Madam Speaker, I want to address Bill C-8. I want to make sure it is clear that I will be voting for it, but I find it inadequate. In that, my views are shared by the hon. member for Kitchener Centre. I want to reflect on the excellent points in his speech, especially related to the housing tax.
We had a speech given by our Deputy Prime Minister and finance minister on December 14. We are now debating it on February 7. Things change very rapidly right now.
As I think back to December 14, when the Deputy Prime Minister gave the speech, we would not have believed that we would be dealing with such a strain on our health care system, that the omicron virus would be so very transmissible, that so many people would be getting sick and that we would have the country, or at least the national capital, in a state of occupation with nerves frayed.
As an opening comment to my friends on all sides of the House, we need to do whatever we can as parliamentarians to display a non-partisan spirit of care and love for each other as neighbours and as Canadians. I have always felt that a hallmark of a Canadian debate is that we can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.
We are at real risk here. I never would have imagined in a million years that I would read, as I did on Twitter today, that there were such people as protesters in the nation's capital who thought it was a good idea to start a fire in the lobby of an apartment building. We really need to find ways to reach out, even to those people who are part of the convoy and who think they are in a glorious moment of grassroots democracy, to say please respect each other. Please be careful. Please go home.
As for Bill C-8, for those who have not studied it and for those who might be watching on CPAC or at home, the elements of it are all understandable, particularly with a lens on December 14, when there was a sense that perhaps we were coming out of the pandemic.
There is not nearly enough economic relief here for Canadians who are now not coming out of the pandemic as we felt we might be. The cutting of the benefit from $500 a month to $300 is completely unacceptable, and we know we need to see that improved. I certainly hope the government ministers recognize that this needs to change.
Yes, it is a good thing to see $1.72 billion for rapid testing. I agree with many of my opposition colleagues who have asked why it took so long. Why did we not have more focus on testing earlier?
I experienced what it was like to have daily rapid testing when I was on the Canadian government delegation to the climate negotiations in Glasgow at COP26. It was really interesting to know that the National Health Service in the U.K. could manage to test 35,000 people every single day. We tested ourselves and sent in the results, and then those results had to be double-checked. It did keep COP26 from being a super spreader event. They worked hard.
I think we need to look at testing, and I am glad to see this money is in the budget. I spent many months trying to prepare for people going back to school in the fall of 2020. I worked extensively with people in the office of the minister of finance and deputy prime minister, and attempted to reach all the ministers of education across the country, with a simple idea that the spaces that had been shut down because people were not allowed to congregate, such as community centres and empty buildings of all kinds, including hotels and convention centres, could be put to use as schools with greater distancing for children and better ventilation.
Of course, as ever, the barriers here were the provincial jurisdiction over education and the federal government having the role of providing money once the provinces asked for it. In that spirit, I think we are really late in getting around to ventilation in schools.
I do not uniquely blame the federal government for how long it has taken, because I know the barriers lie in provincial governments not asking. If a provincial government says, “Please, we need money to ventilate our schools better”, I am glad to see that the federal government, and we as parliamentarians, will approve that and write a cheque. This should have happened before our children and teachers, and in my case, my daughter is a teacher, all went into spaces that could have been made safer more than a year ago. It will take some time to use this money to better ventilate schools, but I am glad it is finally happening.
The measures here are good measures. At 1%, the so-called underused housing tax, or what could have been better described as a speculative investor housing tax, is a very small step in the right direction. We have seen the housing market skewed on the lower mainland of the province of British Columbia, as well as on Vancouver Island and throughout the province. Now, because COVID has led people to realize they can work from home and that they can buy a home anywhere, we have seen a real distortion, but a lot of that distortion has been from people buying houses for investments.
For Airbnbs and foreigners who keep houses empty, a 1% tax is good, but as the hon. member for Kitchener Centre said in his speech, it is like someone waiting for the fire department to show up when their house is on fire, and the firefighters coming with one bucket. This is not going to do the job. It will be a good first step. Perhaps we will learn from it and extend it to be a more meaningful tax to keep people from speculating in the housing market. Houses should be homes first, and not investments for those who do not plan to live in those houses.
There is much more I could say about what is in the bill. I want to talk about some of the things that are not there. We need, of course, more support on the EI front. There are EI changes in the bill, but we need more. We need more support for individuals who are falling between the cracks, but we also need to talk about what the real threat is globally of different, mutating forms of COVID-19. We know, and we have heard many members on all sides of the House say, that until everyone on the planet is vaccinated and until vaccine equity takes place between the industrialized world and the developing world, we will not be through it. It is now basically a giant petri dish of humanity, with the virus being more in charge than humans. We need to make sure that developing countries' citizens get access to vaccines.
Here we are. I am double vaxxed and I have had a booster, and millions of people around the world have not had a first shot. We need to get big pharma out of the way. To do that, Canada needs to side with India and South Africa at the World Trade Organization and support a waiver under the trade-related intellectual property regime, such that developing countries can manufacture their own vaccines without patent protection for the larger pharmaceutical companies.
I will note these larger pharmaceutical companies received millions of dollars from governments around the world to speed up the development of vaccines for COVID-19. I do not think they deserve any patent protection or profits out of this. I think some of the anti-vax protests that we see would be much reduced if the additional argument, which is really a logical fallacy, that just because big pharma is a terrible group and collectively represents a global version of organized crime, people are angry at vaccinations. We can be saying both that big pharma does not deserve a profit out of this, and that vaccinations are essential for public health.
In any case, I would have liked to see in this bill a commitment to move forward to get vaccinations to the developing world. I also look at this bill in the context of the Deputy Prime Minister and finance minister's speech back on December 14. She noted that the province of British Columbia had been walloped over and over again. We had a heat dome that killed 600 British Columbians in four days. We had an extremely stressful summer of emergency evacuations and stretched wildfire response to thousands of fires across the province. Just before the fiscal update was delivered, we had the loss of billions of dollars of infrastructure, as well as lost lives and devastating impacts, in Abbotsford and all up the Fraser Valley. We heard, and still hear, the Prime Minister's voice saying “We are with Lytton,” and that we would help them rebuild.
In point of fact, nothing has happened to help rebuild Lytton. There is not a new housing permit out there. We have a lot of backlog to make up for from climate impacts that have already occurred, yet as I speak today on February 7, Canada's commitment to hold to a target of 1.5° Celsius, which we committed to in the climate negotiations in Paris, remains unfulfilled. Even our promises will not get us there, much less our weak delivery.
