Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in the House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.
I will be splitting my time with the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou.
I am going to begin on what maybe people think is a side issue, but it fundamental to it. It is the issue of children.
We just brought home the body of 13-year-old Karlena Kamenawatamin to Bearskin Lake this weekend. We lost a 10-year-old there last year. I mention her name because she died in a home with no electricity—in Canada.
We are going to talk about the mental health needs of children and ask how this crisis is happening. For a child to have no water and no electricity, she was ground into hopelessness and poverty.
Yesterday we received the report on the 12 children who died in Ontario foster care, six in three months, 12 in three years. I am going to name some of their names and tell some of their stories, because it pertains to what we are talking about: 12-year-old Amy Owen from Poplar Hill First Nation whose parents said she lived in so much pain that she was broken by the age of 12. Then there is 16-year-old Courtney Scott from Fort Albany, whose family and sister I met. What they went through in foster care is a horror story. Nobody defended those children and she died.
Chantel Fox and Jolynn Winter from Wapekeka were 12 years old, and the government was found culpable in their deaths by the Human Rights Commission because it did nothing to respond to the community's urgent pleas to help those girls.
Kanina Sue Turtle also died in care.
I do not have the names of the other children because they are protected.
The report tells us that these children grew up with inadequate shelter, unsafe water, lack of access to food and no access to equitable education or health and mental health services. It said that many of them lived in overcrowded houses without electricity or running water.
That is the face of the housing crisis in our country, like 13-year-old Sheridan Hookimaw from Attawapiskat, whose family I know so well. She was ground into poverty from the sewage backups and living with 21 other people in an overcrowded mould-infested home. She just gave up one day, could not live anymore, and died by suicide.
The cost of the complacency of this nation for the treatment of its children is being counted in the body bags that have flown home to Treaty 9 and all the other communities of the far north. It is the poverty that has ground them down.
If we go to Kashechewan, Attawapiskat and the other communities and go into the homes, we will smell the bleach, because the mothers and the ku-kums try to keep the homes clean for the grandchildren and the children. They are proud. The walls are full of pictures. When there is a graduate, those pictures are everywhere. However, if we look at the floor in the living room, everything has been moved out for the mattresses. There could be 18 and 21 people living and sleeping there at night. That is the nature of the housing crisis.
For government, it is always an issue it will deal with next year and the year after. It is going to have another INAC program. It is going to have another funding plan. The obligation to ensure that children in our country do not live in fourth-world conditions has never been a priority. It will never be a priority until we insist on the fundamental principle that housing is a human right, so that the 300 families in Kashechewan that have no homes, that live with their relatives and their cousins, or travel around and around trying to find a bed in that little community will have homes. That is the nature of the housing crisis.
We recently saw the government come up with all these solutions. One of them was that it would have a contest for first nations to find an innovative solution. What is this, The Hunger Games? The Liberals love this stuff. They have smart city challenges. One of their smart city challenges is they will use AI to help us deal with climate change. We have to love the Liberals. They are going to promote an app for homelessness so the homeless will know when the shelters are full. They are ridiculous. They think people are stupid. They announce they are going to deal with the housing crisis in the first nations. They are going to put $30 million away for the most innovative solution and work with them—winners and losers.
From having worked on this file for a long time, I can tell members that the impediment is not the people's innovation. The impediment is government bureaucracy and policy that time and again sit on projects that are good, that undermine self-financing projects in communities where people can go to the bank and get their own financing. Yet, they have to go through the minister of INAC because he acts like the great white father, who can sign off on their financial plan when they already have an agreement with the bank. We can have innovative housing, but one needs the government as a partner.
Therefore, to me, the idea that we are going to have a smart challenge for indigenous people to compete for the money is probably one of the most ignorant things I have seen from the government and shows its lack of respect.
I come here with many experiences on the issue of housing. I see it across my region. I see it with seniors who cannot move from the old housing their kids grew up in to affordable seniors housing. It does not exist. The waiting list is so long that people will die before they ever get one.
I worked in the urban centres in downtown Toronto with the homeless before Paul Martin killed the national housing strategy. When we were working with the homeless in Riverdale, in Toronto's east end, it was possible to get people into rooming houses. We still had rooming houses, and one could get someone sobered up, get them into cheap housing, then onto the list for social housing. There was such a turnaround in lives. I saw it. I spent every night of the week and the year at detox centres and emergency wards, and we were able to get people stable housing. They were not a burden on the system anymore. Some of the people I have known over those years went on to live very good lives because of housing.
At that time, when Paul Martin pulled out of the national housing strategy, the housing market was already beginning to change, as were the neighbourhoods in the east end of Toronto. Paul Martin, who was king of the private market, told us not to worry because the private market would step up. However, it did not step up, and we have seen a steady gap growing. My old neighbourhood of Riverdale had some amazing mixed income co-operatives, where single moms and university professors lived. Those were solid neighbourhoods. When I go back to my old neighbourhood now, it has become a neighbourhood of the super rich and the super poor. The balanced neighbourhoods we had are disappearing because people cannot afford them. They call it the “hollowing out” of these neighbourhoods.
The young people, who want to raise families and work in the city cannot afford to live there. I will give a shining example, coming from the musicians' community. There was a time when Toronto was the centre where all the bands came, and Montreal was sort of seen as the dance capital. Well, Montreal is the centre for music now. Why? Because there are no musicians who can apply their trade in Toronto and pay the rent, so all the young artists are moving to Montreal. We see creative communities no longer being able to live there because they have been forced out of the city.
What is the solution? It is mixed income housing. There will still be the private sector, but we need to have a commitment to housing to build co-operative and mixed income housing in order to maintain neighbourhoods where we can still have young families whose children can go to school and parents who work in the inner city. It also comes down to this fundamental notion that housing is a human right, which is something the government will not recognize. It talks about it.
Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur, expressed her deep concern about the Liberal government and what it is doing. Of course, the two great tricks of the Liberal Party in the last 150 years is, first, that it will break all of the promises it makes to first nation people as soon as the people turn their back. The second great trick of the Liberal Party that has gotten them into power time and again is to tell people to vote for them in the election because it will do something right, that if people return the party to power, it will look after them.
Liberals are now saying they are going to have a housing framework, but the United Nations special rapporteur says she is concerned that the government is not recognizing the right to housing in implementing legislation and will not recognize the primacy of the right to housing as a legal right subject to effective remedies. Until we have a government willing to commit to that, there is no reason to believe and vote for the Liberals, as people did in 1993, 1997, 2000 and 2003, as a result of that red book of promises, which is always just over the hill, just waiting for the next election, just waiting until the right moment as long as people re-elect them will get done.
If the government is serious, it will commit to that strategy as a human right.
