Andrew Cash

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, this has been a fascinating debate so far. We have heard the government blame the NDP for the economic collapse of Portugal and Greece. We heard another member tell us that all is not quite right in Manitoba these days. The member seems to be confused about which jurisdiction he represents. It has been an amazing day.

Some days one imagines that all members on the government side come from Pleasantville. In their world no senior has a problem paying rent. In their world seniors have a choice of putting their excess money in a tax free savings account or buying a retirement home? That is the kind of conversation those members have.

I am not quite sure what is being served in the government lobby before the Conservatives come out and say their speeches but one wonders if maybe they need to check the ingredients. However, the ingredients may not be accurate because, according to provisions in the budget implementation bill, food labelling will not be as accurate or we will not be as sure of their accuracy. The budget implementation bill that we are debating today contains elements that have nothing to do with the budget, which is what we are trying to get to the bottom of.

I will talk about a couple of things about the budget. The budget does nothing to address the chronic unemployment rate of our young people. The official rate for youth unemployment right now is just over 14%. However, everyone knows that the unofficial rate will be closer to 20%. That brings us into the range of the unemployment rate among young people in those European countries, such as Spain, that the Conservatives love to talk about. We are creating an economy in this country that leaves out our youth.

Government members like to talk about the great future of our economy. They also like to extol the virtues of Conservative fiscal management. They all have short memories. When the last majority Conservative government left office, it saddled Canadians with a massive public debt and deficit. Other Conservative governments enjoyed chumming up to those in the Bush administration in the United States. When it left office, it saddled the American people with huge, onerous public debt.

The present Conservative government has the largest deficit in Canadian history but those members try to ignore that fact as they talk about the choices that seniors have in our country.

I am honoured to serve the people of my riding of Davenport and to speak on their behalf today. I want to talk about a woman I met last week in my riding who is a small business owner. She works about 13 or 14 hours a day on her business and is also looking after an elderly parent. She asked me about the new rules with respect to OAS. She told me that she was working tirelessly and that she was looking forward to reaching the age of 65 but said that she was under the cutoff and that she would need to work until she was 67 years of age. Suffice it to say that she is not happy. The sentiment I heard from her is the same sentiment that I hear from people right across my riding and in fact across the city of Toronto.

People work hard, play by the rules, pay their taxes, raise their families and sometimes look after their parents. What do we see from the government? We see the government making cuts, for example, to immigrant settlement services in the city of Toronto. Those cuts will make it much harder for new Canadians to settle and get a foothold in our country and in our economy.

Raising the age for OAS is going to drag on the economy because we know that people who have very little means are going to spend just about every dollar they have on the economy. That is part of what a vibrant economy does. However, what is happening here is a delay for two years. If that had happened today, we would have thrown about another 100,000 seniors into poverty. Canadians remember, but we have to remind the government that it did not once mention OAS in its platform in 2011. In fact, what the Conservatives said was that they were not going to cut OAS, that they were not going to cut seniors' pensions. They have indeed done that.

The Conservatives also talk about 12 years from now being somewhere off in the distant future. That is just 12 years and it is going to go by in a heartbeat. For the woman in my riding who is working 13 hours a day trying to keep a business going, raise a family and look after an elderly parent, that 12 years is going to go by in a flash. However, she is going to have to work another couple of years before she can access what everyone else before her has been able to access in this country. This is not fair. Not only is it not fair, but it does not make economic sense in our country at all. Again, the government likes to talk about its savvy economic chops when it has yet to address the issue of 300,000 job losses in the manufacturing sector since the recession.

One member decided to take a whack at Manitoba. I guess the Conservatives are getting bored with taking a whack at Ontario, which they have done since I entered this House in May 2011. Ontario's manufacturing base has been battered and the government refuses to acknowledge that the economic platform and the one presented in this budget fail to address the employment and manufacturing crisis in Ontario. The Conservatives can talk all they want about the jobs, but $12 an hour is not enough for someone to afford shelter and certainly not enough to raise a family. These are the issues that Canadians are concerned about and want action on from their government. The fact that we are in a time allocation yet again underlines what Canadians increasingly understand, that while the government talks the talk of accountability and transparency, it has absolutely not walked the walk since it came here in 2011.

