Charlie Angus

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

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. I am concerned about her comments on the economy roaring back. What we have learned with COVID is how quickly it has devastated our conceptions about the economy. The idea that we are going to simply switch the lights back on and everything is going to go back is not realistic. We certainly know there will be devastation in the restaurant sectors in the big urban centres. We saw how the oil sector collapsed before COVID. Now international investors have moved out all together.

There will need to be a long-term vision. Part of that is what we will do with the workers who are on CERB now? Many of them have no work to go back to. Is the government willing to play the role that will be needed to build and start the economy, carefully continuing its investments and ensuring that come August or October people are not simply cut-off from CERB if they have no work to go back to?

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

I never said that the member never showed up for work in her riding, so I think she should correct the record and stick to the facts at hand.

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

Mr. Speaker, I came down this week because we have so much unfinished business, and we need to make sure our Parliament is focusing on the crisis at hand. Within a week of the COVID shutdown, we had millions of people across Canada who could not pay their rent. That is a shocking statistic for a nation like ours.

Yesterday I did not hear any questions from the Conservatives about how people can no longer afford to pay their rent. I heard them go on about Margaret Thatcher, the Soviet Union, the red Chinese menace and the mystical hand of the market, but I did not hear them speak at all about having to send the army into long-term care facilities, where so many seniors have died. I have not seen them act in a manner that treats this pandemic with the seriousness it needs.

When we have had to do something extraordinary such as move to committee of the whole, and I would normally be very suspicious of changing the orders of Parliament, it is to allow us to focus, ask questions, and go back to our constituents and say that we are taking this pandemic seriously in a way that will really drill down to get the answers Canadians deserve.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 25th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I have been in the House 16 years and I have fought every government on every issue, but we are in a crisis that is unprecedented. I think that the move to go to a committee of the whole was an extraordinary decision for this Parliament to make, and I am actually shocked the government agreed to it, because it allows members the opportunity to really drill down on questions that need answering. We need answering of these questions in a much more detailed and clear way than we get in the normal House.

The normal work of Parliament is important, and it must return, but I want to say that I think the work of the committee of the whole at this time gives confidence to the Canadian people that we are all here, putting on the interests of the people we represent, to try to figure out solutions together to make Canada come through this crisis.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 25th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I have known my colleague for many years and I have never heard him speak as long. I actually thought that maybe it would all start to make sense, this bizarre cacophony that we are seeing from the Conservatives.

We heard the member tell us about the beauty of the free market, about the magical, mystical hidden hand that fixes everything, when we have been talking about the fact that there was no PPE in Canada and our front-line health workers had to crowdsource, but no, the magical, mystical market is going to make it better. He told us how we can get government out of everybody's way, at a time when millions of Canadians could not pay their rent and have looked to this House to get them support, but he is telling us that if we get government out of the way it will be great.

Why is it going to be great? Let me see. He gave us the fall of the Soviet Union. We were back in the 1970s. He had to start off with Winston Churchill. We know that whenever the Conservatives start off with Winston Churchill, we are back in the 1940s. Then of course he had to talk about China again and again, and the evil communist regime. China's human rights abuses are certainly serious, but we had to send the army into for-profit care homes to keep our seniors alive, and we heard nothing from the Conservatives about what is happening to our seniors. However, we heard about everything else.

Then the member tried to tell us that the economy was a horse. I have heard a lot of crazy economic theories, almost as crazy as the magical, mystical hand, but I had never heard that the economy was a horse.

We are in the biggest economic crisis in our history, and what we have heard from this member is a hodgepodge of right-wing gobbledygook. I am suggesting that the member is not the man for the time. He is not even yesterday's man; he is a decades-old man. I know he does not have a long time left, but he had a long time to speak. I thought he would have at least given us some kind of coherent explanation of the bizarre strategy of the Conservatives to deny action on fighting to get decent help for people in the middle of this crisis.

[Privacy, May 25th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, Palantir is a surveillance giant that is notorious in the United States for its work with the CIA and for deporting migrants. Now it has been cutting itself in on the business of tracing and tracking COVID patients. Palantir's head honcho in Canada is David MacNaughton, the Prime Minister's personal friend. He has been bragging about all his meetings with top Liberals, but he is not even registered to lobby.

The Prime Minister gave our medical supply chain to Amazon. Is he going to give the private medical information of Canadian citizens to a company with such a dubious human rights record as Palantir?

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, sorry, I did not mean it as a metaphor. I meant it as a simile that if people act like they are knuckle-dragging, they are not being helpful, but I would not suggest that they are knuckle-draggers. I am very glad I was corrected on that.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, one of the ways we get through crises is remembering what happened in other crises. Do members remember 2008? It was the biggest economic crisis in memory, and Stephen Harper's big plan was to force through a massive austerity budget that would have crushed so many Canadians.

It was a minority government, and they panicked. What did they do? They shut Parliament down. Therefore, when we hear the Conservatives whining that we are meeting four days a week, I remember when we were not allowed to meet at all, because Stephen Harper refused to meet.

Then he came back and he blew through $50 billion. How many tourist kiosks did we set up in Tony Clement's riding? There were no accountability mechanisms; they blew through money on gazebos, sunken boats and everything they could put into Muskoka.

We have come here and have just won the right to sick benefits for all Canadians. That is what we do in a crisis. We find ways to put people first, not the ideologies of the Conservative Party, not Muskoka sunken boats and the ShamWow scams they ran. We do not prorogue Parliament and stand and whine day after day that we are not being heard if we're not offering anything positive.

We came here to fight for workers. We came here to fight for health. We came here to fight for small business, and we will continue to do that in a minority Parliament.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the work he has done in actually showing some leadership in the House while having to go along with the knuckle-draggers.

[Proceedings of the House and Committees, May 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, for over 15 years, I have seen all kinds of political shenanigans and engaged in all kinds of partisan debates, but I have never seen a crisis that has damaged our country to the extent COVID has. The role of parliamentarians here is about speaking for the people who need us, not an attempt by some politicians to give themselves more airtime. It is about coming here to negotiate, to figure out how we get through this together. We came here as New Democrats to try to find a solution so that we have accountability mechanisms. We should never forget that the reason we are here is for the people back home who are falling through the economic abyss.

I know the Conservatives are already saying that there are slackers who do not want to work. We are here to defend people, so I would like to ask my hon. colleague this. We are more than willing to work with the government, but we still have serious shortfalls. For example, we are sending many people back to work who do not have proper sick benefits. That is why we are here, for them, not to score partisan points. We are asking if the government is willing to work with the New Democratic Party to put Canadians first at this unprecedented time and show that this Parliament can rise above the normal partisan bric-a-brac and actually do something to get us through this crisis.

[Canada Emergency Student Benefit Act, April 29th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, let us talk about the economy. Let us talk about building a better Canada.

We have enormous capacity here, but we have given it away, year in and year out, in trade agreements. In the case of our IT sector, we need an IT investment through the federal government, because that is where it is going to come. When we are starting to talk about the job recoveries, it is going to require social investment. Nobody figures we are going to get out of this by just turning a switch and having the private economy come back on. When we make public investment, it will be like after the Second World War to make sure we have a proper pension plan, proper health care, proper infrastructure and sustainable cities.

Let us do better than we did in 2008, when they ran around with a bunch of paper cheques and white hard hats and cut ribbons all over the country, and we did not even get high-speed rail. Let us do it right this time.