Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Scarborough—Rouge Park.
It is a pleasure to rise today to speak to budget 2018. I think we can say that it was a great day for Canadians yesterday when the budget was released. In particular, the budget is doing things to further advance gender equality throughout our entire economic workforce in the country. In my remarks today, I would like to take the opportunity to highlight three things in the budget.
One of the remarkable things about this budget is that it had a number of smaller items within it that perhaps did not get quite the amount of limelight that some of the bigger items did. I am going to take the time to talk about two of those smaller items, and perhaps one of the larger items, if I have time.
The first one I want to talk about is the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack fund. The Government of Canada has chosen to invest $5 million in this fund through this budget.
A lot of people perhaps do not recognize Gord Downie in particular and the other members of The Tragically Hip as the immense community builders that they are. I am from Kingston, and The Tragically Hip is from Kingston as well. I had the unique opportunity to see behind the scenes how much the five gentlemen in this band contributed to their community. Quite often they did it out of the limelight and without making a spectacle of showing how they helped out different segments of our communities. They did it because they knew the genuine benefit that would be received at the other end.
Toward the end of his life when he knew that his time was limited, Gord Downie took his fame to help build up others, particularly indigenous communities, throughout our country. This fund helps to highlight and educate people and youth as to what our residential school systems were all about, and what they did, so that we can learn lessons from that to make sure that our history is told with accuracy, and to make sure as we move into the future that we know exactly what it took and what people went through to get to where we are. To see that money has been contributed directly from this budget into that fund is extremely rewarding, and in my opinion it is supporting a cause that I know that Gord Downie would be very happy about.
One of the more national issues I want to talk about is with respect to the changes in the EI benefits, and what this budget is doing to help women in the workforce. My private member's bill that I introduced in this House back in 2016 was about changing our employment insurance system so that women could have more flexibility in their maternity and parental leave. We saw some changes to that in the last budget where there was an extension so that women could start taking their maternity benefits earlier. Originally it was at eight weeks and then it changed to 12 weeks prior to their due date.
Now we are seeing a much larger step in allowing women to get back into the workforce sooner. For couples where both partners choose to split the parental benefits, this budget allows them to split that time and increase it by five weeks. That means there is an advantage for couples who want to split that time. The hope here is that women can get back into the workforce. We know that quite often women are at a disadvantage because of the fact that they sometimes have to choose between whether they want to start a family or participate in the workforce.
We spend a lot of time in this House talking about gender equality in this chamber in particular. It is absolutely imperative to get more women in this House, and to have more women business leaders, lawyers, and doctors.
As one of the organizers for the women's engineering association told me in 2016, there are only 338 seats in this room. We have to do more for women throughout the entire labour market. The reality is that there are a lot of women who want to go into the trades, engineering, mining, and those other fields. If they have to make a decision between having children and pursuing their dream job, they might not choose to do that. I am extremely delighted to see that this has been introduced and is part of the budget because this is another serious step building on what we saw in the 2017 budget.
I will take the remaining amount of time today to talk about one of the small issues in the budget that is resonating extremely well within my community, and that perhaps does not get the limelight but is extremely important for this country. It is buried on page 210 in the budget and it reads, “Reopening the Penitentiary Farms at Joyceville and Collins Bay Institutions”, where $4.3 million will go into reopening prison farms in Collins Bay and Joyceville, which are in and around my community in Kingston.
The reality of the situation is that, in 2010, the previous government chose to close prison farms. It did this without any kind of data, business case, or study. It unilaterally closed prison farms. There was immediate protest. Farmers, guards, and inmates were asking the former federal government to look into this to make sure that it was making the right decision based on evidence and data. The former government refused to do that.
As a result, we ended up seeing these farms close and huge protests. People continue to protest to this day in front of the Collins Bay penitentiary in my riding. Every Monday night for the past 330 Mondays, since the closing in 2010, people have stood in front of the Collins Bay penitentiary protesting the closure of prison farms. We know that prison farms can contribute to the productive rehabilitation and reintegration of inmates into society.
I would like to read something that was said by a former inmate of the Collins Bay penitentiary. He said, “I've committed crimes since I was six years old. I have been in and out of jail for 40 years and then I got on the farm. I've never worked on a farm in my life. Nobody thought I would last because of who I was and because of my record. Before I knew it, they had me milking cows and they had all of a sudden started me really liking it. There was nothing about a cow I didn't want to know. The barn taught me how to talk to supervisors and ask for help. My experience with prison farms have kept me out of jail, kept my mind off the street.”
When we start looking at our prisons as a form of rehabilitation and reintegration into society, and not locking them up and throwing away the key as we saw with the previous government, when we start taking this approach, we will be successful in our corrections program. I was extremely delighted to see that this money was put back into the budget, as were many people in my area and across the country.
As a matter of fact, when the minister came to do a town hall in my riding on this about a year and a half ago, 300 people, regular citizens turned up to talk about why these farms were so important. There were a lot of people along the way who went into making this a reality. I know that a lot of those people such as my predecessor, Ted Hsu, the member of Parliament prior to me, were a driving force on this. I want to thank him for keeping this alive in opposition. I know that the NDP members supported this as well and they should be credited for that.
We are seeing the return of a very important program and I hope that, by bringing this program of the prison farms back to Collins Bay and Joyceville, we will see and be able to properly measure the results so that we can start to distribute the program throughout the country.
I will wrap up with this. This is a good budget for Canada. This is on the right path of being progressive. I have had the opportunity to mention three parts in the budget, but I am happy to take any questions at this time.