Michelle Rempel

[Budget Implementation Act, 2022, No. 1, May 5th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I think there are a lot of people in my riding who would get really mad at me if I started talking about private aircraft right now, because they can barely afford their cars.

I would just say this. This aspect of the budget does not address the broader issue of income inequality, rising unaffordability in Canada and inflation. It is window dressing. The systemic issue of housing affordability that I addressed in my speech and the cost of energy are two very fundamental issues that the government has not addressed from a realistic perspective, and I think that is very unfortunate.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2022, No. 1, May 5th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I think my colleague misunderstood. I was eviscerating the government on the fact that there are no substitute goods for carbon energy, to a large extent, across Canada to ensure that the price on carbon makes carbon pricing elastic. It is inelastic right now.

The second thing is what the government has done, and we have criticized the government for it. Canada still needs carbon energy. That is just the reality. We cannot argue with that; we need it right now. With the policies the government has, all that is happening is an offshoring of our jobs to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and it is raising the cost of energy because we do not have a stable domestic supply.

There is a lack of investments or a prevention of investments in energy infrastructure. I am not saying that we should not be looking at ways to provide alternatives, but that has not happened and the government fails to realize it. I think there is a record of policy failure over several years, and this budget does not rectify that.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2022, No. 1, May 5th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.

I want to focus my remarks today on the acceptability of the government's budget and the budget implementation bill in two key areas. Number one is affordability as the larger issue, but specifically housing affordability as well as energy affordability. Number two is addressing climate change.

In the first half, I want to talk about housing supply, which is a hard truth that I really do not think anyone in here wants to talk about. No government has been successful in addressing the supply-side issue in Canada. The number of houses that the government is purporting to be able to build and all the money that has been put into building houses by the government have actually seen housing prices increase by 30% in a very short period of time. It is sort of a perverse environment, where we are seeing housing prices increase and become more affordable. I am sitting here looking at some of the pages in the House of Commons and wondering how they are going to be able to buy a house. How are they going to be able to afford this?

What this budget does not address, and what nobody is addressing in the House, is that having “taxpayer-subsidized savings schemes to boost down payments”, and I am quoting from an article in The Line written by Jen Gerson, “will double first-time buyers' tax credits and create more buyers' incentives”. All this does is address the demand side of things. It does not actually address pricing. What this does is just say that we are okay with the existing prices and the unaffordability of housing in Canada, and that we are just expecting that first-time homebuyers in Canada will somehow try to take on that level of debt to buy a home in Canada.

That is just not on the table for a lot of people. Not only is it not on the table for first-time homebuyers, but it is also not on the table for somebody who has been in a 10-year marriage and has just divorced. How is either of those people going to get back into the housing market at this point in time?

The reality is that nobody in this place wants to see housing prices go down, so what we are left chasing here is policies that try to get people into the housing market at what is probably an overvalued housing bubble that has been fuelled by very questionable policies on interest rates and whatnot in the past.

What we have in this budget, and I am sure everybody is going to hate my saying this, is incentives to keep juicing demand, as opposed to actually looking at the supply side and the affordability issue. For that reason, I have serious questions, given the severity of the housing affordability crisis in Canada, about the government budget's ability to do that. It is a huge problem. What are we saying to young Canadians right now? We are telling them not to worry because we are trying to make it easier for them to save up, when they are already not being paid in the same way their parents were and they are facing huge levels of inflation and high levels of housing prices that have been unseen. That is crazy. Why is no one talking about this?

This is highly problematic. I would just encourage members of all political stripes here. I wish we could have an actual conversation about ways to address some of the underlying problems with Canada's housing market. We have an entire generation of people who are aging, whose retirement is dependent upon paper gains in their real estate. They do not want to see their housing prices go down. That is their retirement. How are we addressing their retirement? We have told them, as a society, that this is a good thing. We have told them to depend on this, and now we are saying that housing is a problem.

Without addressing that issue, we are never going to fix this. This budget does not do that. We are just going to keep skating by while housing prices increase or until we have some sort of catastrophic failure, either of which is not good for the Canadian economy or for anybody in Canada who is trying to find a place to live.

The other issue I want to raise, which is near and dear to my heart as a member of Parliament in Calgary, particularly north central Calgary, is the inability of the government to match its so-called climate change solutions with incenting and providing low-cost, readily available low-carbon alternatives to high-carbon consumer products and practices. What I want to speak about specifically is the government's inability to both incent and provide alternatives, which it assumes are there with its policies, to the people I represent and how that impacts their lives and perversely makes achieving our climate change targets worse.

