Adam Vaughan

[Infrastructure, May 6th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I see the members on that side cannot get the Minister of Finance to answer a question either.

Twenty-seven mayors from Ontario's largest cities were in Ottawa this week. They are feeling a little ignored. They are tired of being treated unfairly by the Conservative government. There is no new money for infrastructure this year, after no money last year. Roads, bridges, transit, they just do not build themselves. Cities need some help.

I have been asking the Minister of Finance to explain, but he is as tough to find these days as a Tory in Alberta; tough to find.

Why do these mayors have to wait? Why can these mayors not get help this year from the government? Why can they not get help now?

[Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015, May 4th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I met with a number of police organizations over the last week, including some from the City of Toronto, where we both represent constituents. Their complaint was that there is no new money for de-radicalization, there is no new money to do a lot of the work which is side-loaded onto local police forces as CSIS does not have the personnel, in terms of capacity, to fulfill some of these new responsibilities. They wonder how they can do this work and carry out these duties if the current federal government, which talks tough on crime but never supports police departments in the local level when it side-loads these responsibilities, is not going to support them.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the way in which urban areas manage water is going to be one of the defining issues of the next century. In downtown Toronto, I have a great set of examples as to why it is so critical. Our drinking water comes from the lake and our lake is fed by the rivers. The rivers that flow through Toronto are heavily polluted and as they enter the lake they pollute our drinking water. Cleaning up the Don River, as an example, is fundamental to protecting the source of our drinking water in a city like Toronto, but also for the region of the GTA.

We have a project that is on the books that requires a federal commitment of about $325 million. It is a $1 billion project to build flood protection for the lower Don lands but also a filtration system to clean the water before it gets to Lake Ontario. We had heard that money was going to be in this year's budget, but it is not. When we do not invest, we send pollution into the lake that makes it difficult to clean for drinking water, but we also have not unlocked billions of dollars in real estate opportunities in downtown Toronto.

We end up with the worst of all worlds: we do not make an investment that protects the water; we do not make an investment that produces an economy; and we do not make an investment that protects the city from being flooded. Instead, we expose the city to risk on all three fronts.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, our leader was very clear, so let me help the member understand it in more detail.

We support the cut for small businesses, but we think the implementation requires more detail. There are different types of small businesses. People can self-incorporate as individuals. They can have a law degree and hire themselves out as a consultant and make a six-figure salary, doing wonderfully well, but only employ themselves and effectively self-incorporate as a model to manage their tax load as opposed to actually starting and running a small business.

Then there are small businesses, of which my riding has many, that employ people: a corner store, a small start-up firm in a high-tech field, or a new law firm. There are small businesses that have employees. We think that the tax cuts need to bonus those businesses that hire people; so we should target the small-business cut to employment growth, not simply to tax avoidance.

A blanket statement of whether a cut for small-business taxes is good or bad is too easy to make. The question is how to make cuts to small-business tax to generate jobs for people and grow the strength of a community. That is the distinction that the leader of the Liberal Party was making when he said he was concerned about the tax cut as just a tax cut in and of itself.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to highlight three areas of significant concern with this budget as they relate to both the city I live in and also the portfolios I hold as the Liberal critic for housing and urban affairs.

This budget really should be called the 2017 budget, because none of the money for cities really arrives for two years. The promises are made now, but the obligations and opportunities are off into the future. I can assure the House that the government in 2017 will be addressing those issues, but it will be addressing them in real time, not in some deferred payment scheme that, quite frankly, does not work for cities that have needs now and the people who live in those cities have needs now.

The first issue and the one dearest to my heart is housing. There is one provision in this budget that deals with housing. The government's position has been to penalize co-ops and affordable housing projects that are suffering from extraordinarily high interest rates. If those projects sought to refinance, the Conservative government would penalize them at a profit for the treasury, but at a huge detriment in obligation to the housing providers.

The government has now surrendered its punitive penalty program and in doing so may free up dollars that can deal with some state of good repair issues, which are enormous in our country. This is because there is no program on state of good repair budgets that even comes close to dealing with the deficiencies that exist, not just in aboriginal housing but almost all public housing stock in our country. It is a public asset that has been neglected, part of the infrastructure deficit that is not addressed by the government and a real hardship for people living in substandard housing. However, when the Conservatives put that policy on the table and we asked CMHC or even yesterday when I asked a member of the government to detail how it would work, they had no idea how it would work.

For example, when surrendering CMHC mortgages, quite often the subsidy agreements are tied to those mortgages. Therefore, would we be surrendering the subsidy as well? The agreements that expire see the mortgage expire and the subsidy agreement expire. The government is saying not to use that money to recapitalize or repair housing, rather use it to sustain subsidy so one neighbour subsidizes another, which is a crazy way of providing public housing, but it is the ideological position adopted by the government.

