Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-8. It is my first time giving a speech in the House in the new year. It is not my first time on my feet but my first time speaking at length, so it is my first time speaking in the House since the omicron wave seriously took hold. I want to take a moment to recognize what a punch in the stomach it has felt like to Canadians across the country, many of whom had some hope that we were getting beyond the pandemic. When this wave came, I think many of them felt all of those many feelings we have been feeling over the past two years kind of condensed into a new wave of the pandemic.
I want to give special thanks to all the frontline workers we talked about at the beginning of the pandemic, who never went away and never stopped doing those important tasks even though the limelight shifted away from them.
Health care workers continue to labour in really difficult circumstances, and they are overworked, tired and under-resourced.
Teachers and child care workers have had to face the pandemic all the way through. In this particular wave, and I will speak to my own experience in Manitoba, they were having the challenges of remote learning and are now having to deal with full classrooms and students and colleagues who are getting sick, or they are getting sick themselves.
Grocery store workers are putting themselves at risk once again. As my colleague from Windsor West has rightly pointed out, some of the big grocery chains said that when another wave came they would bring back hero pay to recognize the risks workers are taking in order to help Canadians, but they have not stepped up to reinstitute that pay.
All of these things together are leading to a lot of outrage, and I am going to talk a bit about some of the things I find particularly outrageous today and that inform my work.
I am outraged when I get emails, as I did today, about another senior who has lost their life, not because of the pandemic directly but because they took the government at its word when it said it would be there to have their backs, would support them through the pandemic and told them to apply for help when they lost their job. They did. They applied for CERB.
Because the government could not figure out its own rules, and that is probably the most charitable interpretation, or because it did not care, it decided to claw back those benefits that were supposed to be for working seniors in need through the guaranteed income supplement. Not only did the government do that and not catch it before it happened, but the government was advised at least as early as May of 2021 that it was happening and it chose to do nothing about it. The government chose to do nothing about it.
One could say that the government did nothing about it until it happened, except that it happened in July and it still did nothing about it. The Liberals called an election and did nothing about it. They came back from the election and did nothing about it. It took weeks of persistently raising this in the House of Commons to get an announcement, and that announcement did not solve the problem because that money still is not in the pockets of seniors who are in dire need.
The money is not in the pocket of the senior I heard about today, the senior with type 2 diabetes who could no longer afford the food and medication they needed to be healthy and passed away. I have an email open in front of me about a couple from Mississauga who are in dire straits. The two of them are trying to live on $1,300 a month because their GIS payments are gone.
The government says not to worry and that it has a solution with a one-time payment in May or June. There are already seniors who are no longer living and who cannot receive that payment, and there will be more by May or June. That outrages me. It outrages me on the substance of the matter, because Canada should do better. It outrages me because it breaks the promise the Prime Minister made to people in this country that the government would be there for them.
Instead, on a principle of bureaucracy, the Liberals are not, because they could not figure out their internal systems, or they did not have the right lists or they were not sure about this or maybe needed to do that. This is after just proving to the country that when the political will exists they can roll out a program to millions of Canadians almost overnight.
Liberals expect us to believe that, for those seniors who were already receiving money from the government, already on a list, already in a system where we were paying them, they cannot find a way to get money into those seniors' hands so that they are not dying in the cold. It is not believable and it is shameful.
I am outraged about that. I am proud that people in Elmwood—Transcona sent me here to relay that message to the government. I am going to keep doing that until that money gets into the hands of seniors who can then get back into their homes and out of the jeopardy they are in because the government cannot be bothered to take on its own bureaucracy, which is telling it something that needs to be done cannot be done, when we all know that is not true.
That outrages me.
I am outraged that people during the pandemic were dying in personal care homes because of years of cuts, at the federal and provincial level, to health care. We know our system has been under-resourced. Those cuts did not come because Canada could not afford to do those things. Over the years that those cuts came to our health care system, the corporate tax rate in Canada went down from 28% to just 15%. That is a huge decrease. That is almost a 50% tax cut to the largest corporations in Canada, while our government was telling us it could not afford to pay its fair share of health care to the provinces.
That is shameful.
What is more shameful still is that we are two years into this pandemic and there has hardly been a long-term care centre in Winnipeg that has not had a COVID-19 outbreak. There has been no work done by the federal government to convene the provinces to talk about better national standards and funding those standards.
I am not talking about the federal government telling the provinces what to do. I am talking about convening them so they can talk about best practices, so that every Canadian can benefit from the best things our provincial governments are doing to serve Canadians in long-term care, and then ensuring the federal government is at the table to help resource those things.
That was the power of—