Debates of Nov. 20th, 2024

Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased that you are here. In fact, I want to open up to you, and I hope that you will have some answers for me.

Over the past month and a half, I have been going through a deeply serious parliamentary crisis, both on a personal and a professional level. It has been troubling me and keeping me awake at night. I am not sleeping well and my relationship with my friends and family is suffering. I no longer see my friends. I have been keeping to myself. My colleagues find me to be difficult and irritable. I am really having a hard time. I wanted to talk about it in the House because this concerns all members of the House.

Quite honestly, I would say that I was naive and a bit ingenuous when I was elected. I put my face on some posters and told myself that I was going to improve the lives of my fellow citizens, that I was going to come to the House to work every day to improve their lives, particularly the lives of Quebeckers.

People are concerned about all sorts of issues, such as the climate crisis, flooding, drought and the housing crisis, which we will talk about later. We are talking about a report from the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities that focuses on the housing crisis. That is quite serious, and people are grappling with this problem every day. The homelessness crisis is critical.

There is the language crisis too. French is disappearing. It has practically vanished from the rest of Canada and is dying in Quebec. Luckily, in a few years, we will have our independence and we will save the French language. In the meantime, however, we have to work within Canada and within our institutions. We have to work every day to improve the lives of our constituents.

What has been going on for the last month and a half? I come here every day and sit in my seat. I am no stranger to rehearsals. In the theatre, we rehearse a lot. I have acted in the same show 200 or 250 times. There is a big difference, however, between performing Molière 250 times and listening to 110 speeches on a privilege motion. A lot of the time, these speeches are delivered at a snail's pace to emphasize every word and really waste the House's time. The goal is to make absolutely sure that people get fed up, that they fall asleep, and that Parliament grinds to a complete halt. There is a big difference between Molière or Shakespeare and the stuff that we hear in this place. It is a far cry from Shakespeare or Molière.

I hope everyone understands my dilemma. When I arrived here, I was hoping that we would have debates, that we would put our ideas up against those of the Liberals, the Conservatives and the NDP. I thought there would be a clash of ideas and debates, that members would launch ideas back and forth, with each idea brighter than the last. I thought this verbal and intellectual clash of ideas would lead to—

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would appreciate not being interrupted. My colleague just broke my momentum, which is annoying. I would ask for a little respect. I am making an effort. I am performing here, unbeknownst to my agent. I should charge for this performance. The public does not usually talk. When people in the audience talk during a performance, they are kicked out, but that is another story. People have less and less respect for audience members who disrupt shows. People pay a lot of money, and they have the right to hear the performance.

Where was I? This clash of ideas should lead to brilliant, nay, incandescent bills that serve the varied interests of our constituents. That is democracy. At least, that is what it should be. As a separatist, I respect the House as an institution. However, for the past month, I have been robbed, assaulted and abused. I cannot move anything forward for my constituents in Longueuil—Saint-Hubert and for all Quebeckers.

As I was saying, I have been faced with this dilemma for the past month. One minute I was sitting here, and the next I woke up because it was my turn to speak. It has been a month and a half since I have spoken in the House. I was asked to speak about an important issue, a report by the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities on the financialization of housing. “At last”, I thought, “they want to hear from me.” At the time, I was thinking about the fact that my skills and my work as a parliamentarian were being solicited. We put people to work on this file. The Bloc Québécois research team, my colleagues and I worked on this file.

We worked on the committee's report as well as the housing crisis. We did our homework. That is what I am going to talk about. The financialization of housing is a very important element in this major housing crisis. It is one of the obstacles to solving the housing crisis. The truth is, in Quebec alone, one million housing units need to be built by 2032 or so. One million units need to be built within the next eight years. However, in 2021, a record year, 67,000 units were built.

This means that, to achieve the objectives that were set by the CMHC and the big banks, to reach market equilibrium, which is one million housing units in Quebec and nearly 3.5 million housing units in the rest of Canada, we would need to build three times more housing units than have ever been built before. Can members imagine the construction sites, the urgency, how far away we are from the target. Can they imagine all the resources that need to be deployed to face the challenge of building three times more housing units a year than we have ever built before, year after year until 2032. It is nuts. If we do not do it, then what?

I am going to talk about homelessness.

Homelessness comes up every day in the media. We recently learned that in the past five years, there has been a threefold increase in the number of deaths in the streets in Quebec. Three times more people are dying on the street. They die from overdoses or from the cold, and no one seems to care in the slightest. They are found along rivers, in tents next to sidewalks. Among those people are seniors, workers. The face of homelessness has changed and if we do not address the broader issue of the financialization of housing, which I will come back to later, homelessness will grow.

