Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleagues for engaging in what I believe to be a really important discussion today.
To be clear, Canadians are suffering right now. In my community of Edmonton Griesbach, one does not have to look far to see the devastating impacts of poverty. There are community organizations with some of the biggest hearts and biggest hugs one can imagine, but that does not go far enough when we see critical under-resourcing and underfunding of some of the most essential services our country needs to offer. When we do not offer them, we see community organizations having to do that work, the work of health care, the work of mental health, the work that is required to ensure that regular everyday people can maximize their opportunities.
People living in absolute poverty, living in the absolute worst situations one can imagine, if they have no homes or supports, are driven to a place in life where they may seek, for example, substances, which they abuse. They will fall down the rabbit hole of trying to find mental health services and will be unable to find them. It is a kind of labyrinth of poverty that our country has created, and we can address it and fix it. We are wealthy country.
We would not know that by looking outside. We would not know how wealthy our country really is by the conditions of workers. We would not know how wealthy our country is by the lack of clean water in first nations communities. We would not know how wealthy our country really is until we look at the bonuses big CEOs get. These are questions of our society, of our economy, questions about what kind of Canada we want to build.
When I speak to folks in my province of Alberta, they are scared. They are scared of a crumbling health care system that is being driven into the ground by private huge megacorporations that would seek to benefit and profit off those who are sick, and it is being allowed by the politicians for whom they pay.
Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, right now is allowing for-profit surgeries in my home province. It is shameful when seniors are waiting in emergency rooms day after day not knowing if they are going to get the care they need.
I speak to many young people who are struggling to even imagine an idea of owning a home. Even worse, some of them are living on our streets, the most vulnerable in our society. Who put them there? It was not solely the actions of individuals who got them there. It was our society that participated in a manufactured condition.
We are seeing a mental health crisis. When I see people in my community struggling to get the supports they need, there are often massive barriers. One of the biggest barriers is money. There is a lack of public mental health care, and that lack of public health care downloads costs onto our existing health care system. This massively and exponentially compounds the problems we are seeing in our hospitals.
Hospitals cannot be the one-stop shop for all problems in society. We need to reinforce our hospitals and reinvest in them, but we also need to create more mental health supports with real professionals who can ensure that the work of mental health and the kinds of supports needed in that kind of care are met.
We are witnessing a drug-poisoning crisis. It is killing Canadians. It is a crisis that has touched every community that we all represent in this place. Whether it is young people, seniors, business owners or teachers, they are dying because we are not doing anything about the drug-poisoning crisis. We can do more.
When driven to absolute poverty, the increase in crimes goes up. These are crimes of desperation. People do not want to see themselves in a penitentiary, but when they find themselves there, we have to ask ourselves as legislators, as people who represent our constituents, how did they get there? It is not, as I said before, the actions of just individuals; it is the conditions of poverty that we have placed upon them.
There is an answer to this, and the New Democrats have been steadfast for decades to distinguish between the needs and wants of Canadians. The needs of Canadians are the things I spoke to: good public health care; a good, strong public mental health care system; housing stock that can ensure that low-income folks can get into those homes.
We need to address the drug poisoning crisis. We need to make sure that there are resources invested in mental health. We need to take seriously the inflictions of poverty and the outcomes they present. We can ensure that our economy actually works for those who are working to build it.
There seems to be a problem with our conception of where wealth comes from in this country. People think CEOs get up in a day and produce all this money. No, it is workers who show up every single day, like the small business owners in my community. They are not only those who offer their philanthropy to those who need help, but they are also the same people who are suffering in their own right. They are seeing huge costs passed on to them, and they cannot afford to compete with these megacorporations that are dodging taxes while simultaneously gouging Canadians. How can a small business compete with that? It is not possible.
We need to protect those in the working class in this country. They need strong wages. We do not have a labour shortage in this country; we have a wage crisis. When we increase the wages of everyday workers and they can see the value of their labour produced in their paycheque, that is a good day for workers. It means they can actually put food on the table, pay their bills and pay their mortgages.
However, the problem gets worse. It is not just ensuring that workers have good wages but also ensuring that these companies are held to account. We are seeing some of the largest tax avoidance in our country's history taking place right under our noses today, and I will speak directly to some of the facts on this.
The tax gap has almost doubled in the last three years. Corporations are walking away with $30 billion in tax avoidance. We could close the tax loopholes today if only we had the courage of the government to see this as a serious problem.
I will take a moment to talk about the $30 billion, which can go a long way. We are going to see a budget in a short few weeks, and it is going to demonstrate a massive underfunding of public services if we do not ensure that we close these tax loopholes.
Canadians deserve to know that when they show up to work for massive corporations, these corporations are also paying their fair share. When regular, everyday folks are paying exorbitant tax and seeing that these megacorporations are not, there are doubts about the efficacy of our tax system. Moreover, it creates a kind of distrust, which is growing across Canada.
We need to fix our tax system, in which corporations see massive profits, with some up 60%, while simultaneously seeing their tax gap go down. This is creating a massive revenue problem. For the government, and in speaking directly with the commissioner of the CRA, it is a massive issue.
The CRA needs resources to ensure that it can tackle this. However, right now, these resources are being directed to a witch hunt of little old ladies who took CERB in the most desperate time of need instead of going after the rich corporations that have massive windfall profits. Instead of taxing them, we are going to use CRA to attack these poor folks. We are calling for an amnesty for these folks.
I will conclude, as there will be a vote on this amendment in a short while, with regard specifically to the amendment that has been brought by the Conservative Party. New Democrats have been fighting for years to see a pan-Canadian licensing that would make sure we have a standard so that we can increase our workforce, particularly in health care, right here at home. We can do this by ensuring that those who bring those skills here actually have the ability to enter our workforce quickly. We have been calling for this ever since the leader of the official opposition was in federal cabinet, as a matter of fact. Therefore, we are very happy to see the official opposition adopting a very important policy that New Democrats have fought for, and we welcome that.
However, my colleague on the finance committee tells me that this specific program was not raised during the committee hearings on the budget, and so it actually was not heard. The Conservatives did not mention it. To be clear, we want action on this issue, but we will be opposing the amendment because we think it is important that the House have a chance to concur in committee before the budget day next week. It is important that we have that.
I will conclude with that, and I thank my colleagues.
