Alexandre Boulerice

[Business of Supply, May 13th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

Over the past several months, the NDP has been saying that holding an election in the middle of a pandemic is really absurd and dangerous for people's safety. We are therefore in favour of this motion.

However, I would like to ask my colleague what he thinks of the attitude of the Bloc Québécois, which threatened to call an election a few months ago. Last week, the Bloc said that they are ready for an election campaign. They use blackmail, puff out their chests, and sort of flip-flop in the end.

What does this attitude of blowing hot and cold, saying one thing and then the opposite, tell us about the seriousness of the leader of the Bloc Québécois?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her interventions and for her ardent defence of the interests of seniors and the elderly.

The housing crisis is severe in Quebec, as it is pretty much everywhere. After years of neglect by the Liberals and the Conservatives, who cut investments in social housing, people are finding themselves in situations where they could end up out on the street, unable to afford their absolutely exorbitant rent. For example, near my home in Montreal, I recently saw a two-bedroom unit for rent for $1,700 a month, plus heating. I wonder who can afford that in our society.

I would like to hear my colleague's views on the Liberals' half measures to help people access a home or social housing.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent question and his comments.

I only touched on the subject, but we could talk about it at length. We could also talk about the capital gains tax and the tax loopholes that allow the wealthiest Canadians and Bay Street bankers to profit from the sale of certain shares. That money could help fund social housing, public transit, our health care systems, better access to university for students, and more research.

My New Democrat colleague raised a good point about tax havens. We hear about taxing the web giants and the wealthy, but the Liberal government has never done anything about tax havens. According to the Department of Finance, we lose about $16 billion a year to tax havens. As for taxing excess profits, the Parliamentary Budget Officer recently estimated that we could recover $8 billion that way.

The Liberals should truly work for ordinary people, for middle-class workers, not for bankers, as they are doing now.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Drummond for his question.

We are talking about fairness and about the resources we need to give ourselves to support our cultural sector and our artists so they can contribute to the production of original Quebec and Canadian content.

How is it that the corner store near my office is forced to pay taxes while the Googles, Facebooks and Netflixes of the world get billions of dollars richer without having to pay a cent in taxes to Canada? These companies do not even want to tell us if they would be willing to pay.

It is absolutely scandalous and, unfortunately, the Liberals have done nothing about it since they took office six years ago. In what they are tentatively promising for next year, we can already see there will be loopholes that Netflix could take advantage of. It is unacceptable.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his kind words.

Yes, any support for community groups in our constituencies is a good thing in and of itself, because they have difficult working conditions and extremely limited resources. These groups are often the ones keeping the social fabric intact and holding our communities together, so any additional assistance is good. We know that public services are also underfunded, so there would be disasters and tragedies if these community groups were not there.

They often tell us that they also want the funding they receive to be for their mission, not for their projects. Project-based funding forces these groups to spend a lot of time filling out paperwork and doing a lot of administrative tasks instead of helping our fellow Canadians. I encourage my colleague to look at this approach.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, with your permission, I would like to take a few seconds in the House to commemorate the work of anthropologist, radio host and distinguished author Serge Bouchard. For years, he filled our evenings with his reassuring voice and his profound vision of Quebec and our relations with the first nations. We have lost a great Quebecker. We will all miss him.

I would like to address several topics, because we are talking about the first federal budget in two years, so this is an important event.

The past two years have left their mark and turned life upside down in every one of our communities. Over these two years, we have all had to relearn how to live, work, communicate and get things done. Worse still, we saw businesses suffer and close up shop, workers lose their jobs, and entire sectors get turned upside down, especially the tourism sector, the cultural sector, including our artists, and the restaurant and bar sector.

Then there is the health care system, which had to perform miracles with very limited resources and in difficult working conditions, but I will get back to that later. Thousands of Quebeckers and Canadians fell ill and died in great numbers and are still dying or, even if they recover, can suffer long-term after-effects, known as long COVID.

Does the budget meet people's expectations when it comes to improving the situation and being better prepared for the future? There are some major flaws. There are tons of things missing. One of the first things is, how is it that the budget does not provide for stable and permanent health transfers so that Quebec and the other provinces can treat their employees well, treat their patients properly and face another crisis, another wave or another virus?

Over the years, the federal government has been investing less and less in our public health care system. That is very serious. In the NDP, we share the provincial governments' demand to raise funding to 35% of costs. In recent years, a Conservative government, under Mr. Harper, cut transfer payments to the provinces by reducing the annual increase from 6% to almost 3%. At the time, the Liberals made a big fuss about that, saying that it was a terrible thing that would threaten our public health care system but, when they came to power, they maintained and renewed exactly the same agreement. For that reason, our public health care system is now in dire straits. We need to make difficult choices. Times were hard even before the health crisis, with austerity budgets aimed at cutting corners everywhere. We are now seeing the results of those policies.

We need to give our public health system the means, the tools and the resources it needs. We need to work together to be able to care for our seniors in long-term care facilities. We saw the carnage in the first wave. Some of our seniors, the people who built Quebec by the sweat of their brow, were abandoned, left on the floor, left in their beds, dehydrated, without care and with rotten food, if they had any food at all.

As New Democrats and social democrats, we find this treatment disgraceful. It strips our seniors of their dignity, and we must do something to make sure it never happens again. We are not looking away and saying that it is not our problem. We are asking what we can do to help so that we never find ourselves in that situation again.

