Alexandre Boulerice

[Business of Supply, May 13th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I think we would all agree that a political party must be prepared for an election. However, that is not the same as threatening to trigger an election.

As the leader of the Bloc Québécois said, if you look at the reasoning from another perspective, it would mean that we are living in a dictatorship until the pandemic is over. Logically speaking, then, does this mean that the Bloc Québécois would now be okay with a dictatorship? That would surprise me, unless the party is doing an about-face.

As for the wage subsidy, I am proud to say that, if not for the NDP, the wage subsidy would have remained at 10%, which is what the Conservatives, or rather the Liberals, had originally planned. Pardon my mistake, since they are no different. The NDP caucus fought to ensure that businesses had access to a 75% wage subsidy.

[Business of Supply, May 13th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in today's discussion on the Bloc Québécois's opposition motion.

It gives me an opportunity to comment on something that New Democrats care a lot about, and that is the ability to stay the course and be consistent. Not every political party has that ability, and I find myself in a rather unusual position in that I support the motion but am struggling to understand the Bloc Québécois's approach.

I would like to reread the motion:

That:

(a) the House remind the government that a general election was held in October 2019 and sadly note that more than 1.3 million Canadians, including almost 360,000 Quebecers, have been infected with COVID-19 and that nearly 25,000 people have died as a result; and

(b) in the opinion of the House, holding an election during a pandemic would be irresponsible, and that it is the responsibility of the government to make every effort to ensure that voters are not called to the polls as long as this pandemic continues.

That is good. That is what the NDP has been saying for months, but is it what the Bloc Québécois and the member for Beloeil—Chambly have been saying for months?

I have here a Radio-Canada article from about six or seven months ago. I will read the end of the article, which shows that things have changed dramatically.

The article says, “As for whether a second COVID-19 wave could interfere with his plan, [the Bloc Québécois leader] says there are ways to keep people safe at the polls. He thinks COVID-19 itself is not enough of a reason to avoid triggering an election. ‘If we follow that reasoning to its logical conclusion, that would mean that as long as we are in a pandemic, we live in a dictatorship.’” That was the Bloc Québécois leader's conclusion then.

I wonder what happened. The only explanation I can think of is that the Bloc Québécois caucus and members did a little soul-searching and thought about whether holding an election during a pandemic would be the safe, sensible and responsible thing to do, given the presence of the virus and its variants. I am happy that the Bloc Québécois has come on side with the NDP and its leader, who have been arguing for months that it would be unwise.

An election could put people at risk. Hundreds of cases are being diagnosed every day. Not long ago, Quebec, Ontario and other provinces were reporting thousands of cases. The Bloc Québécois's change of heart is hard to comprehend.

A short while ago, the Bloc Québécois was boasting that it would hold to its convictions, that the NDP would save the Liberals and that it would be all right if there were an election because the Bloc was standing tall. Today, the Bloc is presenting a motion saying it would be a bad idea to hold an election. What happened?

I get the impression that the member for Beloeil—Chambly had a road to Damascus moment. He saw the light and fell off his horse. Something must have happened to him for him to say that he would avoid an election out of respect for Canadians. I find it extremely interesting to see the Bloc Québécois finally come around to the NDP's sensible, reasonable and responsible arguments. We have been saying over and over for months now that we will not risk our constituents' health and safety by holding an election no one wants.

None of my constituents in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie are telling me that it is time to hold an election and that it is really a priority. No one is telling me they would be happy about it, that it would be a good thing, that it would be easy and fun. We saw quite clearly what happened with the election in Newfoundland and Labrador.

For months now, the Bloc Québécois has been threatening to trigger an election. They did it during the first, second and third waves. Today, they came around to the NDP's arguments, and that is just fine. I will take it, but I am having trouble following the Bloc's reasoning. That is why I said how important it is to stay the course and be consistent.

This week is National Nursing Week, a time to recognize the work of nurses, who are doing a fantastic job. For over a year now, nurses have been on the front lines in our health care facilities, saving lives, often at the risk of their own. Let us not forget the other health care professionals either, like physicians, orderlies and technicians.

I think that, out of respect for these people, the work they do and the risks they take, the Bloc should have said from the outset, as the NDP did, that it would not increase the risk of spreading the virus by triggering an election, which involves door-knocking, rallies and line-ups to vote. That would have been the right thing to do from the beginning.