When we ask that question, we can not get an answer because nobody at treasury, nobody at CMHC and nobody in the House knows the answer. However, it is a fundamentally important question, because if the money that is supposed to flow to public housing suddenly disqualifies the subsidies that make it affordable, it is no longer affordable housing and will actually cost housing providers more money than they will be earning under this surrendered penalty policy. We need an answer on that.

We also have no idea how one would qualify or apply, because no program has been enunciated beyond the promise in the budget, and this is important. The city of Toronto's public housing provider, Toronto Community Housing, could use all of that $140 million in one year, which means no other providers across the country would get relief from it. If it is not available to Toronto Community Housing, then it suddenly does not have the money to repair its housing stock. Therefore, how it is handed out, who gets to apply, whether it is done on a regional basis or project-by-project basis, what the size of the penalty is, or how close one is to the end of one's mortgage, are all details for which answers do not exist. That is why this budget, which is so unfair to individuals, is also useless to civil society when it tries to actually use it.

This is not a budget, but rather a series of ethereal promises that will be worked out in time. In other words, even though the Conservatives took extra time to write this budget, they now need extra time to tell us what it actually means. Therefore, those promises are empty on housing.

However, the real issue is that the Conservatives continue to brag about the status quo, and the status quo in our country is terrible. There is not a city that does not have a waiting list for public housing. Yet, when we look at the waiting list, 92,000 households in Toronto and close to 200,000 people, the money given under the existing agreements that the Conservatives are bragging about deliver 60 units of housing per year over the next five years. That means the city of Toronto technically has a 1,500 year wait list, and the Conservatives pat themselves on the back for having approached this with $140 million in mortgage relief penalty funds. It is does not work. That money does not build new housing. We need new housing. There is no national program, and we need one now.

There are two issues, and one of them is transit. The FCM has thanked the government because in two years $250 million will start to flow for transit projects. Even then, there is a catch. The money has to be borrowed through a private sector fund and the money is spent out over 30 years. Then, they are going to be chosen on merit. No one can define what merit means. The last time merit meant something, the government went to a guy called Rob Ford and got advice on how to spend money on transit. If that is the kind of merit process we are about to walk into, God help us.

The real issue is that the money is needed now on this file. The biggest problem the major cities, like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, have is not new projects, it is the state of good repair of existing transit infrastructure. That money, that capital dollars, those flows could start immediately and start helping to repair and support cities that are trying to provide transit, despite the fact the government has no real policy except when it comes to the opportunity to cut a ribbon and put a billboard up.

The transit policy has to move far beyond new projects. It has to include state of good repair. Yet, on this file, the money is not there for two years, and the commitment to state of good repair does not exist at all. When we look at the actual dollar amounts, it is too little for the big cities and it actually becomes too big for the smaller cities because they do not have the fiscal capacity to partner with the federal government let alone the private sector to deliver many of these programs.

The fear is that this will only work in a few suburban communities, and it will not provide us with a national transit strategy that is effective.

The final issue is water, the most pressing concern for the folks in city halls and town halls right across the country. They are dealing with two very different dynamics. One of them is climate change, and we can see the impact of climate change and not preparing for it. We can see the impact of that in Calgary with the floods and the hundreds of millions, close to billions, of dollars that could cost that city hall because it did not have the money to protect itself with the infrastructure.

There is no money for climate change, no money for adaptation, no money for cities to deal with these flash storms that are occurring and creating havoc in cities right across the country, large and small.

Without the ability to manage the next century, it will be hellish for municipalities because they do not have the capacity to deal with storms of the century, which now occur every two and three years. This is a significant issue. No money has been set aside in this budget, anywhere, for new infrastructure to deal with that issue.

The Conservatives talk about the building Canada fund, but there were zero dollars last year to almost every city in the country. Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal received zero dollars, all matched by Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Halifax and Quebec City that received zero dollars. The reason was because the budget that introduced it also had no program and no detail attached to it. It took the government almost eight months to even set up a desk to take inquiries let alone applications.

Once again, because the government delayed the budget, it has missed another building year, another construction cycle, and it will be two years before people can even apply for that money and get real dollars into their budget. The real crux of the matter is that money does not arrive for 10 years.

Therefore, there is no money for climate change adaptation in this budget to arrive at city halls to get to work now to help cities immediately.

The final piece of the water puzzle is clean water for drinking. On this file, the federal government has loaded requirements onto small cities in particular and has not provided one penny in predictable, stable funding in a way that those small cities can actually build the water plants they need to meet new federal regulations and also to replace aging infrastructure.

In places like the regional municipality of Cape Breton and Sydney, where there is a $625 million water bill on the horizon, the infrastructure dollars are so insignificant that people in that part of the country are wondering if they have to shut down their entire governmental operations, which is ironically $625 million a year on a regional budget basis. They are wondering if they have to shut the whole thing down just to pay for the new federal regulations. Then they are wondering if they are going to get any help from Ottawa.

