Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, February 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, the NDP believes that the principle of asymmetrical federalism is fundamental to Canada. Quebec has many progressive programs to defend the values, interests and quality of life of Quebec residents. That is obvious to the NDP.

With regard to the question about the motion, the member will have to speak to his critic. However, the NDP feels it is necessary to implement a program that will give people in Quebec and other regions of Canada access to dental care.

[Business of Supply, February 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question. Rather than talking about the middle class, which I think has become so damaged, we have to start talking about the new working class, which is no longer only blue-collar but also white-collar workers.

There are professors who are basically getting minimum wage and working on endless contracts. At one point, being a professor was considered the ultimate white-collar job. We are seeing more and more white-collar workers on these perpetual short-term work cycles.

Therefore, this myth that there is a middle class that we are all part of has become problematic. We have seen a deterioration of that class, and the new working class is no longer just a blue-collar situation. It is also people who are on these endless contract cycles and burdened with student debt. Once we start talking about the real relationship of class, I think we can start to talk about targeted solutions for them.

[Business of Supply, February 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I am glad that my hon. colleague was raised by teachers as I am sure he can do math. I had one teacher in my family, my father, who was very good at math, but he would say his son was not so much. That is why I rely on the Parliamentary Budget Officer as well. When I look at the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report, it says the benefits do go to those making above $90,000, just as the previous tax cut went to those making above $90,000.

There is always a reason for the Liberals not to do the right thing, but when we see the costs of this figured out, it would probably cost $1.8 billion in the first year and then probably about $800 million. That may be low, but the impacts on society are going to be much better.

I would ask my hon. colleague how much of a benefit we are getting from the $12 billion or $15 billion that was signed off on with respect to the pipeline. Has he done a cost-benefit analysis of how that is helping the middle class? That is probably a question he gets asked all the time in his riding.

[Business of Supply, February 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I am always honoured to rise in the House to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.

For the folks back home, what we are discussing today is something on which the Liberal government has promised to work collegially, in this minority Parliament, to try to bring solutions, without our throwing brickbats at each other. However, as we are seeing throughout this debate, the Liberals are absolutely dead set against a reasonable solution. The solution is for a serious problem: the lack of dental care for more and more Canadians across this country.

I talked to a young woman the other day who said something that I thought was very powerful. She said that in Canada today the economic dividing line is between those who have dental care and those who do not. Those who do not have dental care are put at such a basic sense of risk, and there is also a risk of damage to self-worth. From knocking on the doors in my region and in my community, I have seen the impacts of not having access to dental care. In the great regions in the Far North, in the communities of the Cree, the dental crisis is a serious medical crisis.

What are we proposing? Whenever we come forward with a reasonable suggestion, the Liberals say, “There is the crazy NDP, pie in the sky. It is never good enough.” They tell us to stick with the Liberals, who make all the great promises but do not ever actually deliver. The pharmacare promise came so long ago that I think I was a child at the time. At least emotionally I was a child. The Liberals are still promising pharmacare, but we just have to wait a bit longer.

A great analogy for this relates to a loaf of bread. Why fight for a big loaf of bread? We can cut half a loaf of bread and give it to Galen Weston and tell everyone else they are loved and cared for. We are so cared for that the Liberals now have a Minister of Middle Class Prosperity. If this were a drinking game, and every time the Prime Minister said “middle class” we had to take a drink and then a shot for the follow-up line “those trying to join it”, people would be bombed at the end of a four-minute speech by a member of the government.

I say that in all seriousness, because the Prime Minister grew up in a very different middle class than my father and mother did. I do not know the middle class he grew up with in the town of Mount Royal, but my mother and father were the children of hard rock miners. My mom quit school at 15 and got a job. My dad quit school at 16 and got a job. He became a member of the middle class at 40, when he could go to university. My mom would type his notes when he would come home after 12 hours on an all-night bus to Timmins. By getting a university degree, he became a professor of economics. That was the middle class.

Middle class meant that my dad could buy a little house. It was not a big house, and it took him 25 years to pay it off. We had one car, and when that car died it just stayed in the driveway. My dad never got another one. Middle class meant that his kids could go to school and come out without debt, because he had a summer job. That was the middle class.

When we ask the middle class prosperity minister what the middle class is, she says it is hard to define, that it is for people who have stuff. That is it? She says it is for people who have kids in hockey. What about the families who do not have kids in hockey? What about the families who are working three jobs full time and are not able to pay their rent?

