would help us build it instead of just criticizing it.

[Housing, February 19th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, the opposite is in fact true. The rapid housing initiative is a remarkable $1-billion investment directly into the communities that need support to support vulnerable Canadians as they look for housing in this COVID pandemic, as well as through the housing crisis.

I will remind the Conservative member opposite that the policy his party put in place required federal dollars not to be spent on homeless people unless they had been on the street for six months. It was six months before they could receive a penny of support through reaching home in rural, urban and northern communities. That would put a teenager on the street for six months in the middle of winter without any support.

I will take no lessons on fighting homelessness from the Conservatives. They had no fight—

[COVID-19 Emergency Response, February 18th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I would encourage my colleague to reach out to the member for Markham—Stouffville. As a provincial minister in Ontario, she built a basic income pilot project in Hamilton, only to see the Conservatives destroy it, despite the fact it was showing great promise. Before it was allowed to report out fully and had its work destroyed by the Ford government, one of the early findings was that it actually encouraged people to work and that people actually saw a way to use social benefit to improve their standing in their own lives.

I agree with her that the time has come for concerted action, and I hope she would reach out and discuss the findings of that report, because the member in our caucus is a wealth of information, as is the minister from the treasury board. It is his life's work, as a professor in Laval. His thoughts on it are absolutely phenomenal.

The issue is that basic income alone will not solve problems. Basic income alone does not create a housing system that someone can afford just because they have the rent money. We have to design systems for basic income to work within. Housing in particular is one of the key drivers of poverty. It is one of the key drivers of health outcomes, and of the justice of which she speaks. Without the housing system in place, and without intentionally building affordable housing, if we put all the money into basic income and do not spread it through those other systems, access to child care, access to health care, access to housing and access to this country's wealth are limited for far too many people.

While we have to achieve on income reform, we also have to build systems around it to make that income reform work better, work harder and deliver real results to those people.

I look forward to our conversations.

[COVID-19 Emergency Response, February 18th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, this is the first time I get to answer a question from the new member.

I worked in a newsroom with someone called Bob Hunter, He was the person who termed the phrase “Greenpeace” and in fact had membership card no. 1. He never joined the Green Party. Part of the problem was the wonky approach the party used to have using Conservative-style tax credits to achieve environmental goals and nothing else. I am glad to see the Green Party joining the social justice conversation with good ideas and with individuals who have broadened the conversation around what justice looks like in a social context. Therefore, I welcome this question and the idea.

The member talked about seniors, people with disabilities, the homeless and people stuck in the gig economy, whether the tech gig economy or the seasonal employment that defines parts of New Brunswick.

She also talked about the success of and what the child benefit had taught us, because it is a form of guaranteed income. It guarantees income for all families. It is means-tested in a way that is sensitive. It has delivered hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty because it is there for them day in and day out, month in and month out. Those are policies the Green Party supported in our first budget whereas the NDP did not.

I was the parliamentary secretary to the minister who was in charge at the time, but he is now the head of the Treasury Board. He talked about changing the social safety net into a trampoline, about pulling the cords apart to understand which ones needed to be thicker, not to catch people but to bounce them back up. The federal government provides several different forms of income supports that when looked at as a collection is a form of basic income. However, because they are separate programs, there are cracks between them, and those are the very cracks the member opposite is talking about people falling between. We saw this with people with disabilities during the pandemic.

The federal government did not have a coordinated single database of people receiving the benefit because of this patchwork of tax credits and provincial programs, veterans benefits and CPP. When we knitted that back together again, we found we could do more with a cohesive and coordinated approach as opposed to that patchwork approach or those single strands in the social safety net, which are good enough for some but not good enough for all.

Therefore, we have started to look at seniors pensions, boosting the OAS and looking at how seniors poverty rolls through generationally as seniors grow older. We are taking a look at the disability pension and have done it through the lens of the disability rights legislation we passed in the last Parliament.

We have strengthened the national housing strategy from the $40 billion the Prime Minister referenced earlier this year now closer to $72 billion, and the rapid housing initiative is filling those gaps and making a difference in the lives of people in Fredericton and New Brunswick in particular.

