Charlie Angus

[Government Business No. 10, August 12th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for her extraordinary speech. I have listened to speeches that are good, speeches that are great. I have seen a lot of hand sock puppets, speaking whatever their leaders tell them to. For all the sham and drudgery in this place, the only thing that makes it extraordinary is when members come here who want to make changes. That is why we should be here, to be change-makers.

From her perspective as a parent, mother and teacher, I want to ask my colleague this. When I have talked to young people during this pandemic, a seismic shift is happening. It is a difference between millennials who are being economically crushed at this time, down to generation Z. The world will be changed by generation Z. This generation is not having it. These young people get that we have a pandemic that has upended everything, but for them the crisis is environmental. They see a world that is in a serious crisis, and we need voices.

Therefore, I want to ask my hon. colleague, as a parent and teacher, how she thinks we can use this Parliament to start engaging young people and making them believe we can actually make a better world, rather than just accept the same old, same old.

[Government Business No. 10, August 12th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, there are two pandemics in the country right now. We have COVID and an opioid pandemic. The opioid pandemic is very similar to COVID, in cutting across all sectors of society: rural, urban, rich and poor. I want to ask my hon. colleague about what he has seen in his community.

We know that in our Far North, the communities in Treaty 9 are so desperate to stop the opioids that they have people at the airports trying to stop the drugs from coming in because they have no other supports. In the city of Timmins, the police are working with mental health workers on the streets, trying to deal with this because they recognize that this is beyond criminal. This is a massive mental health crisis and we are seeing deaths, suffering and families being broken apart from the devastation from these drugs. We really want to be able to stop the pushers who are making these drugs, particularly fentanyl and its destructive nature, but we need to have measures of support to get people out of the nightmare of opioid addictions.

What has my hon. colleague seen on the west coast and what steps can we take in this Parliament in the midst of this COVID pandemic to deal with the other pandemic, the opioid crisis?

[Government Business No. 10, August 12th, 2020]

Mr. Chair, what really needs to be pointed out is the incredible social solidarity Canadians from coast to coast to coast have shown in response to the unprecedented economic and medical catastrophe that has befallen us. It is really important to also state that we are not out of the first phase yet. We could be plunged back into a crisis. If we are plunged back in, it will be a catastrophe for families who have already suffered enormous economic losses, for small businesses and for students who have had their lives upended.

We are just over two weeks away from CERB's ending. Many people in my riding have no jobs to go back to, or they are only going back to partial or insecure work. We need to be there for them to get them through this crisis. If we leave people behind at this time, it will take years for our nation to recover economically and socially.

I would like to ask the member about the efforts that need to be taken between now and the beginning of September to make sure that we have a plan to get us through what may be a very difficult fall and a very difficult winter, particularly if COVID hits us again the way people expect it may.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, let us do a quick run-through of our favourite moments of shutting down democracy. Do I say Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper? I will probably have to say that about 150 times, for every single time he shut it down. Then there were all the committees, where everything had to go in camera no matter what it was so there was no accountability. Then there was the crisis of 2008, the biggest economic crisis up to that point, when Stephen Harper came into the House and they all puffed up and were going to massively push through this austerity budget. The New Democrats said no. Then what did Stephen Harper do? He panicked and shut Parliament down. Do members remember that? He had to shut Parliament down.

It is pretty rich, when we are here to talk about keeping Parliament accountable until the end of June, plus sessions this summer, and we will continue in the fall, to see the howling at the moon and the abuse of the privileges of the most privileged people in Canada, when, in fact, if we remember the Stephen Harper years, the doors were locked in the Parliament of the people because he was afraid to meet a minority government.

We have a minority government, and we have work to get done. I want to get to that work tomorrow so we can start to drill down and ask serious questions of ministers, where we have a good period of time to actually go through the issues, push, find out and insist on responses. Let us just get down to it.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of issues that we need to start to move on.

I am very interested whenever I hear my political colleagues talk about their privileges. Privilege is about serving people. It is not about the fact that members are not getting enough air time.

We need to come back in committee of the whole and start addressing a number of the serious shortfalls, such as the serious shortfalls for seniors. What is the government going to do now? We can do the jack-in-the-box questions, jump up and down and point fingers, or we could actually drill down, because this is a bigger crisis that we face. There is the issue of health care and the lack of support for health care. These are issues we need to sit down and discuss.

I certainly want to know if the government is willing to continue working with us to actually drill down in the midst of this crisis to serve Canadians. That is the privilege that we have and that we bring to the House. It is to serve people in a time of unprecedented crisis.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, with regard to what we are dealing with, beef, we were starting to see some really good expansion by many of our farmers, but since then we have been hit very, very hard. We have people who might not be able to make it through this, because they were holding their cattle over the winter, figuring that prices were going to be good.

The member talks about the issue of supply, but it is also capacity. We are no further ahead than we were with BSE, with three plants covering 85%, and nobody expected COVID was going to hit Cargill as hard as it did, but it did.

