Charlie Angus

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, December 6th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the Leader of the Opposition back as Leader of the Opposition.

I listened with great interest to his speech and I heard the disconnect that we heard throughout the election. Sure, we heard about Liberal corruption, but we heard a lot about melting ground. Certainly the ground is melting beneath his feet for failing to put forward any coherent climate change plan.

I represent blue-collar industrial workers, and they are concerned about the issue of catastrophic climate change. Year in and year out, emissions rise. We are expecting a 60% rise in emissions from the oil fields in the next 20 years, and what do we get from the member? We get the conspiracy theory of foreign radicals trying to undermine our industry. Nobody buys that.

We do not have any coherent plan other than the carbon tax, but what I find deeply offensive is the fact that the Leader of the Opposition is telling the House that if Jason Kenney does not get his way and massively expand the oil fields, the Conservatives will put the issue of the future of our country on the table.

It is unacceptable that a Conservative member stands, without any coherent credibility on the single biggest crisis facing our planet, and tells the rest of Canada that they have to go along with his conspiracy theories, with no credibility on environmental change, or Conservatives will break up our country.

I would tell that member to drop that kind of language, because the ground is certainly melting beneath his feet very quickly at this point.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, again, the issue is that he is trying to avoid the question of price gouging, which the Conservatives support. The problem with the spectrum auction is that if it goes for what people are willing to pay for it, as he says, then of course the big players are going to win, and the big players have won year after year after year, and then they come and whine to us and tell us that we have to pay.

Earlier he was talking about the little players and indigenous people. Conservatives always bring indigenous people in suddenly when they are trying to defend the big boys. If the Conservative idea of a spectrum auction is that those who have the most money can pay, that is a failed process.

What we would say is that a spectrum auction has to always include rural, indigenous and new players, who would have a guarantee to get access to it so that we could get some competition, which is something the Liberals and the Conservatives have never allowed in this telecom market.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, certainly the ability to give low-income families a fair price is very important. It raises the question of why other families do not get a fair price. If the government can do it for low-income families, why can it not do it for seniors?

The problem with the government is that it has allowed the price gouging to go on for years. We are paying $70 a month, when people in Australia are paying $24 a month. It is affecting students. It is affecting seniors. It is affecting businesses. It is a lag on the development of a data-driven economy.

If we can do this in a very limited way for a very small number of people, because only a small number of people were eligible for that, why is it not possible to have a proper data plan in place to ensure that everyone has access in the digital age?

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I do not hold it against my friend. I know that he is frustrated. It must be terrible to stand up day after day and pretend that his party is defending the little guy when it is coming into the House with a record like Stephen Harper's on the spectrum auction, which took all those billions of dollars that could have been reinvested. However, the Conservatives do not reinvest. When there were billions of dollars from a spectrum auction that could have been invested in the economy, what did they do? They gave it in tax cuts to the rich. They then turned around and asked themselves how they were going to pay for things if they could not do price gouging of senior citizens. That is the Conservative economic model in a nutshell.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, we always know that the Conservatives are going to stand up suddenly for the little guy when it means defending their big friends. They had 10 years on the spectrum auction. They continued to refuse to move forward with a vision that would actually reinvest—

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, we are here today to watch the Liberals and Conservatives come together to defend price-gouging against Canadians, in order to defend what they are claiming is a free market and the importance of a free market. It is not a free market. The telecom market in Canada is a constructed market that is protected. It is protected for the interests of companies that make the highest profits in telecom services in the world, while delivering the highest cost per consumer.

I will begin by talking about two places.

One place is Rwanda. When my daughter was working in Rwanda, she contacted me on her cellphone. I said to her that it must be really expensive to contact us in Canada from Rwanda. She said that she gets better download speeds and download rates in rural Rwanda than she gets in downtown Ottawa. I was quite taken aback by that.

Another place, which you know well, Madam Speaker, is northern Ontario. I do not know if the Conservatives and the Liberals know that Highway 11 and Highway 17 are part of the Trans-Canada Highway route. That is where hundreds of millions of dollars in goods move every day. It is the national transportation corridor. Let us imagine the shock of a couple who invested in a business on the Trans-Canada Highway and were told, in 2018, that a telecom company cannot give their business cellphone service. The big telecom giants who serve the area say that there is no business case for serving those people.

We have been hearing from the Conservatives today that it is very important to gouge consumers; that is how the free market works. If companies rip people off and make them pay more money, then the magic of the free market is that the telecom capitalists will just reinvest all that and help rural areas. They said that they would help indigenous people. I have never seen, in the history of Canada, telecom companies help any indigenous community unless the government is putting up the money.

That is the market we live in. We live in a market where it is the taxpayers who put the money in for the broadband expansions. It is the taxpayers who pay through the nose, time and again, for the price-gouging that goes on. As my hon. colleague from Essex pointed out, if people do not think it is possible to get better rates, all they have to do is call Bell and Rogers and say they are quitting their service. The companies will do backflips to give them lower prices. I talk to seniors who have to give up their phone coverage because they cannot afford to pay for it. They phoned me, and they were shocked at how willing Bell was to give them so much better a rate. They would not have gotten that if they had not threatened to quit.

What does that mean for our economy? We have tried to build an economy that is a digital world-class economy, and yet Canadians have the lowest data use of pretty much any western country. The only countries that use less wireless service than we do are the Czech Republic, Portugal, Germany, Belgium and Greece. We had a period where people would say they did not want to use their cellphone, were not sure if they were covered and did not want to know what the extra costs are. Therefore, we have some of the lowest usage of phones and yet we pay the highest rates.

