Madam Speaker, I always find it such an incredible honour to rise on behalf of my constituents in London—Fanshawe and to be the voice for them in the House. I want to thank them for that opportunity, as always.
I also want to thank my constituency staff. They have been working so hard, helping thousands of people in London. We are in the middle of another successful tax clinic, which ensures that people have the free help they need to file their taxes. We are contacting folks to ensure they know about the additional money we secured for them in the housing benefit and the GST rebate.
We are helping people reunite with their families or to immigrate to our country, so they can contribute to the social and economic wealth that we have here. We are helping people to get their passports, or figure out their EI claims or their pensions, and so much more. I really want to thank them for all the work they do.
My constituents are doing what they can to navigate through the housing crisis, the labour shortage, inflation, the health care crisis and climate change. It is getting so much harder for people.
Now we have to throw on top of that the fact that the government has failed to negotiate a fair contract with public servants for two years. I am so worried about how my office will continue to help people, help my constituents, because the government has failed to ensure that those workers get a fair collective agreement.
I want to take a minute so the House can hear some of the voices of those folks in London who are on strike right now.
One said, “We really don't want to strike, but we have to because we're fighting for all workers' rights. Right now, with the cost of living and inflation, we're really falling behind.”
This is not a cushy job. Our average employee makes $35,000 to $65,000 a year. Many union members are single income earners. They have second jobs. One of their federal colleagues works in pizza delivery.
Mandy talked about the fact that so many of her colleagues had to use the food bank. They cannot afford to feed their families. They cannot afford child care. They cannot afford a roof over the head. Inflation is taking its toll. The strike is a last resort for them. She said, “None of us want to be on strike. We're here because we need to. We tried to raise our concerns, and they're not being heard.”
Chris, who has worked in the federal public service since 1985, said, “We don't get any respect. I just want to go home and cry at night because I've worked so long and so hard, given my whole life to working as a servant to the government. And when we want a raise, and they won't even talk about it.”
I am so proud of the work that my office does for constituents of London—Fanshawe. I am often frustrated by the things we cannot do. For all the successes we do get, we could not do it without those PSAC workers.
When I ran in 2019 and 2021, I promised my constituents, on their doorsteps, that I would fight for fairness and real solutions. Like those on strike with the PSAC, people in my riding just want fairness. They want a government that makes decisions with their best interests at heart and a government that does what it can, instead of having this incredible opportunity that it wastes. It makes decisions that keep itself in power or it helps those who already have so much power and wealth. It gives that power to them, not to everyone else.
My idea of a successful government is one that takes power that has been given to it in good faith by all people and redistributes it fairly to all people, that creates long-term solutions, that builds programs and that expands on supports.
When my caucus colleagues and I were elected, we were determined to deliver just that for people. Not being the government party is challenging, especially when I know that so much more could be accomplished. When we entered into the agreement with the current governing party to not cause an election in exchange for progress on a number of key policy areas, we did so because we needed to build something.
We have not gotten everything we need, and I reference this in terms of the budget. It is not an NDP budget. However, this budget includes initiatives that we think are really important, things that would not be there if New Democrats were not there.
First and foremost, of course, is dental care. This is a really important initiative that will allow millions of Canadians, who up until now have not been able to get their teeth fixed, that opportunity. We worked hard to ensure that by the end of this year, all children under the age of 18, all seniors and all people living with disabilities would finally get access to dental care. That has real consequences. It affects their ability to get and keep a job. It affects their sense of self-confidence in socializing with others. It affects the way that other people look at them. It prevents them from enduring constant pain and other long-term health problems.
A few weeks ago I was at the Wright Clinic in my riding of London—Fanshawe. The Wright Clinic is run by Dr. Ken Wright and a number of incredible people. They provide dental services at a low cost, or at no cost, because they know what that means to people in our community.
I met a woman who spoke to me about the fact that for over 10 years she had been screaming into her pillow because she could not deal with the pain. She could not study, she could not work and she could not focus. That pain took over her entire life. She found relief because of folks at the Wright Clinic, who do this incredible work. She found a new future.
A fellow who was also there talked about the fact that he could not keep a job because of the way he looked. He was able to get a brand new life because he had a brand new set of teeth. That is just incredible. Those are the things for which the New Democrats are fighting. The creation of this dental program has long-lasting benefits. That is the role of the government. It equalizes, it pulls people out of pain, it saves them money. Dental care is just one victory.
There are a lot of other victories that the NDP was able to get in this budget. I would love to talk about them, but I am sure you will cut me off, Madam Speaker.
I want to move on to discuss the biggest thing I see that is missing from this budget. Of course, that is housing. We all know that the housing market is out of control. In fact, housing has been made a commodity when it should be a human right.
In 2015, a house that sold for $150,000 in my neighbourhood in Pond Mills now sells for $400,000 today. In my neighbourhood, rents have soared by more than 25% over the past year. In March, rent for a one-bedroom unit was over $1,700, while rent for a two-bedroom unit was the average price of about $2,100. That is an increase of 27.3% or 24.3% from the year previous, respectively.
Sadly, we see very little in this budget around housing and solving that crisis. To be perfectly honest, I think that past governments, consecutive Liberal and Conservative, do not really want to address it. They do not see it as a problem they need to solve because they see the housing market as just that, a market. Except housing is actually a human right and requires government to invest in it. The trouble is that government has not invested in it directly. No government has directly built housing for over 30 years.
We now have the revamped national housing strategy introduced by the Liberal government, but that has a lot of problems, with a haphazard approach to the way we deal with affordable housing. It has placed a lot of hardships on the not-for-profit organizations that actually want to do that work.
In November 2022, the Office of the Auditor General released a report exposing all the major issues with the national housing strategy. Programs have not created the targeted number of units that are required and many of those are not what is deemed to be affordable. That is unacceptable.
This crisis needs a solution. We need to preserve affordable homes and we need to build them faster. The NDP has a plan for that, of course, and the government can take that great idea as it has taken so many.
The first steps we have to take are to preserve affordable housing and prevent renoviction. We need to create an affordable housing acquisition fund to allow not-for-profit housing providers to purchase affordable housing when they come on the market and to keep it permanently affordable and out of the hands of for-profit housing profiteers. We have to put a moratorium in place on the acquisition of affordable homes by housing profiteers, so not-for-profit housing providers do not have to compete with them.
Jack Layton was an inspiration for so many, and for me as well. I think of him as a parliamentarian. He always said that we needed to not just be an opposition party; we had to be a a party of proposition. We need those good ideas that we know work for people and put them in the hands of people. We have to ensure that those solutions go forward. Dental care and our housing plan are just two solid examples.
People are scared. London—Fanshawe folks talk to me all the time. They do not know how they are going to survive. Before the pandemic people were just getting by. They just had their heads above water; they were treading water. Now it feels like they are sinking further and further below that surface. People are lined up at food banks in record lineups. We have a generation that has given up on the dream of owning a home. People see the consequences of that.
There is a lot to be angry about, but at this time when there is so much division in our politics and everyday conversations, we need to find a way to work together. That is what we are trying to do here with the government. The New Democrats are working together and we are working to find that leadership and really good solutions for folks.
