Madam Speaker, I am very proud to be participating in this debate from a town in northern Ontario.
COVID-19 plunged Canada into the worst economic and medical crisis in a hundred years. The pandemic disrupted our economy and jeopardized the future of millions of workers. It is essential that Parliament show leadership in this crisis. We need to work together and invest the necessary funds to help our country get through the pandemic safely.
I am very proud to be participating in this debate today and to be discussing the situation in Parliament.
It is really crucial when we are talking about the Speech from the Throne and where we need to go that we frame our role in terms of us being in the worst medical and economic catastrophe in a century. I am on the phone all day with people who are really frightened, and I know that members of every party are as well. People are frightened by the rising numbers of COVID cases. People are still dealing with the catastrophe of long-term care homes, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, and worrying about their aged loved ones.
We need to be putting people front and centre, and we can do this. We can have a very spirited and at times confrontational Parliament, but the focus is to get the services out there and what the best ways to get them out there are. It is one of the reasons the New Democratic Party fought so hard to change the CERB, which the Liberal government was going to drop to $1,600 a month. We said that would leave over a million Canadians, such as gig workers and contract workers, in a very precarious situation.
This has forced a discussion about the problems of an economic system that for years was dependent on keeping people in contract positions, part-time work and precarious positions in the gig economy. When COVID hit, two million people were not able to pay their rents within two weeks of the lockdown, and we have to change that. Our focus right now has to be getting people through the long winter ahead.
The Speech from the Throne reads like an NDP platform. It reads like everything the NDP has been running on for years. The problem is the Liberals always run on the NDP platform; they just never govern from it. I was a young man with little children when the Liberals started promising child care. I am glad they are promising it again, but will we see it? I am glad the Liberals are promising pharmacare, but they have promised it in many forms and never delivered it.
However, this is a minority government. This is our opportunity to put forward negotiations to make things happen, and there is a will right now to move Canada forward to a new normal. It is going to take an enormous investment from the federal government to get this nation through.
I want to speak to two issues. One is very concerning, and one may be very positive for my region in the north. In the midst of the pandemic, we are dealing with the other great pandemic: the opioid crisis. It has been a disaster. I am talking to people in North Bay, Sudbury and Kirkland Lake about it.
Timmins has been hit very hard. Mixed in with the opioid crisis is the homelessness crisis, with upwards of sometimes over a thousand people who are homeless in the Timmins region, a community of 44,000. I congratulate our mayor George Pirie, the people who work at the DSSAB, the mental health workers, the police and those at Living Space in Timmins. They have done an amazing job trying to keep people safe and housed.
I have noticed that the Liberal government has quietly let many of the programs that could have helped die over the last year. A lot of the monies that should have been there for the opioid crisis are not there. There have been great promises for money for homelessness, but the money dried up very quickly. We are hearing positive language from the government, but when will that money be delivered? This winter is going to be a very hard winter in Canada, and I am very concerned about the opioid crisis and the homelessness crisis in our communities in northern Ontario. This is something that is non-partisan. Every single community in the country is facing this disastrous crisis.
We have to be ready to work together to get through this, but that means the Liberal government has to move on from positive words. They think if they say positive words, they get positive results, but that is not how it works. Positive words mean action. Action means we have to get the money out now to address the opioid and homelessness crisis.
I was very pleased to hear in the Speech from the Throne the commitment on electric cars. That is certainly something that will help manufacturing in southern Ontario. If we are going to talk about a green recovery through a sustainability lens, we have to be saying that, if we are going to put federal investment into these plants, the sources of the raw materials need to have a green lens too. The products that are mined have to have indigenous agreements and they need to move toward sustainability. That will give an enormous advantage to Canada, rather than taking nickel from Indonesia or going to the war zones of Congo for copper and cobalt. We need to say we are going to insist on an environmentally sustainable and indigenous positive resource policy to help manufacture electric vehicles.
We may have a massive new nickel mine in the Timmins region, and they have already come out front saying they want a whole environmental plan to get to zero emissions. We have the Borden mine in northern Ontario, which is working with zero emissions. They have removed the diesel machines from underground and are going completely electric.
In my community of Cobalt, we have the first cobalt refinery being set up. Cobalt is essential. There is no clean energy future without cobalt, but right now the majority of the world's sources are coming from Congo, which has a horrific record of human rights abuses, child labour and environmental degradation. This also puts us into a geopolitical war with China for who is going to control the cobalt resources and the future of the digital economy. We have an opportunity in Canada to turn that around and say we can do it in an environmentally sustainable way.
One of the things that has to come out of the pandemic is a real discussion about when and how are we actually going to start meeting our targets and meeting an environmentally sustainable future so that we are making investments and creating the jobs that are important here. This is something we need to be doing now, because the government is making the investments to get us through the pandemic, but this has to be for a long-term vision.
At the end of the day, our focus right now is about working people who have been completely upended by the crisis, including people I know who were in the gig economy and people who worked in the service sector.
I am very, very concerned about the rising numbers of COVID and going into new lockdowns. We see Quebec just moved into the red zone. If restaurants start to close, many of them will not reopen. That is the reality. We need to be addressing the potential economic catastrophe if we do not get the numbers in check.
For this, the federal government can play a huge role. This is why the NDP pushed for sick leave benefits, something that allows less protected workers to actually be able to take time off, so we can lessen the COVID numbers.
We did something historic this week in putting workers first and making those fundamental changes. I know we stayed up until three in the morning, but I want to say how proud I was that the Bloc Québécois and the Conservatives supported the New Democratic Party's efforts and we voted unanimously.
We in the New Democratic Party will continue the tough negotiations to keep the focus on getting people through the pandemic, so people can look to the federal government and say that Canada is doing their part and not giving in to to the kind of horrific political chaos we are seeing south of the border. We are also seeing this in other countries that are being plunged into much worse conditions. We need to stay focused at this time.
I thank the Liberals for stealing so many great new ideas from the New Democrats in the Speech from the Throne. I am going to make their lives a living hell, at times, to make sure they live up to those ideas. That is my job as a member in the honourable opposition, but I think we can come out of this Parliament with something better for Canadians and a reason to believe.