Regarding the gig economy and the child benefit, I agree. We had a meeting today at the human resource committee of Parliament. We looked at the way EI does and does not function. It is built for an employment structure from the last century, with a computer system that is almost even older than that. It is time for a massive reform. Whether we call it basic income, guaranteed income, universal income, the name is not so important. I do not care about the bumper sticker; I care about the policy. It is time for all of us as parliamentarians to take a look at how the new economies have emerged in our ridings. Whether in the north, the remote, the coast, downtowns, small towns or small municipalities across the Prairies, we have to find a way to reform EI, to restructure the income streams of the federal government supports and to achieve the goals about which the member has spoken.

Who gets the credit, whose bumper sticker is best, I could not care less, but the issues the member is raising are the right ones. The issues we are working on are the same ones. I hope she sees us moving toward that goal even if we do not achieve it necessarily under the banner she has given us. What COVID has taught us through this process is that we can do better because “better is always possible”, to quote the Prime Minister.

[Families, Children and Social Development, February 18th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, as committed to in the throne speech, we are working on a program that will start as soon as the opposition supports our budget process. We are in a minority Parliament, so the parties on the opposite side have responsibilities to these aspirations, not just in stating them and championing them with bumper sticker slogans, but in actually working with us to deliver programs.

We are not going to talk about the past, but the vote in 2005 was profoundly destructive to the goals and programs the member opposite speaks about. He has given us his word that he is not going to spring an election on the budget. I am giving my word that we are doing everything we can to deliver the day care system that he speaks about and dreams of.

We all need to work together to get this done. Voters have given us a minority Parliament. Let us make it work. Let us make it work for children and for child care, and let us not let them down.

We have a commitment from the member's party. We have my minister's commitment to deliver on the accords we have built. Let us move together to realize early learning and child care, and let us make sure we work with the provinces and territories to realize this dream as soon as possible.

[Families, Children and Social Development, February 18th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I want first to acknowledge how refreshing it is to see someone who has a business portfolio in a critic's job and be talking about child care. We do not build strong businesses in this country if we do not tap into the full array and spectacular diversity of our workforce, and we cannot get that if we do not support families and women as they move to make sure that those with skills can access the best jobs possible. We do not do that if families are not fully supported, and child care and early learning is a critical part of that.

I will also say that child care and early learning are essential to developing a future workforce. Every study shows that the sooner we get kids into early learning environments, including head start programs, and attach child care to educational systems, the better the outcomes, and we know this.

With knowledge, once we know something, the choice is in how we act on it. Our government did not wait for the pandemic to invest in child care. In our very first mandate, we put a national child care accord together. We negotiated with the provinces and territories, and now all provinces and territories have signed on to a $7-billion program. That is already producing results in communities right across the country, but what the pandemic showed us is that this is not enough.

I agree with my colleague opposite, and I could quote to him from the throne speech where we commit to a national system of child care, a national system of early learning and to working with provinces and territories to deliver this, but also to working with cities and communities and, most importantly, indigenous communities, because for the first time ever, our government has established an early learning and child care strategy with, by and for indigenous communities, led by and for indigenous communities right across the country.

That said, the issue is knowing the next step. The member opposite has suggested that we are looking at a series of tax credits to achieve this goal. I agree with him that tax credits will not achieve this goal. We do not build child care capacity if we do not build child care spaces, if we do not fund training to a high quality and make sure we achieve on that front. We also do not do it if we do not understand that close to 83% of the cost of child care is salaries, and therefore training and developing the workforce has to be part of a national strategy.

Let me assure the member opposite that the commitments that have been made in the throne speech are serious and that the budget submissions our ministry has made to the process are just as serious, and we intend to deliver on this commitment in a very profound way.

I will also say this: It was refreshing to hear the leader of the New Democrats in the House stand up and say that he will not defeat the government just as we get to the finish line on this critical issue, and it gave me hope that this system will come into existence. That is good news.

While neither one of us was an MP in the House in 2005, I was a journalist covering the fall of the Martin government. When we lost that government and when that government was not re-elected, for whatever reason we lost a fully funded national child care plan, and we have never recovered from that moment in time. I am glad to hear that the NDP is going to put good policy in front of politics and is going to put kids into child care spaces. I am glad to hear that the NDP is not looking at putting New Democrats into the House as a way of achieving this, but instead is looking at working with us to deliver the commitments we will fulfill in the upcoming budget.