It feels like spring is coming, people will be getting vaccinated, and the recovery is on its way, so much the better. These are all good things. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, we cannot forget what happened last year. If we do, things will never change. The cycle will start all over again, and the same thing is going to happen.

One of the reasons we did not have the means to ensure a basic level of quality care for our seniors in long-term care facilities is the lack of resources. There were management problems, but the Quebec government is taking care of that, because it is not the federal government's jurisdiction, of course.

If we do not help the provinces provide decent care and look after their health care workers, what happens?

When orderlies earning $14 an hour are forced to work mandatory overtime and insane schedules, and this is compounded by a crisis, where a virus enters the workplace, it creates a vicious cycle. It is no longer worth their while to go to work because it is too dangerous, they are not paid enough and they do not want to take the risk. As a result, workers stay at home, and that exacerbates the problem.

Earlier, a member from Quebec said that this is world health worker week and that tomorrow is International Nurses Day. Let us consider. What are we offering them in exchange for caring for our sick patients and our seniors? What are we offering them to make the work attractive and make sure that they still want to go to work even when it is harder than usual, when there is a crisis and they are at greater risk?

For now, that is not what we are seeing, and the Liberal government's budget does not offer any answers. Sure, the government transferred some money, but only on a one-time basis, in the middle of a crisis. There is no plan for the future, yet we know that we need permanent, stable funding.

There is another important issue, and that is child care. We can see how accessible child care services help families and young parents in Quebec and how they allow women to rejoin the labour market. It is a good idea in itself, and I do not want to be a killjoy, but this was a flagship proposal in the NDP's 2015 and 2019 election platforms. It is a good idea, but only if it is executed properly. It could really help people, especially since we are in an economic crisis right now that is disproportionately affecting women. Women's participation in the labour market has dropped sharply, and we know that affordable public child care gives women greater access to the labour market, since they have unfortunately inherited traditional societal responsibities, such as caring for children.

It is a good measure that is very fitting under the circumstances. We could be happy, if only the Liberals had a shred of credibility in the matter. As I said earlier, they have been promising a child care program for the past 28 years. The first time was in Jean Chrétien's red book in 1993. That was quite a while ago. Should we believe them?

Let us see their action plan and what they are going to do, and let us watch how they work with the provinces. Perhaps the Liberals will want to act quickly to meet the need, because there is indeed a need. We see it in Quebec, where the minister of families is desperate. Quebec needs 50,000 more child care spaces, and federal money would be welcome. I met with Quebec's minister of families a few months ago. He asked us to try to put pressure on the government for a federal transfer so that he could open more spaces and pay more educators. That would be a good thing for the Liberals to do, but I have my doubts that it will happen.

Let us remember that, in the last budget, the Liberals' big promise for a major social program was public pharmacare. The NDP agrees that we should have a public pharmacare program, as do the Union des consommateurs, the FTQ, the CSN and the CSQ. There are holes in Quebec's system, which is a hybrid system and is not perfect. Such a program would also help many sick people in English Canada reduce the cost of their medication and access the drugs they need. How is it that pharmacare was a priority two years ago, and now it is suddenly off the table? How is it that we were told that other consultations would be held, but now there is no funding for this program and it is over and done with? One year it is pharmacare, and the next it is child care. The government is playing games by going from one to another. The government does not seem very serious about these things.

There is also a lack of funding for housing, even though there is a major housing crisis in Montreal and across Quebec. There is nothing in the budget about making the tax system fair and equitable. Web giants are still not paying taxes in Quebec and Canada. There is probably even a loophole so that Netflix does not have to pay taxes. The government is even playing favourites among the web giants. I think we need to get to a point where companies that make excessive profits, like Amazon, are taxed more and a tax is imposed on wealth over $20 million. These are solutions that the NDP is putting forward so that we can pay for a vibrant, green and prosperous economic recovery that benefits everyone.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

In the last budget, the Liberals presented child care services as a key measure for economic recovery. Obviously, as Quebeckers, we have seen the success of the network of child care centres and know that it is a good idea.

Given that the Liberals first made this promise in 1993, does my colleague believe it?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Thérèse-De Blainville for her speech.

This is the first federal government budget in two years. We were all collectively hit by the pandemic. We have seen how much we rely on a robust and effective public health care system that treats its workers and professionals well.

The Liberal government says that it transferred a lot of money to the provinces for health, but we can all agree that it was a one-off, not a recurring amount. Why does my colleague think that the Liberals are unwilling to commit to permanently giving the provinces enough money so they can have a good, effective public health care system?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, May 11th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech. If we want to be able to have good public services for the long term, whether in health or to help the most vulnerable, like our seniors, we need to have the necessary revenues.

In that sense, there is nothing in the Liberal budget for collecting money from those who have it, in other words, companies such as Amazon, with its billions of dollars in profits, or web giants that are still not paying their taxes in Canada. We are also still not seeing a wealth tax.

Are those not things that the Conservatives would like to see in order to increase government revenues and avoid cuts in public services?

[National Defence, May 10th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, on Friday, the Prime Minister's chief of staff asked what more she could have done to help the victims of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces. What more could the Liberals have done? Is she serious?

The Deschamps report, which describes the unhealthy, toxic culture in the military, has been available since 2015. What have the Liberals done since 2015? They have done nothing. In fact, they just ordered another study.

Why did the Liberals choose to shelve the Deschamps report and abandon the victims in the military?