Let us talk about what gouging means, because it seems to be a confusing thing to Liberals and Conservatives. They want to compare apples to apples. On a two-gigabyte plan for their phone, people pay about $75 Canadian a month, and they can still get gouged on top of that. In Paris, people pay $30; in Rome, $24. The Liberals and the Conservatives might say that is not fair and it is different in Europe. Let us compare a similar-sized country with a similar population and similar large rural regions, such as Australia. Australians pay $24.70 a month on average for two gigabytes. In Canada, we are paying $70.

The Conservatives and the Liberals would tell us that is the beauty of the free market. No, that is the beauty of Liberals and Conservatives hanging out day after day with the telecom lobbyists.

Folks back at home might not know, but we can hardly walk down the halls of Parliament without bumping into or tripping over a telecom lobbyist, because they do not want government to address the inequities that we are seeing. They want government to continue to protect this protected market that has allowed them the highest profits anywhere in telecommunications.

In terms of total revenue per gigabyte, Canada is 70 times higher in revenue than India, which has pretty much one billion people paying into it. Now, the telecom companies might say that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Well then, let us go to Finland, which also has a northern climate. The telecom revenues in Canada are 23 times higher than Finland. Yet, I am being told that the Canadian telecom companies cannot give us a break on our phones, that it will somehow break the companies and destroy the digital economy if they were not allowed to gouge that 23 times higher than what people in Finland have.

If we look at the success rate, 63% of people in rural Canada do not have access to high-speed broadband. The Liberals think they have done something great, while the Conservatives took the $17-billion spectrum auction and spent it on everything but reinvesting in a modern digital economy. There are 14% of the highways and major transportation routes that do not have access to LTE wireless services. When we get up into the north, we get into much higher rates in terms of what people cannot access.

Phones are not luxury items anymore. They are essential. We have government moving to all online services, and yet it will not deliver proper rural broadband or proper rates that people can afford to pay to be able to even access the services of the government.

What are we talking about in terms of a vision? The New Democrats have been saying all along that the spectrum auction is the greatest opportunity to reinvest in a truly digital economy. We have protected the telecom data-opolies for so long that, if they are going to have a protected market, then they are going to have a market that is fair, and that market is going to end the price gouging and we are going to put the caps on. The Liberals will not and the Conservatives will not, because they will look after the friends of big business time and time again, and they will continue to leave ordinary Canadians behind.

We will put the investments in a truly digital economy, because that is where the future lies. It is not in protecting the insider friends of both the Liberals and Conservatives. It is about protecting ordinary Canadians. It is about protecting seniors. It is about making sure that, when we drive on a northern highway, we have access to telecom services. It is not just northern highways. We can get 30 kilometres outside of Ottawa and have service cut off. How do they explain a first-world country where 30 kilometres outside of the nation's capital we can have our cellphone die out? That is the lack of vision in the last 15 years that we have had under Conservative and Liberal governments, and we are going to change that. It will begin by taking on the telecom giants and making sure we have accessible, fair service at a fair price for Canadians.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2019]

Madam Speaker, I was fascinated to hear a 10-minute speech from a member who obviously had not read what the motion was about. We are not talking about misleading pricing practices. We are talking about price gauging and the fact that people in my region are paying $70 a month for two gigabytes, when in Australia people pay $24 a month. This is supported by the government and the league of telecom lobbyists who knock on its doors daily. When my daughter was in Rwanda, she had better download rates than she can get in downtown Ottawa.

Let us talk about northern Ontario and the complete failure of the government, which ended broadband plans and said that it would another one. We waited two years for that. Many of the communities I represent do not have broadband service and pay outrageous fees. The government continues to protect the telecom giants that rip us off day in, day out.

To say that the Liberals will do something better about bad arbitrary calling and how they deal with it is a side issue. The issue is the price gauging by a protected market of telecom giants.

[Privacy, May 30th, 2019]

Oh, God, Mr. Speaker, that is their idea of a priority: no money for Grassy Narrows, but hey, lots of money for the billionaire Irvings. Speaking of which, when the media asked the government if it gave $40 million to the Irvings to make French fries in Lethbridge as part of an Arctic shipbuilding contract, what did the Liberals do? They tipped off the Irvings, who then threatened The Globe and Mail with a lawsuit. Think about that: a government snitch line for billionaires to target journalists over the spending of taxpayers' money.

What is the Prime Minister trying to do: turn Canada into some kind of two-bit potato republic for his friends?

[Indigenous Affairs, May 30th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, the people of Grassy Narrows believed the Prime Minister when he made a solemn promise to build a mercury treatment centre. He even gave them a timeline, and then nothing happened. I guess we should have known that the punchline was coming when the Prime Minister made a joke about them to his rich donor friends. The punchline came yesterday: an empty agreement. No wonder Grassy Narrows refused to sign that bogus agreement. Politics is full of broken promises, but what about this one?

How does the Prime Minister justify such deplorable treatment of the people of Grassy Narrows?

[Criminal Records Act, May 30th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, the House is speaking about marijuana this morning. In my region, in Fort Albany, Chief Leo Metatawabin has just declared a state of emergency over the devastating impacts of the opioid crisis.

In our northern communities, opioids are destroying families. There are no resources. We have seen the horrific opioid deaths across the country. Much of this is under provincial jurisdiction. However, in our northern reserves, they have to look to the federal government for action to help in dealing with the horrific impacts of the opioid crisis. They are not seeing action, action that would save lives, action that would restore families being broken by the drug crisis.

From his experience in the west, could my hon. colleague tell us what we need to do to ensure we have the on-the-ground resources right now to help the communities that are facing the devastating impacts of the opioid epidemic?