[Member spoke in Cree]
[English]
Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to be here on Algonquin territory. Ottawa is the meeting place of many first nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, but it is also the home and capital of all Canadians. I am very proud to be here today to offer my comments and my thoughts on budget 2018.
My mother is an example. She worked hard, day in and day out, in her life. It was a life of sacrifice for her two children. She was a single mother. She earned minimum wage, often in various precarious employments. She even delivered newspapers at five a.m., and then I would help her in the evenings, delivering other newspapers. We were not always able to pay the rent. It was very hard sometimes to get ahead in society. It was hard to make ends meet, to make sure that we could actually provide the necessities. I remember going to the supermarket and counting out the dollars, penny by penny. Even if we found a penny on the ground, it was something of value because it might be add up to enough to be able to buy some milk for that day.
I am very proud of the government and the work that we are doing.
In the new budget of 2018, the government proposes to strengthen the working income tax benefit, the WITB, by making it more generous and by making the benefits more accessible to people like my mother, so that they can get the resources and the tools they need to be successful in life. This strengthened benefit will be named the Canada workers benefit, CWB, and will take effect in 2019.
In budget 2018, the government proposed to increase maximum benefits under the CWB by up to $170 in 2019 and increase the income level at which the benefit is phased out completely. The government also proposes to increase the maximum benefit provided through the CWB disability supplement by an additional $160. This enhancement is expected to directly benefit about 68,000 Manitoba workers annually, and many of these 68,000 people in Manitoba can be found in Winnipeg Centre, the riding I have the opportunity to represent here.
As a result of these enhancements, a low-income worker earning $15,000 a year could receive up to nearly $500 more from the program in 2019 than he or she received in 2018. Moving forward, the government will continue to work with interested provinces and territories to harmonize benefits and to help support the transition from social assistance and into work. I hope the provincial government in Manitoba will take this opportunity to really strengthen the situation and the condition of many of our poorest workers.
At the same time, the government recognizes that not all low-income workers are receiving the CWB payment that they are entitled to. The government is proposing amendments that will allow the Canada Revenue Agency to automatically determine whether these tax filers are eligible for the benefit. An estimated 300,000 additional low-income workers will receive the new CWB for the 2019 tax year as a result of these changes. Specifically, the government estimates that approximately 13,000 additional low-income Manitobans will receive the benefit for the year 2019. Once again, many of these additional 13,000 low-income Manitobans can be found in Winnipeg but also in rural areas and in many first nation communities.
The CWB enhancement, combined with new investments to make sure that every worker who qualifies actually receives the benefit, will mean that the government is investing almost $1 billion of new funding for the benefit in 2019, relative to 2018. That is investing in people, people who are going to invest in the economy, people who are not going to put that money in the bank, saving it for a rainy day, but people who are actually going to spend it on their children, buying the bread and milk their children require today.
The government estimates these enhancements and the improved take-up in 2019 will directly benefit more than two million working Canadians, many of whom were not benefiting from the WITB before. This will help lift approximately 70,000 Canadians out of poverty. I have seen the estimates, and Manitoba low-income workers will be provided with about $114.5 million more in benefits under the new Canada workers benefit in the 2018-19 to 2022-23 period as a result of this budget. I am very proud of that.
This is not all that we can find in the budget.
Last Friday, I had the opportunity of having a meet and greet at the YaFa Café, a Palestinian café in my riding, just off of Portage near the airport. A young lady came in from Brandon. She drove two and a half hours to visit with me to tell me her story. She had lost her children to the child welfare system. They had been taken from her. She told me how she had complained about the abuse she was suffering at the hands of her partner and how instead of helping her and ensuring she could keep her newborn baby, the system took her baby from her. The workers said that she was also at fault and that she needed to prove she would be a good parent. She is also indigenous.
Therefore, I am very proud that the government decided not to continue fighting, in the Human Rights Tribunal, the child welfare case that was before it for a very long period of time. The government could have done that. It could have fought it over many years, probably another a decade, and gone through the court system all the way to the top.
Instead of doing that, we are providing $1.4 billion in new funding over six years. I am very proud of the government, the ministers, and the people all across this chamber, even our colleagues on the other side, especially from the NDP and the Conservative Party, who I believe support this. This is important to the young lady, who drove from Brandon for a 25 minute chance to speak with me about an issue that was important to her life. She spoke from the heart. It is important because that makes the difference in her life. The budget is not alive in this chamber or in the stats; it is alive in the lives of people and Canadians.
This is not the only investment the government is making. We recognize that not only is it important to reform the child welfare system, but we also have to invest in families. In this case, another $1.5 billion over five years are being invested in indigenous families, making them stronger. We know there have been many issues over many years. I can list multiple stats: $498 million, with $97.6 million per year ongoing to sustain access to critical medical care and services, including 24/7 nursing stations in 79 remote and isolated first nations communities; $200 million, with $40 million per year to enhance the delivery of culturally appropriate addictions treatment and prevention services in first nations communities with high needs.
This one is extremely important. I had a town hall in our constituency week. A gentleman from Saskatchewan, Mr. Johnson, attended. He is a lawyer, an indigenous man, and a trapper and a hunter. He had worked in the mining camps for many years. He was told he was stupid, that he, as an indigenous person, could not succeed. To prove people wrong, he went to law school and got his law degree from the University of Saskatchewan. To prove people wrong again, he got a master's degree in law from Harvard. Not only was he successful in this, he eventually became a crown prosecutor.
One of the issues he raised was the level of addiction in many communities across the country, which we fail to recognize. He talked about the impacts of alcohol. He talked about what we needed to do to eradicate this, which is destroying many people. He talked about all the deaths it caused. Whether cancers, FASD children, or drunk driving, it is important to address these things.
We had 100 people at this town hall. They listened intently over the noon hour on a Wednesday, while he discussed addictions. He estimated that 95% of all the court cases in northern Saskatchewan were alcohol related. We talk about opioids, meth addiction, and other addictions. However, we often fail to recognize the addiction that is among us each and every day even in this chamber and in this building, Centre Block.
I look forward to questions.
Tapwe akwa khitwam hi hi.