Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable.
I would like to thank my Bloc Québécois colleagues for moving this motion, which we will be supporting. We are in favour of increasing health transfers.
However, I would like to speak about the other pandemic. Its symptoms include drug overdoses, depression and even suicide. According to our Public Health Agency 's recent report, the grim story is that, in B.C., paramedics saw 2,700 calls, which is a 700-call increase in people asking for help to save the life of someone who was overdosing on opioids. That is 700 more people yelling into the phone at an operator asking for an ambulance to save the life of a dying person. It is not just B.C.; in Alberta and Ontario, there are 50% increases in opioid deaths.
Statistics Canada reports that the number of Canadians reporting good public health dropped from 68% to 48% in just the last two years.
Calls to one suicide prevention line tripled, prompting one Conservative MP to call for all of the hotlines to be merged into one to serve all of the desperate people seeking help during these desperate times. What is behind all of this misery? Part of the answer is worklessness. Through no fault of their own and because of the pandemic lockdown, nine million Canadians were forced out of their work and rightly received CERB benefits. Replacing their incomes, while necessary, does not replace their work.
Allow me to quote the public health officer, who said, “Statistics Canada found lower life satisfaction among unemployed Canadians and noted that this relationship is about more than just money... This is echoed by systematic reviews exploring unemployment and mental health, unemployment and health, and unemployment and mortality risk.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research found that a 1% increase in unemployment leads to a 3.6% increase in opioid deaths. The University of Calgary found that a 1% unemployment increase led to a 2% increase across Canada in suicide rates. In other words, worklessness is literally lethal.
Researchers looked at 310 men laid off from a ball-bearing manufacturing plant in the early 1980s and found that two years after the layoffs, those who still did not have jobs reported higher rates of mental health, hospital visits, medication requirements and other health problems. Two years later, those people were suffering more than their compatriots who had found jobs.
If worklessness had a warning label, it would read like this: “Unemployment raises the chance by about a third that a man will die in the next decade,” to quote the former editor of the British Medical Journal, Dr. Richard Smith. “And for those in middle age — with the biggest commitments — the chance doubles. The men are most likely to die from suicide, cancer, and accidents and violence.”
One study by Dr. Diette in the United States found that those people who remained out of jobs for long periods of time, even when they had no history whatsoever of mental health problems, were 125% more likely to experience mental distress after that unemployment, and it is not just about money. Harvard professor Edward Glaeser found that the mental health impact of worklessness was 10 times higher than the mental health impact of losing $25,000 in annual income. This goes to the core of who we are as human beings: the necessity to work, to put our brains and bodies to use for other people.
To quote the Dalai Lama and Arthur Brooks in an essay titled “Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded”, they wrote:
Virtually all the world’s major religions teach that diligent work in the service of others is our highest nature and thus lies at the center of a happy life.
Martin Luther King called it “the dignity of labor”.
I am the captain of my destiny. That is the meaning of work. It is self-agency. It is mastering one's world, rather than having the world master one. That is why I rise today to bring the House's attention to the urgent need to get the 600,000 people who are still out of work since COVID back into jobs. What does that mean? It means ending the war on work.
We have, in this country, a system with clawbacks and taxes that can rob a single mother of up to 80¢ on the next dollar she earns. This system punishes people for putting their hands and their heads to work in a job to earn a bit more and to try to get ahead. We must fix that tax system to make work pay for everyone. We must remove the regulatory and taxation obstacles that make it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for our first nations communities to bring business, develop resources and give their young population the opportunity to make maximum contributions.
We must, once again, unleash the power of our resource sector.
Let us think of the number of people who have lost hope across the formerly bustling rural communities in western Canada, where work is part of not just making a living but making a life, where people always took pride in getting out of bed and producing. How many of them lost hope? How many of them took their own lives since the government decided to try to phase them out of existence? Why not unleash the power of that sector to lift people out of poverty and give them, once again, the dignity of work that they deserve and so desperately want?
Why not make Canada the fastest place in the world to get a permit to build a factory or a warehouse and to open a mine or a shopping centre, so that those places can be filled with workers? Why not make this the easiest place on earth in which to create opportunities for people to get up every day and contribute?
To restore health and happiness, we must not just increase health care funding, though that is necessary. We must also honour work and workers, reform tax and benefits to reward effort, free businesses to pay more wages, let labour keep more of the bread it has earned and unleash the mighty force of 20 million Canadian workers, because a job brings dollars and dignity, a paycheque and a purpose, a burden and a blessing, a good living and a good life.
We have work to do.