Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Sherbrooke for his excellent speech. I will attempt to continue in the same vein. I really liked the fact that he called the Conservative motion an omnibus motion. It touches on so many subjects that we could write a speech about any one we like and that would be fine.
I would call this motion the “everything” motion, because it makes me think of the theory of everything. I do not know if the Conservatives are at all interested in science, but the theory of everything is very interesting. It seeks to unify the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. That said, I do not think they want to go that far today.
If I were to agree with them on any of the points in their motion, it would be, first and foremost, that people in our society are suffering. There are people who are struggling and having trouble making ends meet. Incomes have stagnated, and inequality in our society is growing considerably. Many people are forced to struggle with situations of extreme poverty.
In all of our ridings, people are having to make really tough choices, like paying for their medication or paying for their groceries, or similarly, buying food or buying school supplies for their children. There are still millions of people living in poverty in our country, people who are struggling as a result of the Liberal government's decisions. This government is not doing enough for them today and, instead, is merely promising to eventually deliver certain things, if it is voted in again once or twice in the future.
Yes, there are people who are suffering because of the Liberal government's decisions. Take, for example, aluminum and steel workers or Ontario's auto sector workers, like the people in Oshawa, who are losing good jobs despite all the Liberals' fine promises. There are also the dairy farmers who work the land in Quebec and Ontario, in their family farms, making all of our regions proud. The Liberal government keeps turning its back on them by signing agreement after agreement to open up huge breaches in the supply management system, allowing American milk into our market and failing to stand up for the people raising the animals that produce our milk, cheese, yogurt and other dairy products.
The Liberal government's decisions have resulted in 3% of the supply-managed market being given away three times. It happened with the European Union agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and again with the free trade deal with the United States and Mexico. All this is starting to add up. It is starting to have an impact on people. We cannot understand how the Liberals can keep saying they are here to defend supply management, when the reality is that they have given up nearly 10% of the market in all these free trade deals, at the expense of our dairy farmers.
There are also people suffering as a result of the housing crisis, which is real and is affecting many regions of the country and many of our big cities. Montreal had been largely unaffected until now, but recently the vacancy rate in Montreal dropped to under 2%. The mayor of Montreal is sounding the alarm, because this is putting tremendous pressure on rents and renters. It has been a problem for a while now in Toronto and Vancouver. That is why the leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, presented a plan to solve the housing crisis, especially for the people of Burnaby South, but also for the entire Vancouver area. The Liberal government is not doing enough when it comes to investing in social housing and affordable housing.
When the national social and affordable housing strategy was introduced, it came with a promised investment of $11 billion. That is a huge amount of money, but it is spread over 11 years. As someone who likes nice even numbers, it occurred to me that $11 billion over 11 years should work out to $1 billion a year. No, that would be far too simple. Actually, the billions of dollars promised will not be invested until after the next federal election, or even the one after that, that is to say, in 2023.
The people who are suffering today, who are struggling to make ends meet, whose rent is going up and who cannot afford to live in the neighbourhoods they have been living in, do not need help in 2024 and 2025. They need help right now. Unfortunately, the Liberal government is putting things off and refuses to invest in creating social and affordable housing. Montreal alone is in need of 12,000 social housing units.
In my riding, 78% of residents are renters. One-third of these renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing. We are talking about thousands of families and households that are living in poverty and who need help now. Unfortunately, they have not gotten any help with social housing from this Liberal government. In the short term, this would help mitigate the crisis many of our municipalities and regions have been experiencing.
The Liberal government has also failed on everything related to addressing pharmacare or the fact that people are struggling to care for themselves. Canadians have a hard time taking the necessary measures, as prescribed by their doctor, to look after their health. This forces people to either go into debt or make agonizing choices.
The government is also failing when it comes to the basket of services. How, in 2018, can a G7 country as rich as Canada not cover dental and eye care in our public health care plans? How can our pharmacare plan be so schizophrenic that a leg and the heart are covered, but the eyes and teeth are not? It is as though the plan does not see the body as a whole and is making choices about which parts it can treat.
As for the solutions proposed in the Conservatives' motion, we have very different views. We do not think that giving handouts to corporations is how we will stimulate the economy. If that were the case, it would have worked before. Between 2000 and 2012, under successive Liberal and Conservative governments, the corporate tax rate dropped from 28% to 15%. That is a nearly 50% reduction for corporations that make massive amounts of money.
Trickle-down economics does not work. It did not generate investments that would have led to good new jobs. Companies are sitting on $600 billion in wealth. That did not work.
The NDP agrees with putting a price on carbon, because failure to act now on climate change will end up costing even more than the investments or choices we have to make today.
Dealing with the increasing intensity and frequency of natural disasters will take a huge toll, both human and economic, not to mention the insurance costs. On this, we do not agree with the Conservatives' plan to do nothing about climate change. This is the challenge of our generation. We will be judged on the decisions we make now and on our ability to fulfill our commitments, for example to reduce greenhouse gases, under the Paris climate agreement. This is extremely important. I will be attending COP24 next week, in Poland, and I hope that the rule book is robust enough to enable us to keep our promises.
The Liberal government is not keeping its promises. Everyone agrees that it is not going to meet its 2020 or 2030 targets, which are not even ambitious enough to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. We cannot allow the global temperature increase to rise any higher than that. I am therefore calling on the Liberal government to stop providing oil subsidies and to not buy a pipeline that would triple the production of the dirtiest oil in the world, but rather to invest in renewable energy to create jobs for today and tomorrow.