In the article I quoted from a few months ago, did the leader of the Bloc Québécois forget to respect the work of these professionals? I am not accusing anyone. I am simply asking valid questions. It seems to me that this is something that can be done, since I have already heard it somewhere.

If we want to avoid putting the people who work in our health care system at risk, people who have had it tough for months, who are dropping like flies and whose working conditions are challenging, the right thing to do is to say that there should not be an election as long as the pandemic continues.

I sincerely wish the Bloc Québécois had said so much sooner and shown consistency out of respect for health care professionals and the health and safety of all Canadians. It is good that it got there in the end.

Going back to health care professionals and National Nursing Week, I think we obviously need to talk about the federal government's responsibility to provide the best possible working conditions for these professionals. They are working extremely hard to care for our seniors and our sick. They are saving lives and caring for patients who have been suffering intensely for weeks, if not months.

I must draw my colleagues' attention to the Liberal government's failures with regard to provincial health transfers. We unanimously agree that the federal government needs to do more and increase its share of funding for the public health care system to cover 35% of the total. Right now, federal funding is hovering around 20%, which is woefully inadequate and puts tremendous pressure on the provinces, including Quebec. Austerity measures have been introduced in recent years, and they have had an impact on working conditions, particularly orderlies' wages and nurses' schedules, making their job all the more challenging and difficult.

The pandemic revealed the extent of the crisis and exposed just how badly our health care system needs more funding and a better structure, and how the people who work in it deserve more respect and recognition. The federal government needs to contribute to this effort, but it is not doing so, preferring to inject funds on an ad hoc and temporary basis so as to avoid responsibility. Injecting billions of dollars here and there is all well and good, but it all comes to an end eventually. Then the provinces, the hospitals and the health care professionals are left with the same problems.

What we are asking for is stable and permanent transfers from the federal government to the provinces in order to improve our capacity and our health care and to ensure proper care for our seniors, so that the carnage we saw in long-term care centres never happens again.

Working together is the least we can do. We have a shared responsibility, as representatives of our constituents, to work hard to ensure a modicum of decency for our seniors, so they can live out their lives in dignity, without their rent becoming someone else's profits.

As the NDP leader keeps saying over and over, profit and the private sector have no place in long-term care facilities. That is what we need to fix to help our seniors. We must prevent the problems we saw in Dorval, where some people were pocketing thousands of dollars in profits every year on the backs of these seniors, only to abandon them when the crisis came. These seniors ended up alone, dehydrated, lying on the floor, with rotten food and no one to take care of them. We have to work together to prevent this from ever happening again.

A day will come when there will be an election and people will have choices to make. This government's preferences for billionaires, big business and web giants are bad choices that do not serve the public interest, public services or the common good. Until that day comes, however, let us be responsible and avoid having an election. I am pleased that the majority of parties have come around to the arguments that the NDP has been making for months now.

[Business of Supply, May 13th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

Over the past several months, the NDP has been saying that holding an election in the middle of a pandemic is really absurd and dangerous for people's safety. We are therefore in favour of this motion.

However, I would like to ask my colleague what he thinks of the attitude of the Bloc Québécois, which threatened to call an election a few months ago. Last week, the Bloc said that they are ready for an election campaign. They use blackmail, puff out their chests, and sort of flip-flop in the end.

What does this attitude of blowing hot and cold, saying one thing and then the opposite, tell us about the seriousness of the leader of the Bloc Québécois?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her interventions and for her ardent defence of the interests of seniors and the elderly.

The housing crisis is severe in Quebec, as it is pretty much everywhere. After years of neglect by the Liberals and the Conservatives, who cut investments in social housing, people are finding themselves in situations where they could end up out on the street, unable to afford their absolutely exorbitant rent. For example, near my home in Montreal, I recently saw a two-bedroom unit for rent for $1,700 a month, plus heating. I wonder who can afford that in our society.

I would like to hear my colleague's views on the Liberals' half measures to help people access a home or social housing.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent question and his comments.

I only touched on the subject, but we could talk about it at length. We could also talk about the capital gains tax and the tax loopholes that allow the wealthiest Canadians and Bay Street bankers to profit from the sale of certain shares. That money could help fund social housing, public transit, our health care systems, better access to university for students, and more research.