Child care is critically important to families in this country, critically important to women in this country, and critically important to a pandemic recovery that is just for everybody. We will not recover from this pandemic if we do not understand that. I join the member opposite in demanding a national child care program, and I do that as the parliamentary secretary to the minister who will deliver such an accord.

Luckily, because we took action in our first mandate and because we invested $7.5 billion, we have an accord that we can build on to deliver this program quickly and we have a table with first ministers right across the country, including with indigenous governments, to work on this and deliver the results that the member opposite spoke to, for exactly the right reasons and for exactly the issues he raised.

Let us put the past behind us. I will not talk about 2005 if he does not talk about whatever decade of broken promises that were there before my kid came along. She is now out of university, but I mean the promises made before she was born. She is now graduated. I would have loved to have had a child care program in 2005 for my son, trust me.

Let us put the past behind us, let us look to the future and let us make sure that the future is female.

[Instruction to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, January 27th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I would like to speak in favour of this motion. There are some significant issues covered by the proposal, and a full and fulsome study by a committee of Parliament, with recommendations back to the House as well as to cabinet and the Prime Minister, are in order.

There is an old saying in municipal affairs that if we do not manage our water, our water manages us. This was abundantly clear, unfortunately, in Calgary where a flood in 2013 did about $3.4 billion worth of damage to the city. That could have been avoided if an investment of $600 million had been made in flood protection in the river valleys that run through the city. The call from the City was made to the federal government, but it was dismissed by federal Conservatives at the time because it appeared that they were supporting the impacts of climate change. While the Tories were still struggling with their denial of climate change and the science of climate change, they allowed Calgary to fend for itself. In response, the damage was done because water does not wait for Conservative leadership to catch up to science. Science is science, geology is geology, and water is water.

This underscores a need. We have had five “storms of the century” in the last 15 years in Toronto alone. Water is going to play an increasing role in significant economic disruption but, more importantly, in population displacement and population loss in parts of the country.

The forest fires that have been plaguing western Canada are a direct result of drought and other influences tied to the management of water, and those fires do extraordinary damage. They are seen as fire and emergency situations, not as water and climate change issues. Until we start to broaden our understanding of exactly what the impact on water is as it relates to climate change, we are going to be playing catch-up on this. We are going to be spending billions of dollars mitigating the impacts of badly managed water, instead of spending the hundreds millions of dollars it would take to hopefully create and deliver much stronger environmental policies but also much stronger water policies.

I will note that I represent a riding that, as can be seen from the map behind me, is part of the Great Lakes system. There are a number of issues around this bill that are related to that.

For example, the Great Lakes are home to 51 million jobs largely dependent on fresh water, on power generated by water, and on the lakes' shipping capacity. All of these things combine to create an economic vitality that is quite profound in terms of its impact on the continent, so there are a significant number of jobs. In fact, one-quarter of all Canadians draw their drinking water from the Great Lakes. We have to be smart about how we manage this asset or, as I said, this asset will manage us.

The situation is fluctuating. It has great volatility and great capacity to cause danger. It is not simply something, as a member from the Bloc said, to relegate to the Province of Quebec. How do we relegate water to a province when it crosses boundaries every time it flows? How do we relegate management of the Ottawa Valley to one province over another, any more than we tell people in Montreal they should be flooded so we can spare folks on the north shore of Lake Ontario from being flooded, or vice versa?

Clearly a national conversation needs to be had. Clearly a national strategy needs to be enunciated. We can look at the 16 different international joint commissions that govern water in Canada, and the four national jurisdictional bodies that govern water from the prairie rivers to Lake of the Woods in the province of Manitoba. We can look at the Ottawa River, as I mentioned earlier. We can look at the Mackenzie River Delta. All of these interprovincial and interterritorial waterways have a profound impact on everybody who shares that water.

The floods that happen in the Ottawa Valley do not distinguish between the Quebec and the Ontario sides of the river, or between the Quebec and the Ontario citizens who are impacted. Neither do the floods contain the economic damage province to province, and simply say one province alone has to deal with it, and that the country is going to walk away from it because some sort of archaic, bizarre interpretation of the Canadian Constitution is that we do not share resources like water across provincial and territorial boundaries. That literally does not hold water as an argument.