I want to talk about homelessness because there is a specific aspect of this issue that directly concerns the government. In the last budget, the government announced a $250-million envelope to put an end to encampments in Canada. Everyone was happy, everyone applauded the good news. Unfortunately, eight months later, with winter approaching, with nights already getting colder and with temperatures dipping below freezing across Quebec and Canada, the money has yet te be paid out. Quebec's share is about $60 million. Quebec is ready to match this amount and invest another $60 million to help house people.

We saw that this morning in Montreal. There are people sleeping along Notre‑Dame Street. The city does not know what to do with them any more. Even if they are removed from there, no one knows where to put them. The federal government keeps adding administrative and bureaucratic hurdles. People who want to open shelters are being asked, what colour will the walls be? How big will the beds be? Will the blankets be synthetic or wool? How many pillowcases will be required? How many pencils will be used to register the number of homeless people sleeping at their shelter? It is so dumb. They keep adding forms and hurdles. People are fed up.

When it comes time to take care of people, housing organizations in Quebec know what to do. However, these organizations are not like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, X or Elon Musk. They do not have billions of employees who can spend all their time filling out an endless number of forms. The people who work in these organizations want to help other people. They are empathetic and competent when it comes to getting people off the streets and finding them a place to live, when it comes to helping people to improve their circumstances and finding them social housing. We are talking about helping people overcome addictions. We are talking about helping them return to work. Some of these people may be just getting out of prison and they need to reintegrate into society. These organizations know how to do that. We just need to give the people with the proper know-how the means to accomplish these goals.

It is unacceptable that this $50 million is just sitting around in Ottawa when it could be helping single mothers who are sleeping in their cars in Rivière‑du‑Loup or Saint‑Jean‑de‑Dieu, a small village not far from Kamouraska. I know this is true because I went there. People are living in tents all over the place. In recent years, some women have even given birth on Quebec sidewalks. How can we allow such a thing to happen in a G7 country? How can we allow this money to sit idle in Ottawa, for some demented administrative reason, when it could be making a difference on the ground?

My time is almost up. I wanted to talk about the financialization of housing, but I am happy that I was able to talk about something that is important to my constituents.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the passion and the energy of that speech. I thought the member was very effective at communicating some of the struggles we are dealing with in the chamber right now. He talked about how he came here to be able to represent his constituents and work as a parliamentarian, but we cannot because we seem to be at a logjam in terms of our ability to get past one single issue.

The good news is that, and there is good news in this, the Bloc can help the government get past this impasse we are at right now by working with the government to deal with this question of privilege. He is right, 188 or 191 or so people have now spoken to this privilege motion, of which 171 were Conservatives. Conservatives are filibustering this place. They are preventing us from doing the work he speaks so passionately about. Will he work with the government to allow us to get past this so we can get to that really important work he was talking about?

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, that is so disingenuous. We are ready to end this circus. Our conditions have been very clear for a month now in the House. No one can deny that.

I was talking about seniors living on the streets earlier. The government had a chance to help them by increasing old age security for seniors 65 to 74. We want to help them. This week, I saw a story on LCN about workers going to help clean a woman's house. Her living situation was pitiful. I cannot get over the fact that such a thing is being tolerated in this day and age.

The government had its chance. For a month, we have been talking to it about vulnerable seniors. It had its chance to help them. If it had helped them, we would be ready to talk.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think that the hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert was on to something when talking about the Conservative tactics.

I would put to this chamber that the previous speaker before him, the member for Saskatoon West, has never been accused of being a riveting speaker. In fact, that was evidenced by the energy here in the House. It is refreshing for me, as a New Democrat trying to learn French in the House. I have to give, first, some comments about the incredible work of our translators, who not only do the translation but also translate the passion that the hon. member has.

As for this hon. member from the Bloc, the hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, I know him to be a theatre person, someone from the national theatre of Canada, in fact. I just have one question for him, and it might be the question of the night.

Which Shakespearean character does he channel when he rises in the House to deliver his monologues or, sometimes, soliloquies?

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, that is a very interesting question.

By the way, I would like to thank and congratulate the interpreters who work with me. I know it can be a challenge. Sometimes I get carried away and go off on a tangent. I am grateful to them, as I have already told them. It cannot be easy. I know it is challenging. I am infinitely grateful that they are able to convey my meaning to my unilingual English-speaking colleagues. I have said it before, but I wanted to say it again.

