Mr. Speaker, it is always a privilege and an honour to rise and speak on behalf of the great people of Vancouver Kingsway and to bring their voices, opinions and concerns to the floor of the seat of their national government.
Having had the privilege of representing these great constituents for a number of years now, I have a very good sense of what their expectations are of members of the House. I know that, regardless of their political hue, whether they are Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Greens or some other partisan supporter, they expect the people they send to the House to act with honesty and integrity. They expect them to address their minds to the pressing issues of the day, the issues and policies that affect 40 million Canadians from coast to coast, who struggle each day to put food on the table, to put a roof over their heads, to support their families, to pursue their education, to pursue their dreams and to realize their potential.
Members may have noticed that New Democrats have not gotten up to give speeches very often on this matter. That is because, frankly, most of what I just said about what the people of Vancouver Kingsway expect has been violated in the House for the last six weeks. For the people watching and for my constituents, I will give a brief summary of what has been going on for the last six weeks to explain why we are here and what brought us to this moment in time.
We are debating issues that go right to the heart of a lack of integrity, a lack of honesty in government and a refusal of many members of the House to put their minds, skills and efforts to addressing the real issues affecting people. We are here because we have a sordid story of corruption, scandal and misspending, which is not surprising if one looks at the history of the Liberal Party and its governing of this country. It is horrible misspending, inexcusable misspending, of taxpayer dollars.
In this case, it concerns the Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund, which was established in 2001 and was afforded a little over $1 billion in 2021 over a five-year period. Through an Auditor General report and spot audit of this fund, alarming facts came to the fore. Dozens of cases of conflicts of interest were identified, 90 in fact, totalling about 80 million taxpayer dollars. A question was raised about whether the people who were making decisions to allocate those funds, all appointed by the Liberal government, were giving them to companies that they themselves controlled or that they were connected with in some way, which is obviously a blatant conflict of interest, or at least an apparent conflict of interest.
About $60 million was given to 10 projects that were not even eligible when the Auditor General took a closer look. Frequently, the projects that were approved and received millions of dollars of taxpayer funds overstated the environmental benefits that came to pass. In fact, over the past six years, SDTC has approved over 225 projects worth about $836 million, and although the Auditor General only did a spot audit on a sampling of them, she found consistent, pervasive and repeated conflicts of interest, misspending and wasteful spending. The Auditor General put the blame squarely on the Liberal minister responsible for this fund and said there was a lack of oversight. Imagine that. This was a fund of almost a billion dollars, and there was a lack of oversight by the Liberal minister who was supposed to make sure that funds were spent in accordance with the authorization of Parliament. That did not happen.
The Ethics Commissioner is now investigating the former chair of the SDTC fund, Annette Verschuren. She approved two grants greater than $200,000 to a private firm that she directed. She did not recuse herself. She actually participated in the decision of SDTC to approve those grants. I do not think we have to be a lawyer or particularly informed on ethics issues to know that we should not sit in judgment in a case where there is money that could go to our personal benefit if we are actually charged with protecting the public interest. That case is being investigated as we speak.
In this case, the NDP joins with all parliamentarians, particularly on the opposition side, who are horrified. Frankly, we condemn this kind of wasteful spending and absolutely scandalous corruption. The official opposition has put forth a motion demanding documents from the government so that we could get to the bottom of it, as is Parliament's right. The New Democrats also joined with the official opposition and, I believe, the Bloc Québécois when we supported that request and demanded production of documents to the House so that Parliament can exercise its constitutional and historical duty to scrutinize spending of the government and to hold government accountable.
The Liberals demurred. They did not want to do that. It resulted in a motion calling for the Speaker to find a violation of privilege in that refusal to produce those documents. The Speaker agreed with the request to have those documents produced here. Parliament is supreme. Parliament does have the right to have those documents produced. I think that transparency, accountability and respect for our constitutional obligations support the New Democrats and the opposition members in that quest.
