Mr. Speaker, this is the first time I get to answer a question from the new member.
I worked in a newsroom with someone called Bob Hunter, He was the person who termed the phrase “Greenpeace” and in fact had membership card no. 1. He never joined the Green Party. Part of the problem was the wonky approach the party used to have using Conservative-style tax credits to achieve environmental goals and nothing else. I am glad to see the Green Party joining the social justice conversation with good ideas and with individuals who have broadened the conversation around what justice looks like in a social context. Therefore, I welcome this question and the idea.
The member talked about seniors, people with disabilities, the homeless and people stuck in the gig economy, whether the tech gig economy or the seasonal employment that defines parts of New Brunswick.
She also talked about the success of and what the child benefit had taught us, because it is a form of guaranteed income. It guarantees income for all families. It is means-tested in a way that is sensitive. It has delivered hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty because it is there for them day in and day out, month in and month out. Those are policies the Green Party supported in our first budget whereas the NDP did not.
I was the parliamentary secretary to the minister who was in charge at the time, but he is now the head of the Treasury Board. He talked about changing the social safety net into a trampoline, about pulling the cords apart to understand which ones needed to be thicker, not to catch people but to bounce them back up. The federal government provides several different forms of income supports that when looked at as a collection is a form of basic income. However, because they are separate programs, there are cracks between them, and those are the very cracks the member opposite is talking about people falling between. We saw this with people with disabilities during the pandemic.
The federal government did not have a coordinated single database of people receiving the benefit because of this patchwork of tax credits and provincial programs, veterans benefits and CPP. When we knitted that back together again, we found we could do more with a cohesive and coordinated approach as opposed to that patchwork approach or those single strands in the social safety net, which are good enough for some but not good enough for all.
Therefore, we have started to look at seniors pensions, boosting the OAS and looking at how seniors poverty rolls through generationally as seniors grow older. We are taking a look at the disability pension and have done it through the lens of the disability rights legislation we passed in the last Parliament.
We have strengthened the national housing strategy from the $40 billion the Prime Minister referenced earlier this year now closer to $72 billion, and the rapid housing initiative is filling those gaps and making a difference in the lives of people in Fredericton and New Brunswick in particular.
Regarding the gig economy and the child benefit, I agree. We had a meeting today at the human resource committee of Parliament. We looked at the way EI does and does not function. It is built for an employment structure from the last century, with a computer system that is almost even older than that. It is time for a massive reform. Whether we call it basic income, guaranteed income, universal income, the name is not so important. I do not care about the bumper sticker; I care about the policy. It is time for all of us as parliamentarians to take a look at how the new economies have emerged in our ridings. Whether in the north, the remote, the coast, downtowns, small towns or small municipalities across the Prairies, we have to find a way to reform EI, to restructure the income streams of the federal government supports and to achieve the goals about which the member has spoken.
Who gets the credit, whose bumper sticker is best, I could not care less, but the issues the member is raising are the right ones. The issues we are working on are the same ones. I hope she sees us moving toward that goal even if we do not achieve it necessarily under the banner she has given us. What COVID has taught us through this process is that we can do better because “better is always possible”, to quote the Prime Minister.