I started out as Hamlet, asking the deep questions: to be or not to be a parliamentarian. I started out in that direction, questioning myself the way Hamlet does. Afterwards, I would say I started leaning more towards Prospero or characters from Shakespeare's comedies like Twelfth Night—

[An hon. member]

Not Romeo.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

No, Madam Speaker, not Romeo, as my colleague says.

I would say first Hamlet, and then one of the characters from Shakespeare's comedies.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, speaking of Hamlet, something is rotten in the state of Canada. Rent has doubled. Housing costs are way up. Young people cannot afford to buy a home. It is all because of the failing policies of the Prime Minister. We saw one cabinet minister resign today.

Does the member agree that what we really need to do is replace the Prime Minister with a common-sense Conservative alternative?

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, that question involved a really big hypothetical, but things got a bit noisy so I only half heard the question.

My colleague alluded to Denmark. Funnily enough, since we are talking about corruption, in another Liberal era, there was a Mr. Gagliano who was appointed ambassador to Denmark. I do not know whether there is a connection, but Hamlet, Shakespeare, ambassador to Denmark and Mr. Gagliano—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

Resuming debate.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will admit from the outset it will be hard to follow that act. That certainly was a very impassioned speech. I always enjoy hearing from my colleague in the Bloc when he has thoughts to offer in this place. However, he was absolutely right on a number of issues. I agree completely with him.

For starters, there is the fact that we have not been able to continue to work on the important legislation that Canadians expect us to work on. Let us be honest. For the preceding two and a half years before September, we were able to be an effective government through an agreement with the NDP. We had the opportunity to work with the NDP on common issues, on some issues that were more important to them; on some issues that were more important to us. We had the ability to work together and we got a lot done for Canadians during that time. I think it would be hard to argue against that when we look back at pharmacare, dental care and a lot of other initiatives. Yes, I will give credit to the NDP. The NDP did a very good job at negotiating those and bringing them to the government's attention, issues that many Liberals had also been fighting for within our caucus for quite a long time, at least as long as, if not longer than, I have been around. The point is that we were able to get work done. We were able to actually do something in here and deliver meaningful things for Canadians. I already mentioned pharmacare, and I mentioned dental care. The national school food program is another one, along with $10-a-day child care and making sure that the framework legislation behind that was well established. This is what Canadians have asked us to do by electing us to come and work on their behalf.

The member from the Bloc is absolutely right. I felt his sense of defeat about not being able to do anything, of coming here, sitting here and then suddenly realizing it is his time to speak after listening to over 170 Conservatives filibuster over the last 25 or 28 sitting days of this House. What have they been filibustering? They have been filibustering a motion that they introduced into this House. They have been filibustering a motion that asks to send a very important issue to committee. I will not say it is not a very important issue. Then, as soon as they introduced the motion, they said they had no intention of actually letting it pass. Why did they even introduce the motion in the first place? Is this the hill that they are ready to die on? It is easy, because the Conservatives want to give the impression to Canadians that it is impossible to do anything in Ottawa. Things have come to such a standstill that the only option left is to have an election.

The Conservatives have been betting on this for weeks now. I regret the fact that we ended up in this position. Unfortunately, I can understand the political motives behind it. The New Democrats decided they did not want to be part of that working relationship anymore after two and a half years of seeing successful things happen. I understand that decisions had to be made for whatever reasons. We can debate whether or not that was right or wrong, but the one thing we cannot debate, because there is no room for discussion in this, is whether or not we were effective for two and a half years and are not effective now, at least during the regular sitting time of this House.

I will say that it is really good that a lot of legislation was passed in the spring, legislation that the Senate is still dealing with and has been able to deal with during this time. I just came from a reception across the street put on by folks from the east coast, a shed party over there. I also talked to a senator who said it was a good thing that we did have a lot of legislation. We have been able to work through that and get caught up on a lot of that.

We are still continuing to deliver. We are still seeing legislation that would otherwise never be implemented if an election was called now, stuff like pharmacare, for example. Although we passed it here, it had to go over to the Senate and do its work there. While in the Senate, it had to go through all the proper stages.

Unfortunately, we have now come to a point at which the NDP is making it virtually impossible to do anything, but I do not excuse the Bloc completely either. As I indicated in my question for the member, I ask why it does not work with the government to say to the Conservatives that maybe 172 speakers for 20 minutes each on an issue is enough. I am not good enough with math to do the—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam is rising on a point of order.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am wondering if the member knows that we are debating the financialization of housing—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member knows that there is a lot of latitude in what members can do. The hon. member has 20 minutes to come to the point that we are discussing, so I will give him the time to get there.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am fully aware of the concurrence motion that we are debating today. I just wanted to set some of the context in which I find it troubling that we are having to debate these issues through concurrence motions. We should be debating housing through government legislation, which the NDP was able to successfully contribute to not that long ago.

