Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be in the House today to speak to the NDP motion, which is drawing a straight line from the inequalities that existed before the pandemic, the situation that so many Canadians find themselves in now and exacerbated by different issues, whether that be poverty or people living with disabilities, seniors or indigenous people who face particular challenges in the pandemic context, right through to the question of how we build a better Canada on the other side. All these things are connected.
I have had occasion to talk in the House before about some of the very real challenges that Canadians are facing right now in the midst of this pandemic. Some of those challenges come from before the pandemic and have just been made worse by the pandemic. Some of them are new problems. When we are trying to solve those problems, we should be thinking about how we emerge from this on the other side in a much better state and with much less inequality between Canadians.
One of the groups I want to speak about I have not had the opportunity to speak about in the House so far, but I want to raise them as an example of how we can respond to a current crisis and then build for better on the other side. It is the example of independent travel agents, who have faced real challenges through this pandemic because a lot of their income is earned on commission and, of course, that commission does not get paid until their clients take their trip.
They found themselves without income, supporting a lot of clients who have had to make alternative arrangements or, mostly, cancellations of their travel, and have been frustrated at the fact that they cannot get the airlines to reimburse their money. Now, in some cases, airlines are offering reimbursements, but contingent on the travel agents' sending their commission back to the airlines so that it can be returned to the customers.
Here we have a situation where there is a lot of hard-working people who are very frustrated, continuing to do work and getting by on CERB and now the CRB. They are looking to have extended coverage because they know that, even when they go back to work and when people start booking travel again, they are not going to see money for a very long time. It is not until those trips are taken that the commissions start coming in.
What is the significance of this? First of all, they are calling for a special extension on their part, because of their circumstances, for the CRB to apply to them. That is something that makes a lot of sense, given the nature of their industry. We want to make sure that Canadians get through this and come out on the other side without losing their homes, so that the economy can get back up and going as quickly as possible and with a minimum of disruption.
If we had in place, already, a policy for a guaranteed basic livable income for every Canadian, this transition would have been a lot smoother. It is something that we should be looking at doing because, before the pandemic, there were far too many Canadians living in poverty and after the pandemic there will continue to be Canadians who have need of assistance in order to be able to live with the dignity that every human being deserves.
When we look at responding to the current challenges of the pandemic, and I gave one small example of where there is serious need, and we talk about building for a better future, there is no question that a guaranteed livable basic income has to be a part of that solution. That is part of the motion today.
Another important problem that the pandemic has highlighted is the trouble that so many Canadians have in getting access to pharmaceutical drugs. That has been exacerbated by the pandemic because many people who were able to get that access by way of a benefit plan at work, when they lost their job as a result of the pandemic, they also lost their drug coverage.
I think that is another example of one of the real needs of the pandemic. All of those Canadians who had drug coverage and now do not because of a loss of employment, that is a problem we need to address. Many Canadians did not have drug coverage prior to the pandemic and continue to live through this pandemic without drug coverage. That is a problem that needs to be addressed as well.
The way to do that is not a temporary fix, but building a proper public universal national pharmacare plan that will cover everybody irrespective of their employment status, so that when there are large economic upheavals, whether they are because of a pandemic or the result of some other kind of economic downturn, people could rely on their national pharmacare plan in order to get the medication they need and would not be beholden to economic circumstances in order to get basic health care. This is something that has been the case with respect to pharmaceutical drugs for far too long here in Canada, and something that we absolutely need to change.
One of the other problems that, again, existed before the pandemic but has gotten worse, and I think threatens to get even worse yet, is the question of affordable housing in Canada and ensuring that everybody can put a roof over their heads. That has something to do with income. A guaranteed livable basic income could help with that, in terms of ensuring that people have income to pay rent, but the other piece of that puzzle is meaningful investment in public housing, of the kind that we saw in the post-war years and really have not seen since the 1990s.
There has been some new investment in public housing in the last five years, but it has not gotten us back to the point where provinces and organizations could engage in a consistent planning cycle over the long term. Restoring that capacity is something that is very important.
I want to make sure that I reserve time for what I think is probably the most important part of this motion. We can talk about all the things and all the ways we want to support Canadians in living a good life and living with dignity, but we do have to address the question of how it is that those things get paid for.
I want members of the House to recall what my colleague from Winnipeg Centre, who spoke just before me, had to say. If we want to save money, the way to do that is to look after people and to care for people. I want to remind members of the House that, actually, we already pay a huge cost for not doing these things up front. We pay for them later. We pay those costs in emergency rooms and we pay them in jails, because people who are not well looked after end up interacting with the justice system and they end up interacting with the health care system. Instead of proactively, with their family doctor, they do it reactively in the emergency room once the problem has gotten so bad they have no choice but to present to the emergency room.
First of all, I want to say, and this is not just an article of faith, there is a lot of evidence to show that when these kinds of investments are made, serious cost savings can be realized to the public purse over time if the investments are made up front.
However, the really critical piece about this motion is to say that one of the ways we can pay for these things is, first of all, to recognize that since the pandemic began, Canada's billionaires are $37 billion richer than they were in March 2020. These are people who can afford to pay more in order to ensure that the rest of Canada is able to get the support that it needs. Asking those folks to pay more is not a stretch. It is not too much to ask. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, there is something deeply wrong with a situation where we do not ask them to pay their fair share.
For far too long, Canada's richest families and largest corporations have been assessed at lower tax rates. They have been given options to funnel their money out of the country, and not illegally. They can do this legally, investing their money in tax havens. It is why the NDP has proposed a wealth tax on fortunes of over $20 million. It is why we have proposed a temporary excess profit tax for the pandemic, looking at corporations that have made vastly more money since the pandemic began than they did last year, to say that they should pay a larger share of tax on those profits, over and above what they made in previous years.
That is how we are going to go from addressing the inequalities that existed before the pandemic, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, and land ourselves in a Canada that is more fair and better to live in for everybody on the other side.
