Mr. Speaker, that last comment from my colleague across the way about Canadians not being concerned about process is a keeper. Democracy is all about process and the opportunity for the public to engage in their political process.
However, today I take great pleasure in rising to speak to Bill C-38, the Trojan Horse bill.
My riding of Beaches—East York is an urban riding, and it is through that lens of urban reality, not exclusively but primarily, that my constituents look at Bill C-38, which is before the House today.
This is not just true of my riding. In our mind's eye this is a country of great lakes, rocky mountains, craggy coastlines and broad expanses, but about 80% of Canadians live in urban centres. We are an urban nation. This is important to recognize, because it is this reality, not some romanticized mythical or historical place, that the Conservatives have been elected to govern. However, the urban fact of this country is something not at all recognized by the government, as evidenced by this and successive budgets and this budget implementation bill. Simply speaking, cities and the urban experience do not seem to form any part of the government's understanding of our country or its citizens. Cities have been left out of this budget and this bill, as have those who live in them.
We all know by now the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' estimate of the urban infrastructure deficit. It is about $120 billion. That is an old number now, and surely an underestimate, because so little has been done to address this deficit and so few investments have been made in our cities. Another year comes, another budget comes; another year goes and another budget goes, with nothing done that can be considered remotely meaningful to address the matter.
There is no commitment to urban transit, even though many studies by many credible organizations—including the OECD, the Toronto Board of Trade in my own city and Statistics Canada—tell us that at least in Toronto, our lives are wasting away in traffic jams and on inadequate public transit. Our economy is losing billions of dollars annually in lost productivity because of that.
There is no commitment to affordable housing, even though in Toronto 70,000 households—about 200,000 people in all—wait interminably on a waiting list for affordable housing. Last week a constituent of mine, Paul Dowling, took me on a tour of 40 Oaks, a new 87-unit affordable housing project in downtown Toronto. The project has been much celebrated in the media and the community, not just because of its architectural and design features, which are wonderful and spiritual, but also because new affordable housing is so very rare. It is so hard to get built and yet of such tremendous value. It took Paul and the Toronto Christian Resource Centre eight long years and countless hours of volunteer time and fundraising to build a home for people who needed a home and a community hub for people who needed a place to be with others. There could be, should be and need to be many such buildings in our cities, but of course the current government is not a government to respond to these needs, because it is a government that creates these needs.
Blame for the state of our cities cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the government. It is following a path set out by its predecessors of both Liberal and Conservative persuasion. It has all been quantified by the OECD. Canada has the seventh-greatest level of income disparity among 29 advanced countries. The richest 1% of Canadians saw their share of total income increase by 65% from 1980 to 2007, and the richest 0.1% of Canadians saw their total income more than double over the same period, as successive Liberal and Conservative federal governments took down the very barriers we had once erected to offset income disparity.
Toronto, my city, had for a long time been known as a city of neighbourhoods. It was an apt description, at one time, of a Toronto largely made up of mixed-income neighbourhoods. In 1970, two-thirds of Toronto's neighbourhoods were middle income. In just over a generation, our city of neighbourhoods has become, as David Hulchanski describes in his “The Three Cities Within Toronto” study, “a city of disparities”. The middle has been, and continues to be, hollowed out. If we continue down this path, less than 10% of our neighbourhoods will be middle income in just a decade or so.
A number of factors are responsible for what has become of Toronto. In large part, it is the result of a dramatic change in both the number and quality of jobs available to Torontonians.
Toronto has lost about 100,000 manufacturing jobs in less than a decade. The broader economic region of southern Ontario has lost about 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Many of these jobs have been lost as the result of a trade policy that establishes bilateral trade agreements with low-wage economies. The outcome, alongside the creation of a ballooning current account deficit, is the destruction of good manufacturing jobs and an expansive middle class that goes along with them. The government's commitment to pursue more vigorously such trade agreements will only hasten the decline of good jobs in Toronto and the demise of the middle class.
A recent study lays out about half of these job losses at the feet of so-called Dutch disease; that is the decline in the manufacturing sector caused by increased development of natural resources and corresponding currency escalation. This bill's savaging of environmental protections will only again hasten the demise of good jobs in Toronto and the demise of the middle class.
In place of good jobs are jobs that all too often leave workers in poverty. According to a recent Metcalf Foundation study, as of 2005, nearly one in ten workers in our city are living in poverty, but too many more cannot find work, especially Toronto's youth, with an unemployment rate creeping up on 20%.
Finally, and most offensively, it is into such a labour market the government proposes to force our seniors. With this budget, the government has at last decoded for us the Prime Minister's remarks in Switzerland in January about transforming our pension system. With Bill C-38, the government is about to implement these changes. Effective 2023, all Canadians not yet 65 years old can anticipate having to work longer before receiving their old age security and corresponding guaranteed income supplement.
As the federal budget and its implementation bill reveal, the government cannot imagine Canada as anything other than resource dependent. Most Canadians, certainly the 80% of us who live in cities, have been hoping for a different and more promising future for a long time. This lack of vision will be felt across urban Canada and in Toronto, most certainly.
There are ways to unwind the vicious spiral that has gripped our city, but our course will not change without adequate leadership from the federal government. In other G8 countries, governments have become major players in the financial, economic and cultural life of their cities. It is well past time for ours to do the same.
Canada's cities await the chance to be great. We await a federal government that finally understands that a city must be organized and its resources must be marshalled for the benefit of all of us who share the space. None of us succeed, much less thrive, as citizens of Canadian cities if we do not build cities that serve us all well. With this federal budget, we are forced to wait longer for cities and their citizens to fulfill their great potential.