This is where it gets a little bit funny. The government is prepared to produce documents to the House, but they want to redact them to some degree. This is a consistent and common theme of government, where they want to redact for certain reasons. Some are more legitimate than others, in my view. Sometimes it is to protect commercial information. Sometimes it is for national security. Sometimes it is to save their political bacon. I am not sure which is the case in this until we see the documents.
The official opposition, though, is not happy with that. They want all the documents, unredacted, to go directly to the RCMP. That is where it gets a little bit confusing, because the government has refused to do that, saying that while Parliament has the right to have documents produced to it, it is unprecedented to demand production of documents to a third party. There is also an issue of whether the police forces, in this case the RCMP, might have their investigation compromised by having documents produced to them in that way.
In any event, we have had a standstill for six weeks. Instead of working productively, I would say, like responsible parliamentarians, to resolve this issue and conform with the Speaker's direction to send those documents to PROC, which is a committee of Parliament, to work these out, the Conservative opposition has decided instead to bring the work of the House of Commons to a grinding halt for six weeks. For six weeks, the Conservatives have not allowed a single piece of the people's business to move forward in the House.
A former colleague of mine, Nathan Cullen, used to famously say that the currency of Parliament is time. We only have a certain amount of time to address the issues that are important to Canadians. Every hour counts, yet the Conservatives have decided it is more important to them to have not a single issue move forward in the House for six weeks, not on housing, not on inflation, not on international trade, not on foreign affairs, not on issues that affect every single Canadian in every community in this country. Not a single issue important to Canadians has been allowed to move forward while they filibuster and debate a motion in the House that could easily be ended.
In terms of cost, I am told that the filibuster the Conservatives are engaging in costs us $70,000 an hour. That is about a million dollars per day. By my calculation, that means the Conservatives have cost the House about $20 million over the last six weeks. In my view, that pales in comparison to the cost to Canadians of refusing and failing to deal with the real issues that they are facing, that my constituents are facing in particular.
I want to delve into a couple of those issues we could and should be dealing with. Some information came out recently, in the last week, showing that the price of groceries and the price of rent have gone up 20% and 21% respectively over the last three years. From September 2021 to September 2024, food has gone up 20% and rent has gone up 21%.
Figures came out the day before yesterday that showed, when comparing October of last year to October of this year, so just in the last 12 months, the price of rent has gone up 7.3% for Canadians; the cost of shelter, which includes mortgage interest and all other forms of paying for accommodation, has gone up 4.8%;and the price of food has gone up 2.7%. For three consecutive months, food inflation has exceeded the headline target of 2%. Remember, that is on top of the stratospheric increase of the cost of all these things that has already happened in the last three years.
People are struggling. People are cutting back on their grocery bills. It is not just working families, but middle-class families are cutting back on their food. Parents are skipping meals so they have enough money to make sure their children can eat.
In my hometown of Vancouver, it is not uncommon for people to have to spend between $2,000 and $2,500 per month to rent a one-bedroom apartment. Two-bedroom apartments cost between $3,800 and $4,500 per month. These rents are absurd. People are being driven out of the communities they grew up in, businesses cannot find workers to staff their enterprises and people are having to move out of the cities they want to live in.
I have heard a lot in this place about Conservatives blaming the Liberals and their inattention to housing, and that is well placed. The Liberals have been in power for 10 years, and I can say it is absolutely the case that housing affordability has become worse in the last 10 years. I do not think there is a community in this country that would come forward and say housing affordability has become better in the last 10 years.
However, it also wrong just to blame it on the Liberals. This is a problem, at least where I live in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, that started well before this. The housing crisis did not start in 2015, so I pulled some statistics to see if my intuition was correct and will share what I found. I checked the Greater Vancouver Realtors, which has been watching statistics for many decades. It tracks the prices of varying forms of housing, in this case a single detached house, and it does that for the entire Lower Mainland, from Squamish in the north to White Rock in the south, where millions of people live. What it found is that the average price of a single detached house in the year 2000 was $380,000. In 2004, it was $600,000. In 2008, when the Harper government came to power, it was $800,000. In 2012, it was $1.2 million. In 2016, just when the Harper Conservatives left office, it was $1.6 million. In 2020, it was $2 million, and in 2024, it is $2.25 million.