I want to ask my hon. colleague about the importance of having some provincial or regional capacity to give to our farmers, because there is a need for beef at the stores. We need to get this thing through. The set-aside is simply not going to get people through as it is, but the larger structural problem of kill capacity remains a problem, and COVID has really exposed it.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his good question.

For the NDP, it is clear that the federal government needs to fulfill its obligations and adequately fund the provincial systems. That is the NDP's vision.

It is also clear that the pandemic does not respect areas of jurisdiction; it is affecting everyone and Canada. The federal government of Canada certainly needs to talk to the provinces. However, we also have an obligation to take steps to ensure that the rights of seniors in long-term care facilities and in all seniors' homes across Canada are respected.

This crisis is a disaster for our country and the neglect has been extraordinary. We have an obligation to work together to come up with a solution. To do this, it is vital that we provide greater funding to the provinces.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I have been here many years. Nobody is ever going to accuse me of being non-partisan. I drop the gloves without thinking twice, because that is how Parliament has worked and it is the Parliament I have grown up in. However, we see something bigger than us, something bigger than we could possibly imagine. Timothy Morton calls it a hyperobject, something we cannot even completely comprehend. That is the power of this pandemic.

I hear the Conservatives talk about coming back here as if it is an inconvenience, but I do not see this as an inconvenience. My family worries when I come here and tell me I have to stay home for two weeks. What about my children? I see what people are doing back home. They are concerned. As my colleague from Hamilton said, it is not the working class who are itching to get back to work, because they know they are going to be on the front lines.

Canadians have taken an extraordinary step of social solidarity. I am so proud of Canada at this time. We need to show Canadians that when we meet to talk about these issues, we are focused on drilling down on the crisis that we are facing so that we will come out more resilient, stronger and more just. That is the task before us, and we will get there.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise in the House to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay and be here at a moment when our world has fundamentally changed forever. What we need to come to terms with in the House is that we are in the midst of an unprecedented economic and health crisis, and the role of Parliament is to come together to find a way to establish a means of working to address the nature of it.

Before I spoke, we heard a report that the Canadian military, which has been in long-term care homes, has found blatant disregard for the lives of seniors, with abuse and negligence in the for-profit care system. Canadians are looking to this Parliament. They will look to us and ask what we will do to ensure that this never happens again. We will hear some say that this is under provincial jurisdiction, but the negligence happened under provincial jurisdiction and in numerous jurisdictions. These seniors deserved better, and we will have to look at how we envision health care in the 21st century.

COVID has exposed very clearly the myths of our society and the smugness. It has laid bare the inequities, and it has made us start to address this. Canada is now in the new century, and the old century and its old smug assertions are gone forever.

Yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition talked about the magical, mystical hidden hand of the market that creates everything we need. That is a really bizarre thing to say when this nation did not have PPE, when our closest neighbour, the United States, was stealing our medical supplies and when front-line medical workers had to crowdsource because our nation did not have the capacity to handle the pandemic.

People will look to this Parliament to ask what we are going to do to make sure that never happens again. We should never ever to be in a situation where we have to send in the army to keep our seniors alive. We send in the army for earthquakes in Haiti. That is where we send the army. We send it to catastrophic floods and fires. We had to send in the army because we have been so negligent in the health care of seniors, and the reports speak to the blatant disregard and abuse.

We have had to adjust how Parliament works as well, and I will say one thing for sure: In opposition, members never give up time. It is their one tool. Members never shorten debate or give up an opportunity to speak, because it is the one tool we have. In the face of this crisis, we recognized that we had to pull back from Parliament and think about how we were going to do this. The New Democrats said that as we are in a minority government, we will begin to negotiate. That is what we do in a minority government.

The first negotiation was based on the fact that suddenly millions of Canadians could not pay their rent. So much for this myth of the middle class and those wanting to join it. What we see are millions of people in the gig economy and millions of contract workers who were not going to have the ability to pay their rent. Then we started to push the government.

In the original talk, the government said it was going to tinker with EI and that it had a little more money for the Canada child benefit. The New Democrats said the extent of this crisis was such that we have to do something extraordinarily different, something that would have been thought impossible in February: a $2,000-a-month minimum to keep people afloat. We worked with the government on that. We never got any support from the Conservatives. They were all howling. They talked about the shirkers and people sleeping in their hammocks. We worked with the government but said the plan was too restrictive, and we asked about the self-employed. We had to change it, and each step of the way we had to negotiate. This is what we can do in a minority government.

People in the United States got a one-time payment of $1,250. No wonder there is so much social unrest in the United States right now, a breakdown of social solidarity. If we had given a one-time payment of $1,250 in March, it would have been an economic catastrophe for Canada. We recognized that we had the power of the federal government, a power that the provinces do not have. We have the Bank of Canada to backstop this. We knew we could give $2,000 a month as a bare minimum, so we included the self-employed.