My New Democrat colleague raised a good point about tax havens. We hear about taxing the web giants and the wealthy, but the Liberal government has never done anything about tax havens. According to the Department of Finance, we lose about $16 billion a year to tax havens. As for taxing excess profits, the Parliamentary Budget Officer recently estimated that we could recover $8 billion that way.

The Liberals should truly work for ordinary people, for middle-class workers, not for bankers, as they are doing now.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Drummond for his question.

We are talking about fairness and about the resources we need to give ourselves to support our cultural sector and our artists so they can contribute to the production of original Quebec and Canadian content.

How is it that the corner store near my office is forced to pay taxes while the Googles, Facebooks and Netflixes of the world get billions of dollars richer without having to pay a cent in taxes to Canada? These companies do not even want to tell us if they would be willing to pay.

It is absolutely scandalous and, unfortunately, the Liberals have done nothing about it since they took office six years ago. In what they are tentatively promising for next year, we can already see there will be loopholes that Netflix could take advantage of. It is unacceptable.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his kind words.

Yes, any support for community groups in our constituencies is a good thing in and of itself, because they have difficult working conditions and extremely limited resources. These groups are often the ones keeping the social fabric intact and holding our communities together, so any additional assistance is good. We know that public services are also underfunded, so there would be disasters and tragedies if these community groups were not there.

They often tell us that they also want the funding they receive to be for their mission, not for their projects. Project-based funding forces these groups to spend a lot of time filling out paperwork and doing a lot of administrative tasks instead of helping our fellow Canadians. I encourage my colleague to look at this approach.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, with your permission, I would like to take a few seconds in the House to commemorate the work of anthropologist, radio host and distinguished author Serge Bouchard. For years, he filled our evenings with his reassuring voice and his profound vision of Quebec and our relations with the first nations. We have lost a great Quebecker. We will all miss him.

I would like to address several topics, because we are talking about the first federal budget in two years, so this is an important event.

The past two years have left their mark and turned life upside down in every one of our communities. Over these two years, we have all had to relearn how to live, work, communicate and get things done. Worse still, we saw businesses suffer and close up shop, workers lose their jobs, and entire sectors get turned upside down, especially the tourism sector, the cultural sector, including our artists, and the restaurant and bar sector.

Then there is the health care system, which had to perform miracles with very limited resources and in difficult working conditions, but I will get back to that later. Thousands of Quebeckers and Canadians fell ill and died in great numbers and are still dying or, even if they recover, can suffer long-term after-effects, known as long COVID.

Does the budget meet people's expectations when it comes to improving the situation and being better prepared for the future? There are some major flaws. There are tons of things missing. One of the first things is, how is it that the budget does not provide for stable and permanent health transfers so that Quebec and the other provinces can treat their employees well, treat their patients properly and face another crisis, another wave or another virus?

Over the years, the federal government has been investing less and less in our public health care system. That is very serious. In the NDP, we share the provincial governments' demand to raise funding to 35% of costs. In recent years, a Conservative government, under Mr. Harper, cut transfer payments to the provinces by reducing the annual increase from 6% to almost 3%. At the time, the Liberals made a big fuss about that, saying that it was a terrible thing that would threaten our public health care system but, when they came to power, they maintained and renewed exactly the same agreement. For that reason, our public health care system is now in dire straits. We need to make difficult choices. Times were hard even before the health crisis, with austerity budgets aimed at cutting corners everywhere. We are now seeing the results of those policies.

We need to give our public health system the means, the tools and the resources it needs. We need to work together to be able to care for our seniors in long-term care facilities. We saw the carnage in the first wave. Some of our seniors, the people who built Quebec by the sweat of their brow, were abandoned, left on the floor, left in their beds, dehydrated, without care and with rotten food, if they had any food at all.

As New Democrats and social democrats, we find this treatment disgraceful. It strips our seniors of their dignity, and we must do something to make sure it never happens again. We are not looking away and saying that it is not our problem. We are asking what we can do to help so that we never find ourselves in that situation again.

It feels like spring is coming, people will be getting vaccinated, and the recovery is on its way, so much the better. These are all good things. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, we cannot forget what happened last year. If we do, things will never change. The cycle will start all over again, and the same thing is going to happen.