What does that mean? When the Harper Conservatives were in power between 2006 and 2015, the price of a house in Vancouver went from $800,000 to $1.6 million. It doubled. The greatest increase in housing cost that happened in the last 25 years occurred under the Harper government, under the Conservatives' watch. When they come here and say that the housing crisis is all the Liberals' fault, it is the Liberals' fault from 2015 on, but it did not start there.
That is the kind of issue the people of my riding have sent me here to deal with. They want to know how we can make sure that everybody has a secure, affordable and decent place to live. There are thousands of issues in politics, and they are all important, but some are foundational. Housing is one of them. Housing is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It anchors people in community. It makes it possible for people to access all of the civil rights and duties that they want, like to find a place to work, to send their children to school, to connect with neighbours and to build community. They all require a stable, secure, affordable home, and that is an illusion for far too many Canadians.
People under the age of 30 in this country should be furious, because people under the age of 30 in this country cannot find a place to rent that is affordable, and the dream of home ownership is almost completely gone. That is a failure of policy that should be laid at the foot of every single federal government, of both Conservative and Liberal hue, going back several decades.
I just want to talk for a moment quickly about scandals. The funny thing is we are talking about Liberal scandals. It is a genuine Liberal scandal, but I was here when the Harper government actually self-destructed on its own after many scandals. I have heard Conservatives say they were not here at the time. The leader of the Conservative Party was here. He was in cabinet the whole time the scandals were happening.
The Conservatives say that was then and this is now. The best predictor of how the Conservatives will govern next time is how they governed last time. What happened then? They blew $2 billion with the Phoenix pay scandal. They did not even ask anybody about it. They just decided to contract out and privatize human resources in the public service. It bungled. It did not work and they are still trying to clean up the mess today. It was $2 billion wasted.
Not once but twice the Harper Conservative government was found in contempt of Parliament. It was the first government in the history of Canada to be found in contempt. In the greatest irony of all, it was for refusing to produce documents. The Conservative government refused to produce documents in the Afghan detainee scandal and documents that underpinned their so-called tough-on-crime legislation. When this Parliament demanded, by majority vote, when Parliament was supreme, for the Harper government to produce documents, it refused.
We have Conservative after Conservative getting up, spouting respect for principle, demanding that Parliament is supreme and demanding the production documents. The Conservatives did not do it when they were last in government; they will not do it when they are in government again.
There was a $400-million G8 scandal. We all remember the $80,000 gazebo by former Minister Tony Clement, who, by the way, had to resign because of a sexting scandal after he was extorted because of that.
There were Conservative logos on government cheques when they were handing out taxpayer dollars in a cheap attempt to blur partisanship.
There were four Conservative senators suspended. The Mike Duffy affair happened, where the legal counsel to the former Prime Minister wrote a cheque for $90,000 to pay the legal expenses of Senator Mike Duffy. I do not know who pays $90,000 in legal expenses for people they barely know, but they did.
Two Conservatives had to resign for election cheating. There was Peter Penashue and Dean Del Mastro, who was taken away in handcuffs and jailed for cheating in elections. There was the robocall scandal and the in-and-out scandal. They lost $3.1 billion of $12.9 billion in funds allocated to public safety and anti-terrorism initiatives. It took the Treasury Board six months to try to track the money down.
That is the record of the Conservatives who are standing up here today, attempting to be the moral and ethical leaders of this country. I say to Canadians, if they want to look and see how the Conservatives will be next time, take a look at how they acted last time. They will find a record of corruption, dishonesty, lack of ethics and poor governance.
If Canadians really want to elect a party that would actually do the work of the people of this country, then they would vote a New Democratic government in for the first time in history. We would spend our time working on the real issues facing Canadians every day, not this kind of back-and-forth corruption that we see from the two old-time parties in this place.
