Madam Speaker, congratulations on your appointment.
It is a pleasure to rise for the first time in this 43rd Parliament. Before I turn to the Speech from the Throne, I would like to take a moment to thank the people of Scarborough Centre for returning me to this place. They have put their trust in me to continue to be their strong voice in Ottawa. I am so grateful for their confidence and support. None of us would be here without our dedicated supporters and volunteers. I have an amazing team and I would like to thank team Salma for its countless hours of hard work over these past months and years. I also want to thank my family, my husband Salman, and my boys Umaid and Usman, for their love and support.
I am proud to have received a strong mandate from the people of Scarborough Centre to fight for their values, hopes and dreams in this place. They have shared with me their struggles, their hopes for the future and the challenges their families are facing. It is their priorities I bring to this Parliament.
I also recognize that in a minority parliament it is ever more important that we all work together. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. I am ready to work with those who share the values, hopes and dreams of the people of Scarborough Centre. We are a riding of Canadians by birth and Canadians by choice. Many of us come from somewhere else and have chosen to make Scarborough our home. We are a community of senior citizens and young families. We are a community of Canadians working hard to join the middle class. They are concerned about being able to stretch each paycheque to the end of the month. They worry about the ever rising cost of housing. They lay awake worrying if they can provide a better future for their children. They work hard and are looking for a little help to get ahead.
That is what I was looking for as I listened to the Speech from the Throne. I was pleased to hear some of the priorities of my constituents addressed in the speech. That a tax cut that will deliver a real benefit to those families working hard to join the middle class will be the first order of business for this government was welcome news for the families of Scarborough Centre. Rather than handouts to millionaires, we know that putting more money into the pockets of families working hard to join the middle class is money that will be invested back into the economy. It means new clothes for going back to school. It means healthier groceries going into kids' lunch bags. It is an investment that will support not only families but also local jobs and economies.
The throne speech mentioned the historic reductions in poverty achieved by the government in its last mandate. Nearly 900,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty, many of them children, thanks to programs like the Canada child benefit. That is a program we are committed to strengthening even more.
One of the many families in Scarborough benefiting from the Canada child benefit is the Tareen family. Thanks to the CCB, Lenna and Najib are able to provide healthy food for their children, Abdullah, Ahmed Yasin and Habibullah. They can take them on educational outings and allow them to participate in more activities in school. We are proud of that record, but I know this government will be the first to admit there is still more work to be done.
Probably the biggest expense that families in Scarborough face is housing. There is a serious lack of supply. What housing is available is often old, overpriced and inadequate to meet the needs of the average Scarborough family. Therefore, I am pleased to hear that the government reaffirmed its commitment to the national housing strategy and to making continued investments in affordable housing.
Programs like the first-time home buyer incentive are already making a difference. The money already being invested in Toronto community housing is funding long-overdue renovations in community housing facilities in Scarborough and across Toronto. Moving forward with the Canada housing benefit in the coming year will help many families who are struggling with the rising rents they have to pay.
In this Parliament, I will be a voice for continued investment in affordable housing. As well, we must ramp up our investment as fast as our provincial and municipal partners can build the capacity to make new projects shovel-ready.
Another key priority for my constituents is community safety. Too often the sound of gunshots echo through our neighbourhoods. Too many of my constituents have lost loved ones or know a family who has lost loved ones to senseless violence.
I recently attended a community safety meeting in an apartment complex where a family had lost a son in a shooting. Nothing can compare to the grief of a mother who has lost her child. The community came together to grieve and to discuss meaningful action to end these acts of violence. In Scarborough, in Canada, no one should feel unsafe walking the streets of their community. The time has come for serious action to combat gun violence and the gang activity that fuels it.
While I supported the common sense gun crime legislation passed in the last Parliament, it is long past time to go further. This is why I fully support the commitment in this throne speech to ban military-style assault rifles and introduce a buyback program. Too many of these weapons have been involved in mass shootings in Canada and around the world. Outside the military, they serve no legitimate purpose. These weapons are not designed to hunt deer. They are designed to kill people, as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
I understand the need for a rifle on a farm for protection, and I respect the hunting culture practised in many communities, but military-style assault rifles do not belong in our communities. The safety of our children must come first. It is time to get these guns off the streets.
I also welcome the commitment to work with municipalities and communities that want to ban handguns. This is something that I have heard loud and clear from my constituents, and something that the mayor of Toronto and Toronto council have asked for. While these measures alone will not eliminate gun crime, the evidence from jurisdictions around the world shows that it will make a big difference. We owe it to our children to do everything we can.
We must also continue to invest in measures to stop the flow of illegal guns at our borders. As important as getting guns off the streets is, the most important thing we can do to ensure safer communities is to show our youth that better is possible for them. We need to show them that they have opportunities to grow and prosper and succeed.
During its last mandate, our government made significant investments in programs to tackle youth gang violence. I hear from my constituents, especially the mothers, how important this is. As the mother of two sons myself, in this Parliament I will be a voice for further investments in our next generations.
Those are some of the highlights for my constituents, but other priorities of Scarborough Centre are also reflected in this Speech from the Throne. My constituents know that climate change is a real and serious threat, and they want us to do more to achieve our emissions reduction targets, ban plastics and get to net-zero emissions by 2050.
My constituents know we have a moral obligation to Canada's indigenous people to walk the road of reconciliation together. That means eliminating all remaining boil water advisories, enshrining the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in legislation and so much more. They believe that every Canadian should be able to get a family doctor much more easily, and that universal pharmacare is the next natural evolution of the public health care system of which all Canadians are justifiably proud. As well, they want Canada to continue to be a voice for human rights and the freedom of all people, both at home and around the world.
Historically, minority parliaments have been some of the most productive in Canadian history, but that is only possible if we park our egos at the door and work to find common ground. I look forward—