Denis Trudel

[Housing, September 28th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, if the Liberals' priority was to provide housing to our people back home, they would have given the housing funds to Quebec a long time ago. By holding on to that money, they are showing that their priority is not to build houses as quickly as possible, but to fight over flags with Quebec.

They should start by giving us the means to build apartment buildings. Not to worry, we will be happy to invite them for the photo op.

When will they give Quebec the $900 million for housing? We need that money now.

[Housing, September 28th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, where is the $900 million that Quebec is supposed to receive for housing? There is not a Liberal blunder, not a single distraction, that is going to make us forget that.

I have travelled all around Quebec. This is not just an issue in Montreal. People in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts talked to me about homelessness; it is something they have never seen before. In Saint-Jérôme, there are 40 families living in their cars. There are families without a roof over their heads all over Quebec; meanwhile, the federal government is depriving Quebeckers of $900 million for housing.

When will the government hand the money over to Quebec without conditions?

[Business of Supply, September 28th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, today, the Conservatives are serving up another load of hogwash to make us think they care about the most vulnerable among us. I just got back from a tour of Quebec; the housing crisis is visible everywhere. There are tent cities all over the place, single mothers sleeping in their cars and pregnant women giving birth outside.

In 2022, the oil industry made $200 billion in profit. The Liberal government sent $50 billion to the oil industry in 2022. I have not heard my Conservative colleagues protesting that.

How many homes does my colleague think we could build with the $50 billion we sent to the oil industry in 2022?

[Business of Supply, September 28th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I really liked my colleague's indignant tone when he said the Liberals opposite are not doing enough to fight climate change.

I do have one question, though. In the last budget, in 2023, the government still gave billions of dollars to oil companies, specifically for carbon capture, an approach that we know does not work at all. My NDP friends voted for the budget. How do they explain that?

[Business of Supply, September 28th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, listening to my Conservatives friends this morning, one would think the Bloc Québécois is the party in power in this country. It is unbelievable.

My colleague mentioned that he is concerned about people who are hungry right now. It is funny, because two weeks ago I was in Quebec City, the only part of Quebec where the Conservatives have elected members. There was a conference on homelessness where every party that has members in the province was represented. The Liberals were there, but strangely enough, the Conservatives were nowhere to be seen. One might well ask why not a single Conservative showed up.

I have a question regarding the infamous energy bill that the member for Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis waved around in the House.

Does my colleague understand that it had nothing to do with the carbon tax and everything to do with the Quebec-California carbon market? What that member said in the House was a bald-faced lie.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 26th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right; that is unacceptable.

The government seems totally clueless about this problem. As I have said, we need to build 1.1 million housing units in Quebec and 3.5 million in Canada. A GST break alone is not going to make a big difference.

We absolutely have to have a strategy. We need an industrial-strength strategy. When the pandemic hit, the government managed to organize everything, send cheques out to workers and businesses and roll out vaccination across the country. How did it do that? It all happened in record time.

Why can we not mobilize the entire Canadian government behind this issue? It seems to me that we should all be able to get on board with taking care of the least fortunate.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 26th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, what is most expensive in Quebec right now is housing and rent. That is what is needed right now. I listen to the Conservatives here in the House and I try to find solutions. I listen to what they are proposing. All they want is to punish cities. They say that cities cannot get it right, that they will get in there to clean up the mess and make sure that cities build housing.

Come on. That has never worked. If it worked, we would know it. Punishing cities is not the way to go. What we need is for the federal government to really step up, because it has taxation power.

According to the IMF, we gave the oil industry $50 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, people in Quebec have to sleep outdoors. How is that acceptable?

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 26th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I want to know why Bill C-56 does not include an affordability criterion as part of the eligibility for the GST credit. Including it would have made things simple. The government could force private builders to make housing truly affordable. However, it was not included.

Perhaps my colleague from Joliette will manage to get this added at committee, but I do not understand why the government did not include it. With this GST credit, all the government is going to do is hand out more money. The main problem with the major national housing strategy that was launched is that it is giving a lot of the money to private developers. The private sector wants to line its pockets. That is how capitalism works.

It is absolutely essential that the government invest in building real social housing.

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 26th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I was saying that we are at the end of the continuum of service for homelessness. As we saw, there are 10,000 homeless people in Quebec. That was a snapshot of the situation in October 2022, and every organization told me that it was likely just the tip of the iceberg, because the homelessness we see hides the homelessness we do not see. I am thinking, for example, of women trapped in toxic relationships who are forced to stay in the home because they have no resources. Every day in Quebec, a woman who is the victim of domestic violence knocks on the door of a resource for victims of domestic violence and returns to her apartment with her two or three children and her abusive husband. How is such a thing acceptable?

Here we are being offered a half measure. After hearing these testimonies all across Quebec, I expected the government to do something. I saw a poll or two this summer. I imagine that the Liberals saw the same thing and told themselves that the housing crisis was important and they needed to take action. Then they present us with a half measure, a GST credit.

This country needs to build 3.5 million homes by 2030, including 1.1 million in Quebec. We would expect the Liberals to take action if they want to be re-elected. That is one of the major problems of our time. We would expect them to introduce a structuring measure that will change people's lives and enable us to build housing quickly. Instead we are getting a GST credit.

Of course, private builders will benefit from this, but will they really build housing for the less fortunate? Will they build social housing? Rarely in my lifetime have I heard of private contractors getting involved in social housing. That does not happen very often.