That is what we should be debating. We should not be debating concurrence motions, moving things around, and how we take a committee report and send it back to committee as proposed in the amendment. We should be working on actual government legislation that would have a meaningful, tangible impact on Canadians' lives. A concurrence report coming from committee, although very important in terms of the work that we do here, does not have the ability to direct any kind of legislation other than in terms of asking the government to bring in a new piece of legislation with respect to the issue.

Let us talk about this concurrence motion and about housing more specifically. When it comes to housing, the reality is that we find ourselves in a unique position once again. We have introduced a program, the housing accelerator fund, which is very effective. Kingston received almost $30 million. Of course, the Leader of the Opposition is great with his two-word slogans, and it was recently revealed in a story that—

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan is heckling me right now, so I will use him as an example. The member—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan is rising on a point of order.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, we know that Liberals struggle with numbers, but axe the tax, build the—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

We are not going to do that right now. The hon. member knows very well that this is not a point of order.

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands has the floor.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition really likes his slogans, and he is very effective at taking an issue and confusing it so Canadians cannot really see what the objectives are.

The Leader of the Opposition will say that the housing accelerator fund is a program that has never produced any housing. If we go back and look at everything they have said in the House, we see that 19 of the Conservative members at times have been very critical of the program, yet they themselves have written letters to the Minister of Housing asking for money for their communities through the program because, although the Leader of the Opposition sits there and talks about how the fund has never built any housing, they know that the $30 million, the amount that is coming to Kingston, is not meant to physically build houses but instead is there to unlock other housing developments.

As an example, the City of Kingston has historically, over time, maybe through provincial legislation and maybe through zoning efforts on its own, developed cumbersome processes to develop housing. Maybe the development charges are too high. Maybe permit fees are too high. Maybe there is too much red tape. The federal government says it is going to give the City of Kingston $30 million, and it has to be aimed only at how city officials remove their red tape and how they figure out ways to encourage more housing to be built faster in their city.

The funniest part about this is that it is something that the Leader of the Opposition himself was talking about a couple of years ago. At the same time that we introduced the program, before it had been voted on in the budget, he was actually saying that we took his idea. However, the Leader of the Opposition suddenly decided he was going to confuse the issue for Canadians so they do not know what is really going on here; he was just going to say, “The money going to the cities is not building housing.”

The money that is going to the cities is intended to encourage them and to find ways to reduce red tape and build faster so we can get more housing built. The federal government fully knows that there is no way we as society and as the government can build the amount of housing that is required, and nor do we want to. The government's job is not to build housing, except in certain circumstances where we are working with organizations, to build affordable housing, for example.

Therefore I find it really rich to hear Conservatives get up and talk about the failure of the government and of the housing accelerator fund, when behind the Leader of the Opposition's back, 19 Conservative members have been secretly writing letters to the Minister of Housing, saying that their mayor or their council really needs some of the housing accelerator fund because they know that it is going to help them build faster, that the program is going to work and that their communities need the money too.

There is an idea that the Leader of the Opposition says was his idea. He then starts slamming it as being completely ineffective, once we also agree and bring forward our very similar idea. Then while the Leader of the Opposition is doing that and while they are getting up in the House talking down the housing accelerator fund and saying it is an absolute failure, Conservatives are sending secret letters to the Minister of Housing saying, “Can we please get some of that money, because we know it's effective?”

Then the Leader of the Opposition finds out that the letters have been sent and he tells his MPs that they are no longer allowed to send letters to the government asking for help for their communities. Let us just think about that for a moment. The member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan is no longer allowed to write to the government to ask the government to help his community.

Those are the people who elected him to come here. They are the people who gave him the mandate to represent them here, and the leader of his party is barring him from the ability to be able to advocate on their behalf, once he found out that many of the Conservative MPs were doing it behind his back.

Let us think about that for a second. Once a week, Conservative MPs have to go into a room and listen to their leader tell them what they are going to do: “Here is my three-word slogan for the week and everyone has to start saying it.” Then behind his back, they say to hold on a second; maybe this guy has it wrong and this is a good program. Then they write a letter to the Minister of Housing.

[An hon. member]

It's a great program.