In terms of the Great Lakes, our government has stepped up on these fronts, but the stepping up on these issues requires us to work within regulatory frameworks where we never have total control of the issue or a global perspective on what is happening with water, and we do not understand, from a national perspective at all times, what the best strategic direction forward is.

For example, the member from the Bloc said that water flow is an issue when navigating up the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the great lakes. The reason water flow is an issue is that we are trying to drain the Great Lakes because of their record-high and fluctuating water levels due driven by climate change and due to habitat destruction in the watersheds around the Great Lakes. When we do not plant trees or protect wetlands, as we are seeing in Ontario now with the MZOs from Queen's Park and when we do not protect our conservation authorities, as we are also seeing being undermined by moves at the provincial legislature, what ends up happening is that the Great lakes overflow with water and the flooding is profound. We had six hundred homes in my riding alone flooded in the last couple of years, and the way we have protected those waterfront properties is by flowing the water out of the Great Lakes faster. That has implications for shipping. It has implications for Montreal and downstream, and to simply pretend that we can manage the Great Lakes without understanding the impact in Quebec and downstream into the Atlantic provinces is just absurd.

This is a critically important issue for protecting water quality; protecting the integrity of our habitat, our wetlands and our river basins, as well as our Great Lakes; and also managing the navigational and shipping capacity that water offers us, in particular to cities like Hamilton, where the agricultural business there depends on getting boats through the St. Lawrence River. We cannot do that if the water is too low or too high, or if it is moving too fast or too slowly. All of these issues require comprehensive, coordinated action and investment in a stronger water agency to make sure that we have coordinated action and that the best science is available so that the best conservation and displacement policies are put in place. As well, this would inform us on how to manage the environment upstream, so that we create a more balanced approach to the way in which water impacts us right across the country.

I will also say this about water, the impact it has on cities and settlements and why this institute is so critically important, which is that we have a fifth of the world's freshwater in Canada. That commodity is going to be result in unbelievable economic opportunities and advantages in the coming years. It will also be what will give us the ability to survive the next century, if we manage it properly. To start trying to solve the problem after it has been created is like trying to mop up a house after there has been a leak in a bathroom. The thing to do now with water is to attend to it immediately before it causes damage that takes out so much in so many communities around our waterways.

When we take a look at this proposal to study the joint commissions and international treaties and the interprovincial and territorial treaties, indigenous water lot rights and indigenous approaches to conservation, as well as indigenous treaty rights tied to water lots, we are examining the water quality issues that are required for human existence and industrial standards. In Pittsburgh a few years ago, they had to close high-tech plant because the water quality was so low they could not get the water clean enough to do some of the high-tech work in that part of the country.

When we take a look at water quality, it is not just a question of human existence; it is also what our economy is based on. We have an economy that is based far more than on just the fish and what we pull out of the water; it is the use of the water in industrial processes. It is critical.

When we take a look at our energy and switching away from fossil fuels where possible and moving toward renewables where there is an opportunity, water plays a critical role in that new energy future in this country.

As we move toward more electric vehicles and greater use of batteries as a mobile power source for more than just vehicles, but also for all sorts of machines, water is going to play an increasingly important role in all of this.

If we do not understand where freshwater is being managed, what the goals and strategies are and the impacts of decisions as they relate to the economic dynamics around water conservation, water usage and the use in industry as well as power generation; if we do not also take a look at the impact in terms of the storms and flooding we are seeing and the droughts that we are trying to mitigate, but also take a look at the climate change impact and where water—

[Families, Children and Social Development, December 11th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I am sure the member is as proud as I am to be part of a government that has advanced $420 million for staffing and training for early learning and child care in the next year. It builds on close to a billion dollars, a historic amount of money invested in the child care and learning system this year, which builds on a $7.5-billion investment and accords with provinces and territories as we move toward a national system.

I was here in 2005 and watched the NDP keep families locked in a house as they gambled for seats in this House. I hope this time around the NDP does not play those childish games, but it will have to wait for its leader to get off TikTok and stop playing video games before we actually find out.