Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time today with the hon. member for Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor.
I have appreciated the comments raised in the House today in this take note debate. As we gather as members of Parliament, we all bring certain wisdom and knowledge to this discussion. Some of that wisdom comes from past experience, which some members have a great deal of and have offered. A lot of our knowledge comes from the experiences in our own constituencies as people visit us to talk about the effects of this economy on their personal lives.
I do not think there is a member in the House who does not have someone attend his or her office every day to talk about the effects of this recession and the economy on their lives. It may be a young person facing unemployment at a structural level rarely seen in Canadian history. It may be a senior citizen whose savings have been so dramatically reduced due to falls in the market and he or she is no longer able to take a taxi to go to a funeral of a friend. That happened last week.
We may talk to people whose employment insurance benefits have run out and do not see any other opportunities. They are waiting for the so-called infrastructure spending stimulus to kick in so jobs may actually be created. Every one of us brings that experience to the House.
The particular spotlight I would like to shine on the debate today has to do with the experience of our veterans and their experience of this economy. That is an unusual spotlight to shine on an economic issue, but we are talking about real people with real issues facing real struggles in this economy and beyond.
As the critic for Veterans Affairs, those stories have been coming to me and they take on two different kinds of aspects. One group, of course, is traditional veterans, senior citizens, men and women who served in World War II and the Korean War. They bring the issues that many seniors are facing, sometimes magnified.
At the same time, we have another group of Canadians, modern veterans, young men and women, who have served our country in uniform and have come back to our country ill-prepared at times but often deeply affected and sometimes injured from their experiences in the theatre of war or in other operations that our Canadian armed forces serve in now, even as we speak.
With those two lenses, I would like the House to reflect for a moment on what it means to be economically involved in the lives of Canadians who have particularly or voluntarily served to protect our freedom, democracy, human rights and dignity in our world. The first part of that has to do with the experience of traditional veterans who are senior citizens.
I was interested as the throne speech yesterday addressed some of the profound issues faced by senior citizens. There was mention made of a seniors day. That sounds noble. It sounds a little like Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart. I am somewhat concerned that we are not going a little more deeply into the lives of seniors and how they are facing this economic recession. The reality is deep and meaningful pension reform is necessary for all seniors. Veterans bring their particular experience of that to us for us to share, debate and try to understand.
I am particularly speaking of veterans in small communities on very fixed incomes, with limited services provided by Veterans Affairs Canada for their particular needs. That may be part of the veterans independence program, or it may be access to the long-term care facilities known as pavilions or other care facilities in our country simply because there is no room and waiting lists are keeping them out. This will also affect modern veterans and I will talk about that in a moment.
Some veterans are coming to us in dire need and extreme experiences of poverty. That is simply not good enough for Canada.
Recently I had the opportunity to go to Calgary to visit the Calgary Drop-In, which is the largest homeless shelter in Alberta. It is a significant facility that deals with people on the streets facing homelessness. Every night there are between 30 and 40 homeless Canadian veterans in that homeless shelter, which is a national disgrace.
From reading the newspapers, we know that the largest and fastest growing population of homeless in the United States is American veterans. Canada has a chance to address that issue immediately and make some changes before we catch up to our American brothers and sisters. Those homeless veterans range in age between 26 and 85 years old. This means we are dealing with both traditional veterans and modern veterans who are on the streets seeking shelter
This implies that we need a national strategy to combat homelessness and to provide affordable housing for all. I want to put at the front of that queue veterans in Canada who need to be housed in safe, adequate housing. It is a shame and a disgrace that the government does not come up with a national housing strategy to improve the lives of all Canadians but also very specifically our veterans.
Some of the other issues that our veterans face have to do with the experience of younger and modern veterans. They face the job crisis that many are, unprepared for a world that does not know how to transfer the skills and the knowledge they have brought out of the military service and to put them to use creatively in the productivity of a Canadian economy.
We need to invest money in education, job training, skills improvement and even language skills for our veterans so they are part of a mobile workforce ready to address the problems of Canada. They want to build our country in their peaceful activities as much as they built it in their war efforts.
We have a responsibility to invest very specifically in our veterans at this economic juncture. Some of these are young people who joined the services very quickly and have now served in the theatre in Afghanistan for longer periods of time than the whole of World War II. They are coming back to Canada, some of them with shock, with post-traumatic stress disorder, some of them with other injuries, some of them with latent injuries that begin to appear later.
To deal with this, to reflect on this is going to cost money. This is not an expense however. This is an investment, an investment in human resources that are richly trained, experienced, noble and courageous men and women who have served in the armed forces. We need to do that to ensure this economy, this recession does not create more victims, particularly from that group of people.
I am not trying to exclude others who are affected by the recession. Obviously each one of us when we are in our constituencies hear these stories. We know the stories of people being left out.
We are waiting. We hear from the government side about this tremendous infrastructure spending. We also know about jobs money that has been left on the table and unspent. That is money is meant to not only generate one-time jobs, but create a multiplier effect through the economy to create jobs for more and more people.
We are not talking about expenditure money. We are talking about investment in key sectors so people can find work and make work. We will then be a complex society of doing the kind of work we need to do as a Parliament.
We have some very particular issues with which we will need to wrestle. When the Conservatives took office, they had a $13 billion surplus, and I am glad my hon. colleague mentioned that. That surplus has been squandered unreasonably with no sense of planning for an economic downturn, which was known to every economist in our country. Denial reigned on that side of the House and now we are paying for it. With the largest deficit in Canadian history looming, the heads are still buried in the sand. We need to lift the heads and care for Canadians. That means the most vulnerable Canadians. That means the Canadians who have been on the edges of society. That means those who are homeless, those who have faced addiction problems, those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, our seniors, those who have been left out of the job market for too long, youth and women.
Today I hope the government members are listening and hearing the constructive criticism on this side of the House. We are willing to work with them to offer new opportunities to all Canadians.