Charlie Angus

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to rag the puck here but if it is less than five minutes, I think it would be fair for all of us to see the clock at 6:30.

Would we need unanimous consent for that or would we just need a majority of members in the House?

I think it would be very helpful in order to have us all leave on a good point on Monday but I defer to my colleagues.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague, who I respect, and I think he has good knowledge of the file.

The one thing I need to question is this relentless line from Conservatives about gatekeepers, bureaucracy and red tape. They always throw out the line, for example, that it takes 10 years to get a mine into production. I come from mining country. There is not a single investor on the planet who would open a billion-dollar operation in a mine without doing absolute due diligence, which does take 10 years to actually map out an ore body.

It is the same for getting housing right. We have seen the leaky condo scandal that cost $7 billion in B.C. We have seen the crappy concrete crisis in the U.K. that happened under Conservatives because they were not making sure that things were done right.

When I see the blame about municipalities acting as gatekeepers, in my region, they are more than ready to get these houses built, but they have to be built right.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, we have very clear rules about how to address members; it has to be through the Chair. I just want to clarify did you, Mr. Speaker, bring in the carbon tax or is he misunderstanding the rules of the House? I would like to have that clarified.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, this issue is important. The housing crisis is affecting every single one of our communities. Certainly, in Timmins—James Bay, when we look at the indigenous communities, we have massive rates of homelessness. Even in our urban centres now, where we have a young population looking to live, there is no place to live. We have a growing economy; people cannot move in. For senior citizens who cannot stay in their old farmhouses and want to move into town, there is no housing.

I would ask the hon. member about a sense of urgency. I have heard about housing since this government was elected, but I have not seen the urgency on the ground to actually move towards mixed units, co-operative housing and apartment opportunities so that we can get housing now, whether for new Canadians, students, workers or senior citizens in communities like Timmins, Kirkland Lake or Belleville. In any community we name, it is the same crisis.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I would like to withdraw that comment. He is the member who lives in Stornoway. He is not the member for Stornoway. I thank the Speaker for that.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I was very interested in my hon. colleague's comments and I want to point to one very crucial part of his speech where he talked about the government only being there to help its friends, its “very rich donors”. I think he is talking about the Conservatives of Ontario and Doug Ford.

What did Ford run on? He ran on promising people a buck a beer, but what did he deliver? He delivered $8 billion for his insider crony pals. Here is the thing. I know the Conservatives all get whiny whenever their record as a party is questioned, but the mysterious Mr. X, who has been named by the integrity commissioner for being involved in this, is also a friend of the Conservative leader, the member for Stornoway.

I would like to ask the member if he would have any of the discussions between Mr. X and the member for Stornoway made public so we could know what kind of backroom deals the party is already making.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I would like to follow up on that last question. It is worth pointing out that prior to 1980, the notion of homelessness simply did not exist in Canada. There were certain inner city skid rows with local charities, but housing began to be the crisis in the 1980s as the government began to underfund, and then, of course, when Paul Martin cut the national housing program which gave the green light to multiple provinces. We have seen a slow-moving hurricane finally touch down in real time over the last 30 years, such that now upwards of 280,000 Canadians are touched by homelessness in any given year. That is a staggering number.

I want to ask my hon. colleague about the importance of making it a priority to get housing, to get non-market housing and co-operative housing, built so we can have homes for seniors, for single mums and for families. We need to make this a national priority to make up for the years of disregard from both the Liberals and the Conservatives on the fundamental right to housing in our country.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 25th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, on a point of order, we know that Parliament has recognized virtual. We know that the Conservatives participate virtually. This is an inappropriate attack—

[Strengthening the Port System and Railway Safety in Canada Act, September 21st, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my hon. colleague say the old Conservative mantra that they are going to build pipelines, pipelines, pipelines. I was reading the indictment of the people of California against ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Conoco, Phillips, and it says:

Rather than warn consumers, the public, and governments, however, Defendants—

That is big oil:

—mounted a disinformation campaign beginning at least as early as the 1970s to discredit the burgeoning scientific consensus on climate change; deny their own knowledge of climate change-related threats; create doubt in the minds of consumers...

...Defendants have promoted and/or profited from the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels...

This has forced the state of California and the people of the world to pay for the damages. What we are seeing is the big tobacco moment.

My hon. colleague is saying big tobacco and big oil will continue to pollute the planet and it will be good. I would suggest that he read the indictment from the state of California against all the big five oil companies that knowingly discredited climate science and are knowingly destroying our planet.

[Strengthening the Port System and Railway Safety in Canada Act, September 21st, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, every morning past my little house in northern Ontario, we hear the big rumbling of the train. I always love that sound. My family worked the trains, and when I hear that train whistle in the distance, I feel good. However, that train carries huge tankers of sulfuric acid from the smelter in Rouyn-Noranda, and it goes past my house.

Every morning as I hear that rumble, I want to know that those smelter cars are on tracks that are safe and that our workers are able to make sure they can look after them, because a derailment of that nature would be catastrophic in our region of the north where we have fragile lake systems. It would be catastrophic anywhere in this country, particularly going through many of the cities and communities across the country. We saw the disaster at Lac-Mégantic where so many people died because of a lack of regulation.

I want to ask my colleague about the importance of this. We have been told self-regulation works. It does not. We need to see strong measures to make sure that what we are transporting across this country is transported safely, for the workers, for the communities and for the environment. There is the necessity of making sure the federal government lives up to its responsibility of ensuring that is done.