Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my friend and neighbour, the hon. member for Whitby—Ajax, on her appointment as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour. I look forward to having many vigorous debates with her.
That being said, I express my profound disappointment with the government's malicious neglect of what has become Canada's national homeless crisis. In particular, I want to voice my absolute horror that the member from Moncton, who in the past did so much for impoverished Canadians and showed so much promise when she was appointed minister responsible for homelessness back in March, would turn out to be such a train wreck as a minister.
On March 25 she promised to have a strategy in place with new money to help the homeless within 30 days. It has now been 224 days and there is no money or plan in sight.
Also in March she vowed in the House that “every child in Canada will have a safe bed to sleep in”. Here we are eight months later and most places in Canada have already had their first snowfall, and the minister has done nothing to prevent thousands of homeless children from spending another winter freezing on the streets.
Last spring her government passed Bill C-66 which will divert $200 million from social housing programs, after cutting $55 million from CMHC's social housing budget last year. The minister opposed many of her own Liberal colleagues and voted down Bill S-11 which would have prohibited poverty as a legal grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act.
In June she refused to meet with Lifeline Centre, an Ottawa organization seeking help to set up a new and innovative facility to assist homeless men who are addicted survivors of trauma.
This summer when the city of Toronto asked the federal government for emergency assistance to provide short term shelter for the city's homeless, the Liberals offered the use of the Fort York Armoury and then sent the city a bill for $250,000. It is sad to note that the Liberals made a hefty profit on the backs of Toronto's homeless.
The minister claims she has been working day and night seven days a week to come up with a plan for the homeless. Yet the week the throne speech was delivered and other parliamentarians were coming back to work the minister was jetting off to Mexico.
In May the minister hired 18 new bureaucrats at a cost of over $1 million to taxpayers in salaries, benefits and office space. Her new million dollar staff includes three new correspondence assistants even though as Minister of Labour she already had six letter writers and six new program assistants even though she has no programs to administer as the homeless minister. Instead of putting up a shiny new office that million dollars could have provided emergency shelter for 30,000 homeless Canadians.
The minister was given the mandate to find a solution for Canada's homeless. She made a lot of promises to a lot of people but now she is backing away from her commitments. She has recently been quoted as saying that she cannot do anything but pass along a few ideas to cabinet and hope that something gets done. The minister now says that it is not her job to produce a strategy, that it is not her job to find new—