This is the kind of obfuscation and prevarication that Canadians are getting tired of from the government. We need a real debate about the economy and about youth unemployment. Not only are youth unemployed, but youth are increasingly saddled with increased student debt. So now the Conservatives are telling young people that when they leave school they are going to have a $25,000 to $50,000 debt and, by the way, they are not going to be able to find a job. I hear this in my riding all the time. I talk to parents whose 25-year-old children are still living at home; they have degrees, they have done the things the government says they should do, they have a higher education and they still cannot find a job. The government has not addressed that situation, and it has certainly not addressed it in Ontario. We look forward to that debate and to turning things around in 2015.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague brought up a couple of really important points. One was as a parent thinking about the future and the increasingly large gap between the opportunities for young people and those for middle-aged and older workers.

Does the member have concern, and has she heard this concern from other parents in her riding, around the issue of generational inequity and the fact that the budget and the government seems to have no interest in rectifying this huge gap?

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is a wonder to behold when this Parliament gets an economics lesson from the government side, a government that has racked up the biggest deficit in Canadian history. This sort of nonsense is unbelievable.

The member likes to obfuscate in this House on a daily basis. In this instance, he is talking about the supposed inability of Canada to sustain its OAS. The government always compares us to the economic basket cases of Europe. The amount of GDP that Greece and Portugal spend on their public pensions is 12% and 11%, respectively. Canada spends 4%. How dare the member try to compare our expenditures on public pension with that of these members of the eurozone? It is this kind of prevarication which this side of the House rejects and which Canadians are increasingly rejecting and are angry about.

I wonder why this member insists upon bending and weaving through the real issues of the--

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it sounds as if my hon. colleague is holding out a bit of an olive branch to the government side, and he sees many things he may support in this document.

However, I want to double back to something that is a recurring theme in this Parliament and that is the use of time allocation to discuss and debate vitally important issues that affect all Canadians. In the past and in this Parliament, the government has said we have already debated these things, that we debated them in the last Parliament so why would we need to go through the process again, which underlines the Conservatives' anti-democratic inclinations.

I wonder if the member could speak to this issue and whether he thinks it is appropriate for the government to impose time allocation on this massive document that has not 100% to do with the budget it is supposed to be referencing.

[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it actually gets worse. Not only do journalists have to swear an oath of loyalty but the chair of the board of the CBC now has to swear an oath of friendship to the minister. Is it really that hard for him to find a friend?

It is World Press Freedom Day today, and we have to remember that the CBC must remain at arm's-length to the government.

Why does the Minister of Canadian Heritage need to force the new chair of the board of the CBC to be his buddy?

[May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, let us talk about effort. We have tabled a national housing strategy. The Conservative government has not said a word about it. In fact, the government likes to compare us to OECD countries when it suits it. Yet this instance and others such as the national transit strategy are another glaring lack on the part of the government.

There is very little in this national housing strategy that any government could not buy into. One of the main points is that once this national housing strategy comes into law, it compels the minister to convene a meeting within 180 days. The government has 180 days to talk to major stakeholders, to the provinces, to municipalities, to those that provide social housing. It is a way for the government to do the job that Canadians expect their government to do, which is to plan and to prudently plan for the kind of housing Canadians need.

[May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to be here tonight to stand before you and Canadians from coast to coast to coast, especially the members of my riding of Davenport, the men and women who elected me to this place a year ago tomorrow.

The very first day of this Parliament, I rose in the House and asked the government where its housing strategy was. In particular, I asked when it would introduce a national housing strategy and, in the absence of one, whether it would like to get on side with the one we subsequently tabled in the House.

Every time I stood in the House to ask this question on behalf of Canadians from coast to coast to coast, I never received an answer. In fact, I will read the answer I received from the Minister of Finance one of the last times I asked a question on this. He said:

Mr. Speaker, what is not to love in the mayor of Toronto ? He is 300 pounds of fun, self-described by the mayor. I did not make that up.