One of the reasons we did not have the means to ensure a basic level of quality care for our seniors in long-term care facilities is the lack of resources. There were management problems, but the Quebec government is taking care of that, because it is not the federal government's jurisdiction, of course.

If we do not help the provinces provide decent care and look after their health care workers, what happens?

When orderlies earning $14 an hour are forced to work mandatory overtime and insane schedules, and this is compounded by a crisis, where a virus enters the workplace, it creates a vicious cycle. It is no longer worth their while to go to work because it is too dangerous, they are not paid enough and they do not want to take the risk. As a result, workers stay at home, and that exacerbates the problem.

Earlier, a member from Quebec said that this is world health worker week and that tomorrow is International Nurses Day. Let us consider. What are we offering them in exchange for caring for our sick patients and our seniors? What are we offering them to make the work attractive and make sure that they still want to go to work even when it is harder than usual, when there is a crisis and they are at greater risk?

For now, that is not what we are seeing, and the Liberal government's budget does not offer any answers. Sure, the government transferred some money, but only on a one-time basis, in the middle of a crisis. There is no plan for the future, yet we know that we need permanent, stable funding.

There is another important issue, and that is child care. We can see how accessible child care services help families and young parents in Quebec and how they allow women to rejoin the labour market. It is a good idea in itself, and I do not want to be a killjoy, but this was a flagship proposal in the NDP's 2015 and 2019 election platforms. It is a good idea, but only if it is executed properly. It could really help people, especially since we are in an economic crisis right now that is disproportionately affecting women. Women's participation in the labour market has dropped sharply, and we know that affordable public child care gives women greater access to the labour market, since they have unfortunately inherited traditional societal responsibities, such as caring for children.

It is a good measure that is very fitting under the circumstances. We could be happy, if only the Liberals had a shred of credibility in the matter. As I said earlier, they have been promising a child care program for the past 28 years. The first time was in Jean Chrétien's red book in 1993. That was quite a while ago. Should we believe them?

Let us see their action plan and what they are going to do, and let us watch how they work with the provinces. Perhaps the Liberals will want to act quickly to meet the need, because there is indeed a need. We see it in Quebec, where the minister of families is desperate. Quebec needs 50,000 more child care spaces, and federal money would be welcome. I met with Quebec's minister of families a few months ago. He asked us to try to put pressure on the government for a federal transfer so that he could open more spaces and pay more educators. That would be a good thing for the Liberals to do, but I have my doubts that it will happen.

Let us remember that, in the last budget, the Liberals' big promise for a major social program was public pharmacare. The NDP agrees that we should have a public pharmacare program, as do the Union des consommateurs, the FTQ, the CSN and the CSQ. There are holes in Quebec's system, which is a hybrid system and is not perfect. Such a program would also help many sick people in English Canada reduce the cost of their medication and access the drugs they need. How is it that pharmacare was a priority two years ago, and now it is suddenly off the table? How is it that we were told that other consultations would be held, but now there is no funding for this program and it is over and done with? One year it is pharmacare, and the next it is child care. The government is playing games by going from one to another. The government does not seem very serious about these things.

There is also a lack of funding for housing, even though there is a major housing crisis in Montreal and across Quebec. There is nothing in the budget about making the tax system fair and equitable. Web giants are still not paying taxes in Quebec and Canada. There is probably even a loophole so that Netflix does not have to pay taxes. The government is even playing favourites among the web giants. I think we need to get to a point where companies that make excessive profits, like Amazon, are taxed more and a tax is imposed on wealth over $20 million. These are solutions that the NDP is putting forward so that we can pay for a vibrant, green and prosperous economic recovery that benefits everyone.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

In the last budget, the Liberals presented child care services as a key measure for economic recovery. Obviously, as Quebeckers, we have seen the success of the network of child care centres and know that it is a good idea.

Given that the Liberals first made this promise in 1993, does my colleague believe it?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Thérèse-De Blainville for her speech.

This is the first federal government budget in two years. We were all collectively hit by the pandemic. We have seen how much we rely on a robust and effective public health care system that treats its workers and professionals well.

The Liberal government says that it transferred a lot of money to the provinces for health, but we can all agree that it was a one-off, not a recurring amount. Why does my colleague think that the Liberals are unwilling to commit to permanently giving the provinces enough money so they can have a good, effective public health care system?