There was an attempt in Montreal. Mayor Plante tried, with the 20-20-20 bylaw, which required developers who build 80, 100 or 120 units to build 20% social housing, 20% affordable housing and 20% housing for families. Many developers would rather pay the penalty than build social housing. Obviously, people who live in $2,500-a-month homes do not really like having poor people as neighbours. It can interfere with property values.

Nothing is being done to solve this problem. As my colleague so well put it, the government had one chance, and now that makes two missed opportunities.

The first missed opportunity was withholding the $900 million. I cannot believe it. There is a program called the housing accelerator fund for municipalities. It was part of the 2022 budget, and not a penny of the program funding has been spent in Quebec. Clearly, no one has figured out how to accelerate this program. It has been a year and a half, and there is a desperate need, yet not a penny has been spent. We are being told that the Quebec government is investing money as well. That could add up to more than $1 billion to quickly build housing to help our people. It makes no sense. How is that acceptable?

What I am hearing is that the people in Quebec City want to use this money to build housing, but the people in Ottawa want the accelerator fund to be used to help municipalities with zoning and infrastructure and so on. Perhaps that would be helpful, but right now, Ottawa is the one hindering housing construction. It has been a year and a half since this $4-billion program was passed, and they have just started building homes elsewhere in Canada.

The second missed opportunity dates back to 2017, when the government launched its major national housing strategy, an $82-billion program. It took three years before even a single penny was spent in Quebec. Who is holding up the projects? Both the Liberals and the Conservatives like to say that it is the cities that are delaying projects and that they are going to fix the problem. No, it is not the cities that are holding up the projects. It is the federal government that is holding up the projects. That is unacceptable.

There is something else the government could do quickly. In Quebec's low-income housing stock, 72,000 housing units were built before 1993, and 4,500 of them have been boarded up because they are too dilapidated. These housing units still come under agreements with the federal government. It seems to me that funds could be allocated pretty quickly in the current context. These nearly 5,000 units already exist, and we would not need to zone anything. They are there; they exist. These are actual social housing units that could house people.

The government made a promise and it has to pay for these renovations, but it is nitpicking, fussing over the colour of the wallpaper and the tiling, or the depth of the sink. We are not too sure. There are discussions among people of taste. How are these homes going to be built? There are 4,500 housing units. If the government signed a cheque now, it could have 5,000 brand new social housing units ready for next July 1 in Quebec. The victims of domestic violence I was just talking about could be housed there.

It seems to me that the Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities could make a quick call to Ms. Bowers—

[Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, September 26th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech, particularly the part about Bill C-56 that he handled so well. He spoke intelligently, very eloquently and passionately, as always.

I am a little uncertain about how to approach today's debate. Over the past few years, I have talked a lot about housing, about those less fortunate, about people who are being left behind in this country. Last week we debated a motion moved by a Conservative colleague relating to, among other things, children with disabilities. That gave me the opportunity to say that I do not think we are doing enough for the most vulnerable members of our society. They are not being properly considered, and Canada is not doing enough to address the huge problems we are facing right now. Bill C-56 is right in the thick of it. We have a major problem.

This summer, I set out with my pilgrim's staff. I had read in the newspaper back in February that homelessness was now a reality in places where that had never been seen before in Quebec, places like Sainte‑Anne‑des‑Monts, Lebel‑sur‑Quévillon or Saint‑Jean‑de‑Dieu in the Témiscouata region. There were people sleeping in tents on the side of highways and in buildings in places where no one had ever seen anything of the sort. We know that the situation is dire. We have seen the numbers. We need 3.5 million housing units. That was mentioned earlier, and I will come back to it later.

When I heard about that, I decided to take a trip across Quebec over much of the summer. I left in May and June, and again starting in mid-August. What I saw was terrible. Quebec is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. There are tent cities everywhere. I mentioned Lebel‑sur‑Quévillon, but there are some in Val‑d'Or, in Shawinigan, in Joliette, in Trois‑Rivières. How can we, in this country, accept that a single mother has to sleep in her car with her two children? I cannot accept that. I tell myself that I have some power. I was elected here. I am only one of 338, but I still have the power to do something. We need to act. I got on the road to get a sense of the situation.

This summer, we also heard about a young pregnant woman who gave birth in a wooded area in downtown Gatineau, about one or two kilometres from here. The mayor of Gatineau talked about it. She asked how we could accept that. As an elected official, she too finds that completely unacceptable.

Last week, I was in Quebec City at a symposium on homelessness. We talked about how to deal with this crisis. Bill C-56 brings us back to the housing crisis. What are people telling us about the homelessness problem? This was a problem 20 years ago in Quebec. We know how to deal with these issues. We developed a continuum of services for homeless people, which included emergency resources that are available 24/7, where people could go if it was -20 degrees outside and where they could sleep. These types of resources are not available everywhere, but they were there at one point. Then, there was a continuum of services for people with addictions and mental health issues. They could be brought to a transition house, where they could stay for a month or even two. There were services available there. There were psychologists that could help people. They were working to reintegrate these people back into society. Those who had an addiction got support. At the end of this community help chain to support the most vulnerable, this sort of service pipeline, this process for taking care of people, there was housing.

However, I have seen that, now, there is nothing at the end of the service pipeline. There is no more housing. The result is that homelessness resources are at maximum capacity. There is no room for anyone else, so people are sleeping in tents across the province. How is that acceptable?

I spent the summer talking about that. Everyone is talking about it. It makes the headlines in the media almost every—