Under Boris Johnson, England went with a base income as well, but it does not include the self-employed until June. If we had done the same thing in Canada, millions would have been wiped out.

This is how we negotiated. We gave up our time, which we fight for to stop the government from shutting down debate and fight for at committee. We gave that up because there is a bigger principle at stake: the crisis that Canadians are facing.

We negotiated with the government about small businesses. The original plan the government had was for a 10% wage subsidy. We said that 10% was not going to do it and that it had to be 75%. We negotiated that. That is what we do in a minority. We have the capacity.

The government has now brought in a motion for the committee of the whole to meet four days a week. People back home have never heard me explain the ins and outs of how Parliament works because I do not tend to do that, but the idea that this is a fake Parliament or not a real Parliament is a complete misrepresentation and falsehood. We have been able to zero in with ministers, asking very specific questions to push much harder.

We asked how we would get to the end of June. We are not shutting Parliament down permanently.

How do we get to the end of June? We said there were two clear things for us.

We wanted some sessions in the summer because we do not know how COVID will change in the summer. We heard nothing from the Conservatives about wanting to show up for work in the summer. Parliament does not sit in the summer, but we got those meetings.

We also said we would support the government on this key issue if it considers workers who are going back to work. They get $14 an hour and have no sick time. We never see the Conservatives stand up and talk about people making $14 an hour, unless it is to thank someone who served them a burger in the morning after they went through the drive-through. It is great that an hon. member thanks a guy at the drive-through, as I heard earlier, but the Conservatives offer nothing about the fact that if workers gets sick they cannot take time off.

The 10 days we negotiated with the government is extraordinary. It is also extraordinary because we realized, which my friends in the Bloc will lose their minds over, that we have to start talking at a federal level about how we can do this across Canada in a pandemic. We will have to negotiate a solution here.

We will now be speaking until the end of June about where we need to be, but coming out of this, we need to have a very clear vision. The economy is not simply going to turn itself back on and roar back into life.

We heard the Leader of the Opposition say that we have to get government out of the way because we want people to be able to make choices. Mr. 20th Century Man talks of making choices when millions cannot pay their rent. Let us get government out of the way. Let us just have the private sector do it all. Anyone who is dealing with industries has heard from industry after industry that they will not come back without some kind of vision and support.

We are talking about what the role of government will be. We have been here two days, and we have heard many things from the Conservatives. They went on about Margaret Thatcher. Remember her? She said there was no such thing as society. Guess what? COVID showed us that this is not very credible. Of course, they always mention Winston Churchill. They started off with Winston Churchill, then went to Margaret Thatcher and then to the Soviet Union, with the old “follow the Soviet Union” approach. The only thing they were missing was that we had to hold the line in the Mekong Delta so that the dominos did not fall.

What we are hearing are the tired old excuses of a 20th century vision that does not cut it. What COVID has shown us in 2020 is that those old myths are not going to cut it. We will need a new vision for public investment in health care. To end the precarious nature of work, we will need a public commitment with standards, not just to get government out of the way. We will also need a vision for building our economy.

We are willing, as the New Democrats, to give up some of our time in order to negotiate in a minority to put the people of Canada first. That is what we will continue to do. We will leave the Conservatives to howl at the moon or jump on the back benches. Maybe they will mention Castro next or someone else from their 20th century greatest hits. We will focus on what we need in the 21st century.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 26th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, that was a fascinating 10 minutes of my life.

Just because we have so much revisionism going on the House, I would like to speak about the incredible work that was done when the economic crisis hit. When the government started talking about tinkering with EI and child tax benefits, we knew that it was not going to work and that they needed to create a whole new program, something the Conservatives were not supporting at all.

It was the civil servants who worked through the Easter weekend and at night to get the CERB out. We know that the Conservatives are attacking CERB relentlessly and talking about people sleeping in their hammocks and not going to work. However, there is the work of the CRA in Sudbury and the Service Canada offices in Timmins and Thunder Bay, as well the incredible work of Community Futures and FedNor across the north, stabilizing our region, and the fact that we have $50 million of new money coming into the north at this time. We have extraordinary civil servants who stepped up, and it is really important that we recognize the work they did in getting this program off the ground, working under very difficult conditions to make sure that millions of Canadians did not lose their economic security and were not wiped out at a time of unprecedented crisis.

This is an important moment for us because we are back in the House and seeing all manner of revisionism. I want the historical record to show the work of our civil servants, who stood up at a time of unprecedented crisis, and how we were actually able to work in Parliament to change the CERB to make it workable.

I say this because in the United States, the Americans have a one-time payment of $1,250 under Trump. In England, under a majority government, there has not been any money for the self-employed people. It will not come until June. That delay would wipe people out.

However, here in Canada, because we are in a minority Parliament and because New Democrats were willing to negotiate to get something done, we got this thing through. Our civil servants did an extraordinary job, so I want to thank them.