The mayor is doing a wonderful job in Toronto. He is leading the transit reform charge and is straightening out the finances of the City of Toronto. It will be the ultimate great service for the taxpayers of that city to have control of the fiscal future of the City of Toronto, which has been mishandled for a long time.

There was not a single mention of housing in that answer.

This is what happens time and time again, not just to me but to every member of the official opposition. Quite frankly, Canadians are getting very concerned about the lack of accountability and transparency of the government.

With respect to housing, the Canadian Federation of Municipalities has underlined the fact that housing is the number one issue facing municipalities, both big cities, small towns and rural municipalities. Access to affordable housing is becoming increasingly more difficult, not just for those in our society who struggle economically but also for those who were once called middle class. The government likes to say that it is on the side of working people, but the facts do not bear that out.

Approximately 1.5 million Canadians are in core housing need, of which 25% are single parent families. Time and time again we hear the government say that it is doing this or it is doing that. However, whatever it thinks it is doing, it is time for it to acknowledge and admit that its plan is not working.

We need a national housing strategy. We are the only G8 country that does not have one. How can that be good public management? How can that be a good social policy? It is certainly bad fiscal management, especially when we consider the multipliers that investments in housing bring into the economy.

The government's decisions are ideological. It is time it started working for Canadians.

[April 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague for her efficient answer.

I wish that our world here in Canada looked the way her speaking notes make it look. The fact of the matter is whatever the heck the government is doing around housing, it is just not working. It is like saying we have a leaky roof, so we put some gaffer tape over half the hole, and we are looking after the roof. That is not the way this is going to work for housing.

Housing is not like any other issue that Canadians face. This is a basic key determinant of health. That is not in dispute by anyone.

My hon. colleague talked about the investments the government was apparently making. The federal agreements for much of our social housing stock are expiring. They are going to begin to expire shortly. This is going to threaten the viability of about a third of Canada's social housing stock.

I want to ask my hon. colleague, how does she square the circle? Those agreements are expiring. Those people are wondering what they are going to do with their affordable housing. The government has so far provided no answers, no certainty to hundreds of thousands of Canadians.

[April 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise in the House representing the riding of Davenport in Toronto on this very important issue. This is one of the most important issues that people in my riding face. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has noted that the lack of affordable housing, the shortage of rental housing, is the number one issue affecting municipalities from coast to coast to coast. That includes large urban centres, small towns and rural municipalities.

I rise this evening on the issue of housing because we continue, during question period, to get answers from the government regarding its lack of a plan for affordable housing. We have the Minister of Finance hectoring Canadians and telling them that their household debt is too high. He does not go into one of the reasons that their household debt is so high, which is because of plummeting wages, but we will leave that for another day. He says that Canadians need to reign in their household debt. At the same time, the Minister of Human Resources says we have solved the affordable housing crisis, that we have solved the crisis of the lack of affordable rental stock in Canada, because interest rates are low and Canadians can simply buy a house.

That answer just does not cut it. I am here tonight to allow the minister—or the minister's associate, as the case may be—to provide an answer to the House and to Canadians for whom the issue of affordable rental housing is not just an esoteric question but a question of daily struggle.

In January, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities came up with a three-point plan, which it presented here in Ottawa. This was a really pragmatic approach to the lack of rental housing. The federation had really taken a look at it; it had taken a look at the way the government is oriented toward market solutions, and it came up with three proposals. One was the building Canada rental development direct lending program to stimulate investment in new market-priced rental units. The second was the rental housing protection tax credit to preserve rentals and stop the serious erosion of existing low-rent properties through demolition and conversion to condominiums. The third was the eco-energy rental housing tax credit to encourage and help landlords to retrofit their buildings. These were three very practical, very prudent, very sensible suggestions.

There was not a single word about this in the budget. Therefore, I would like to ask the government why there was silence on the most important issue facing Canadians from coast to coast to coast, affordable housing? Why was it left out of the budget?

[Petitions, April 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition involves a corporate postal station that Canada Post has suggested it will close in my riding of Davenport. Many people have signed a petition with a lot of concern because they use this postal station everyday. It is wheelchair accessible and there is no other station is in that area.