Small town by small town, rural town by rural town, northern town by northern town, these new obligations are so magnificent that the federal government has driven into city hall and town hall budgets. We have to wonder why the government did not respond with an infrastructure program that dealt with this specific set of requirements.

Instead, what we get is silence. The only help that seems to materialize is 10 years from now. We cannot wait 10 years for clean water. We need it now.

On housing, water and transit, this is not a 2015 budget, it is a 2017 budget at best. Even then the dollar amounts are so low, it is a useless budget and it is an unfair budget, particularly for people living in urban areas.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I keep hearing questions from a party that talks about coalition, but every time we speak, its members get mad at us for having an opinion. It is a strange way to make a coalition work.

I, too, lived through the nineties with the Liberal government and worked at a Crown corporation at the time. I was also aware of the cuts. However, I also saw that as the budget was balanced, repayment and rebuilding social programs were well under way.

There were two programs in particular. The first was daycare, a new national agreement, which would have delivered real daycare spaces across the country, was finally achieved with consent and co-operation from the provinces, in which provincial jurisdiction is important to acknowledge. The second was in housing which, in the last budget presented in the House by a Liberal Party, had $2.7 billion for public housing. When that government fell, the $2.7 billion, which would have been spent this year, disappeared with it.

Are those the programs that are part of the thinking that criticizes the budget, the absence of daycare and a housing program? Is that why the member is so concerned that the budget fails to meet the needs of Canadians?

[Housing, April 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, this is the problem. What the parliamentary secretary has just described is the existing program. It is the status quo. When he talks about aboriginal housing and 1,400 houses being built or repaired this year, that is 2 houses per reserve. That is tragically ridiculous, because it puts people in harm's way.

Here is a question to which I would like a very quick answer. When those co-ops and affordable housing providers renew their mortgages, will the subsidy agreements expire when the old mortgages expire, or will the subsidy agreements continue?

[Housing, April 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about housing. I have asked several questions and quite often have received the exact same response from the minister, and I am troubled by it.

We know that housing agreements, which were initiated by the Liberal Party, have been renewed and we know the renewals in places like Ontario constitute about $801 million in funding. I did the math when I was in city council, and certainly have done since I arrived in Parliament. When we do that math, it means that approximately 60 new units of housing will be provided by this agreement each year for the next 5 years in a city like Toronto.

Because there is no money for state of good repair, because there is no money for new housing and because the capital repair backlog, which is effectively downloaded onto the city by a provincial Conservative government, is now close to $1 billion, we are losing more units of housing in Toronto through disrepair than we are gaining in the new housing agreements.

My question for the government is very simple. We know that housing solves problems. We know that housing pays for itself through the social investment. We know that housing is an integral part of building strong cities, strong neighbourhoods, but most important, strong families. In light of the fact we are facing an unprecedented crisis in Toronto, with 92,000 families, close to 200,000 people waiting for assisted housing, close to 5,000 people a year living in city shelters of whom half are children, with this calamity facing Canadians living in Toronto, with a calamity that is replicated unfortunately right across the country in every major city, every minor city, every medium city and every city of every description, why is the government satisfied with the status quo when it is literally putting people in harm's way?

Why is there not one new dollar in this current budget for one new unit of housing anywhere in the country, let alone a city, let alone the aboriginal or traditional territory, let alone in any single settlement in Canada? Why is not one dollar put into new housing, one dollar into fixing new housing? Why is the status quo, which people suffer under, acceptable?

[Business of Supply, April 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, this debate will not fix problems of the past. The debate is about addressing the problem in the future.

As a journalist, I used to listen to politicians talk about their opponents being soft on crime. That is ridiculous. Then we hear the other side say, “that side wants to waste money”. No politician campaigns on the platform of wanting to waste money. It just is not a reality.

What we are asking for and what we are looking for is the House to come together on this issue and realize that government advertising should be just that, the advertising of government services, not the advertising of political parties or ideologies.

If the Conservatives really believe their ads are truly a public service and independent of their party platform and ideology, they would be unafraid to support this motion and unafraid to submit their ads to this process. Instead, we hear reluctance on the other side and finger pointing. They want to avoid the test because they know they will fail that test.

[Business of Supply, April 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I was with aboriginal leaders in Toronto yesterday. On the residential school apology, the apology came but there was no follow through. They are asking why there has not been restitution made for the individuals who suffered one of the worst chapters in Canadian history. When the Conservatives talk about the funding for aboriginal children of first nations and traditional territories, the reality is that they get less funding per capita than every other kid in our country, and that has not been addressed in this budget.

However, I would add to this debate these words:

Given the growing evidence of widespread waste and mismanagement of government advertising business and the fact that the government's incompetent handling of its advertising...is already under review, will the prime minister stop the waste and abuse right now and order a freeze of all discretionary government advertising?

That was Stephen Harper. His voice is silent in this debate is it not?