It is called the gig economy. The finance minister, who is pretty much the minister of the 1%, tells us to get used to it; it is the new normal. It is not the new normal. It is the direct result of deliberate economic policies by the Liberals and the Conservatives, going back and forth, policies that have deteriorated the once strong middle class that was the basis of the economic engine in this country.

When we talk about dental care now, with people who have to make a choice among paying their rent, looking after their children, getting their car fixed so that they can get to work and getting their teeth fixed, we are in a very different economic reality. What is the solution? It is quite simple. The Liberals, whenever they do not know what to do, give money to wealthy people and tell us that we will all benefit. The first thing the finance minister did was give a tax cut to the middle class and those wanting to join it. In other words, those making $150,000 a year are going to love the Liberals, and for those making $40,000 a year, they have nothing but a lot of nice affirmations.

The minister of the 1% has given us $14 billion in tax cuts over the last five years. These are cuts to revenue that could be used to invest in things the Liberals say they support, like pharmacare, and address the horrific shortage in national housing. They keep saying housing will receive the greatest and most incredible investment ever, but they are just not spending money on it. They do not even know where the money is because they gave it away in tax cuts.

What about their latest tax cut? Those who make $150,000 a year will do very well, but those who make less will get very little to diddly-squat. The reasonable alternative is to say that those making $90,000 or more do not need the extra money and to take that money and put it into a national dentistry fund to help 1.4 million Canadians.

The Liberals seem to think these finances are shocking. The finances were not shocking when they wrote a cheque of $4.5 billion to Trans Mountain to get it to go away. Then we bought ourselves a pipeline, and now they are adding $1 billion every few months, no problem there. They did not have to factor that out. They did not have to cost it out. Now they are asking how to cost out a national dental care program. What we know is that in the first year it will be used by a lot of people, but then it will settle in at about $800 million a year.

It is pretty clear that if we decide not to give more benefits to the rich, the people who so-called have all the stuff, and put in a dental plan, it will make life much better for many Canadians. It is doable, but it is about political will.

The other issue is about federal and provincial jurisdiction.

Quebec clearly has a lot of credibility when it comes to providing services to its people. The NDP upholds the principle of asymmetrical federalism. If the Government of Quebec decided to offer a program, it would be able to develop a plan and receive federal funding. That is reasonable.

To the other provinces, like Jason Kenney's Alberta, which would love a national dental care plan and then would give it to some oil executives, we would say no, that the money has to go to dental care. We have to protect the rights of citizens in this. If we are going to change how we tax money to help people, we have to make sure it will go there.

In my 16 years in the House, I have seen a continual deterioration of the middle class through deliberate policies, like the policies that downloaded the cost of university tuition onto students year after year so that students are now coming out with $50,000 or $60,000 to $100,000 in debt that they cannot get out of. I have seen the rise of the so-called precarious gig economy, precarious because it favours corporations, as it does not require standards to be in place for employment. It is crippling the young generation that is carrying those costs. I have seen the rise of housing prices in urban areas and in rural areas like mine, where right now 2,000 homeless people are in the area of the city of Timmins, a city of 44,000 people. Despite all the volunteers we have, they cannot address that crisis without a national investment. What do we get from the government? It says we have the greatest national housing investment ever, but we are not seeing any buildings.

This is about choice. It is about the choice to invest in housing. It is about the choice to invest in our students. It is about the choice to invest in infrastructure. Here we have a clear choice to not give to the rich and make a plan to establish a national dental care plan.

I appeal to my Liberal colleagues to do the right thing, work with us and send the message that this minority Parliament can work together.

[Business of Supply, February 25th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I want to put it on the record, just to be clear, I do not think I have ever agreed with that member. However, there are a few points in his speech that I agree with today. I certainly agreed that the NDP ridiculed the Liberal national housing strategy in 2015. The member said that we said it was not enough, and I certainly agree with that. It was not enough because there was nothing there.

The problem with the Liberals is they think that if they keep saying something it will become true. When we kept trying to find out where the national housing strategy was, we had the national housing strategy person, the member for Spadina—Fort York, who got up very defensively, said that they had helped over a million Canadians. We wanted to know where the million Canadians were. Then when the member was questioned on it, it turned out he had just made that up. He said it was for rhetorical advantage, to misrepresent numbers about a basic housing strategy.

If we listen to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, someone the Liberals seem dead set against and have tried to undermine, his latest comments on the Liberal national housing strategy are that they maintain “current funding levels for current activities and slightly reduced targeted funding” for current activities. If we get through the bureaucratese and economics of that, it means the Liberals have basically been putting jack squat into a national housing strategy and they plan to maintain a jack squat national housing strategy.

