Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-66, an act to amend the National Housing Act and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Act and to make a consequential amendment to another act.
I spoke in the debate on the motions in Group No. 1 and I said then that the Bloc Quebecois did not support this bill. My friend from Hochelaga—Maisonneuve focussed particularly on social housing.
I listened earlier to the member for Frontenac—Mégantic, who spoke in the debate before this one. He read us statistics that indicated some people in the national capital region were spending over 50% of their income on accommodation. This is appalling, especially when this country has had since 1946 an organization to make it easier to acquire residential property.
We could say that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has failed thoroughly in meeting its objectives. The public housing crisis is not just here in the national capital, in Ottawa, it is pretty well everywhere. There are people who, for reasons it is not up to us to judge, are now needy and must have help from others and society to get housing.
The government did not take the opportunity provided by this bill to acknowledge a reality. While I do not know every major Canadian city, I am nonetheless aware that homelessness is a growing Canadian issue. Even Toronto is not immune to this problem, which affects increasingly younger people.
We now find entire families—father, mother and two or three kids—sleeping wherever they can, under bridges, or over subway air outlets, in Montreal or Toronto. Yet, this legislation has been very helpful to Canadians in the past. I cannot understand the attitude of this minister who introduces a legislative amendment but totally ignores the whole emerging issue of homelessness in Canada.
This bill amends the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Act, which was meant to make it easier for Canadians have access to real estate property, by requiring smaller downpayments from them. Since Bill C-66 amends a number of acts, I cannot understand why the minister did not take this opportunity to also amend the Interest Act. I read about 10 articles on this issue. I tried, through a private member's bill, to have a limit of three months' interest set as the penalty charged by lending institutions to get out of an existing mortgage.
The Reformers, whose generosity and magnanimity are legendary, are opposed to such a measure. I was quite surprised by that. After all, western farmers are not all millionaires or billionaires. Some have mortgages or liens on their farm equipment, which is getting bigger all the time, but costlier as well.
When after a good harvest or a stroke of luck a farmer wants to change vehicle, as some couples change houses, and goes to pay back his loan, the lenders, who are all faithful contributors to the Liberal Party coffers, hit him with a huge penalty for cancelling the loan.
I wish the minister, who is sensitive to the plight of prospective home owners, had taken this opportunity to bring penalties back to a more reasonable level. I believe a three month penalty is adequate, especially in view of the mobility of capital and the speed with which one can reinvest. It is instantaneous through the Internet and other electronic means.
When I was a notary in Longueuil, especially during the worst years of the interest crisis, in 1982, I knew someone who was forced to sell two small income properties. A bank I will not name, out of kindness, even though it showed none to others, charged this individual a $28,500 to $29,000 penalty to cancel the mortgage. It squeezed something like $58,000 out of a person who was already in dire straits and had to sell his income property at a loss because he could no longer pay the interest. It stomped on someone who was already down.
I would have liked the minister to be a bit more aware of what is going on in the housing industry and to put a stop to what his friends who contribute to his campaign funds are doing.
The NDP member who spoke before me also talked about—and it is worth mentioning—the way people are appointed to the board of directors of the CMHC. It will be another patronage haven, and this Liberal government has become a master at making appointments. It is one of its specialties.
Every day, as critic for Public Works Canada, I receive a list of appointments to Atomic Energy Canada, Canada Post Corporation or some other agency. I checked in the book I had ordered from the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada. The first 10 names I found were the names of individuals who had contributed to the election fund of the Liberal Party of Canada. Granted, these were not always large contributions. We are talking about $150, $200, $250, $300. Contributions from companies are always a bit larger.
Still, one can wonder whether having contributed to the Liberal Party's election fund is a requirement to get appointed to the CMHCs board of directors.
Soon we will have a new board in charge of managing the $30 billion in misappropriated funds from public employees pension programs. Those who will sit on that board will also be friends of the government. The same goes for the millennium scholarship foundation. The Liberals have become masters at this. Mind you, I do not envy them.
Pork barrelling has taken unprecedented proportions with the Liberal Party. There is no holding back. The Liberals are in office. They criticized the Progressive Conservatives for being too generous in that regard, but the Conservatives look like boy scouts compared to the Liberals, who have been in office for nearly six years now. They sure know how to make patronage appointments. They have it down to an art. It is often subtle, but it is well done.
What interest is there for the taxpayer? In introducing a bill such as this, at least the Interest Act could have been modified. The big banks could have been told “We are not still in the last century; speedy investments are the way things are done now”.
There is no great interest in supporting this bill, particularly since it is responding to the new criteria of universality. As the hon. member for Trois-Rivières has already remarked, the federal government is the one that will call the shots, the one who is boss, because CMHC is heading into the international forum, and it is the one setting standards. There is quite simply nothing doing as far as social housing and negotiations with the provinces are concerned.