That leads me to my final point. I agree with the member that the Liberals are always willing to put money in the pockets of people they think need it the most, like Galen Weston, $12 million to fix his fridges. The Liberals think he needs that the most. We are here talking about people who cannot get dental care.

I do not know if the member understands what it is like to be without dental care, but I meet people without dental care all time and they are not people in the Liberal universe. We are here to say we could have a reasonable strategy to help with dental care or we could have more and more of this kind of Liberal rhetoric for advantage that helps no one.

[Indigenous Affairs, February 20th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, indigenous youth are marching in streets across this country with signs that say “reconciliation is dead”. That is on the Prime Minister. They do not believe him anymore, and the trains are stopped across this country. To get them started, the Prime Minister needs to put a credible plan on the table, yet he continues to fail the test of leadership.

The Prime Minister can fly to Africa and he can go to Barbados, yet he cannot pick up the phone to talk to the hereditary chiefs in our own country. When is he going to show up, put his boots on, go to Wet'suwet'en territory and de-escalate this crisis? When is he going to show up?

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I did not want to interrupt because I believe it is our hon. colleague's first speech, but she did reference Gordon Lightfoot. I was shocked by that because the Conservatives made a motion that stood up against quoting folk singers. They have denounced lyrics, they have attacked young people and they have attacked indigenous people.

I want to ask my hon. colleague whether she believes it is acceptable in the Parliament of Canada to quote Gordon Lightfoot, without offending Conservatives.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, this is why at this moment our Parliament needs to say there is a bigger issue, which is the danger of what happens if some guy in a truck does what he did in Edmonton and tries to do that on a Mohawk blockade, or someone with a bigger vehicle drives through a blockade, or if someone feels they are going to take this into their own hands and a train gets derailed, or if someone gets hurt. Once someone gets hurt, all our talk is going to become moot, and that is the real danger.

This is like Idle No More 2.0. We remember how powerful Idle No More was. This is much bigger, and I am hearing from many young people who are watching this. They will see how we play this out in Parliament, so de-escalation has to be the first step that we take.

We do not have a solution for what is happening in the Wet'suwet'en territory right now. No one does right now, but we have to de-escalate so we can get those trains moving and take the tension off.

I would urge my hon. colleague to tell the Prime Minister he needs to sit down and meet. We need to start these meetings. We should have started these meetings two weeks ago, but right now this is where we are at. The longer we wait, the more chance this will go off the rails very badly and very quickly.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague because he is from Vancouver Island, the area where so many of these issues have been faced, and issues such as Delgamuukw and other major legal decisions that have come down in British Columbia about rights and titles.

Every time we brought these things forward, such as the Treaty of the Nisga'a, the Conservatives fought unbelievably to stop it. They fought against UNDRIP unbelievably. They had it killed in the House, and now they are coming forward as the voice of the Wet'suwet'en people.

I do not think there is an indigenous community in the country that would say the Conservatives have some numbers on the Wet'suwet'en people, so they must be accurate. I have been trying to find these sources of their numbers as well. I know one of them came from a tweet from Jason Kenney, so I think that pretty much sums up the credibility there.

The fundamental issue is that this is a motion that attempts to say there are good native people and there are bad, reckless, agitated ones who are fooling them and dividing them. We are saying we need to sit down and address in a 21st century manner the underlying dissent and obvious problems we are seeing in that region and then say to the rest of the country that out of this we will start to move forward. To just throw numbers around as the Conservatives are doing is not credible; it is just another tactic.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2020]

Madam Speaker, the number one location in the world for a renewable economy is south central Alberta. Those facts are not from me but from meeting with energy workers, who ask where the plan is for the present Alberta government to start to move ahead on renewables.

What we see with Jason Kenney is a man who does not believe in making any effort and has alienated the rest of the country on this. This is what is causing the crisis. This is the proxy war the Conservatives are fighting.

My hon. colleague from Quebec understands full well that, when Quebec moved ahead with the hydroelectric dam, officials sat down and made a modern treaty with the Cree. They understood that there was going to be a negotiation about how to move forward.

The problem that we are seeing with the Conservative vision is that they are pushing further and further for the increase in greenhouse gas emissions without any credible plan to lower them. Without that, they are not going to have the social licence or the buy-in from the rest of Canadians.

There will be more conflict if people like Jason Kenney continue to push their 20th-century vision as opposed to recognizing a 21st-century reality.