For example, in Calgary Centre North there are a large number of people who would love to take public transit to downtown Calgary, including me. I prefer to take public transit. It lets me work more. I get stressed easily and do not like to drive when I do not have to. I would love to do that, but the reality is that for me to take a 20-minute bus ride from where I live in north central Calgary to downtown, it is 20 minutes at the best of times by bus, but sometimes it could be an hour or even two hours on a snow day. There is no light rail transit that goes from downtown Calgary to my part of the city, which has one of the highest levels of under-serviced potential transit ridership in western Canada, based on the ridership numbers I have seen. What that means for somebody like me is that I still have to gas up my car to get to meetings downtown. I am paying $100 or more for a tank of gas, but I am in a privileged position. What are people supposed to do if they are not making my income? They do not have the option of getting on a public transit line; they have to fill up their vehicle to go to work or get their kids to school.

Therefore, all the increase in carbon energy, which has been affected not just by the price on carbon but also by supply-side failures, means that people are paying more for carbon, not that they are using less of it. This is part of the problem with the inflationary pressure we are seeing in Canada.

The budget could have started to address some of these issues, for example in how the government is allocating transit funding, both from a capital development perspective and from an operating perspective. It is using a formula that is just not realistic, with respect to where the money is going. I believe it is 30% population-based and 70% based on existing transit ridership. What about parts of the country where there is no public transit? We would love to have public transit, but the government has not allocated transit funding there. That is the first problem, that we do not have the transit to use. It is not that we do not want to use it; it is that it is not there, so we are still filling up our tanks with gas.

The second problem is this. It is not just about funding allocation, but about how the federal government uses its convening role as a funding partner between the provincial governments and the municipalities to see transit projects built. The green line, the LRT project I was talking about earlier, has failed in Calgary. Although the funding was announced nearly 10 years ago now, virtually nothing has been built. The project has decreased in scope to a quarter and has ballooned in cost four or five times what was originally projected. That is a bad investment with respect to how this management works. The federal government should put boundaries around funding to make sure these developments actually get built. People cannot afford to keep having taxes increase, prices increase and lack of supply of goods, housing and energy increase, while not addressing those core, fundamental issues. From that perspective, this budget is a huge missed opportunity.

I wish I had an hour and a half to get into all of the issues around the amount of money that is spent, which puts Canada into debt, but just on those two issues alone, this budget is not addressing them. It spends so much and it disadvantages Canadians. I hope the government can get it right. Until then, it does not have my support.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2022, No. 1, May 5th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, the concern I have is that every initiative across this level of government right now that is focused on increasing housing supply has no details on how increasing housing supply is actually going to lower prices or make housing affordable for Canadians. This line of thinking and these concerns have been raised by economists and many other schools of thought over the past several weeks. I share that concern.

If taxpayers are paying to increase housing supply, what guarantee is there, based on the government's program, that the supply will become more affordable for Canadians?

[Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, May 4th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, I say yes to safe transportation and yes to all these things that make women safer, but to say this is the only industry where first nations and indigenous women experience violence is wrong. What about sex work, just to start? What about any downtown core? I grew up in Winnipeg. My family has lived in the member for Winnipeg Centre's riding.

I think we can acknowledge that in some industries and specific areas there are problems to fix and work on, but are we trying to suggest that they are the only places? I can only feel and imagine the frustration of women from these communities who are asking, “Are you kidding me?”

I would just ask everybody to take a moment and take a pause. Let us make extractive communities safer for these women, but let us not pretend those are the only places where this happens, because it is dangerously laughable and disgusting to think otherwise.

[Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, May 4th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, I am not here to make people comfortable. That is number one. When we speak truth about these experiences, our colleagues need to listen to them. It is a violent place here for women, and when we add the intersectional issues and lenses of racialized women and women from the LGBTQ+ community, I cannot even imagine what it is like.

Every person in this place has tacitly stood by, watched this violence occur and been silent, and what needs to change in here is the culture. We repress people and punish them for speaking out, speaking their mind and having their own positions. That needs to end, and anybody who is comfortable with doing that is comfortable with this culture continuing.

What needs to change? People in here need to look inward and ask themselves if they are comfortable with the environment here and if they are comfortable with the lack of diversity and equity in the voices this place contains.

[Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, May 4th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, yes, I agree.

[Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, May 4th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, in the spirit of reconciliation, I acknowledge that the people of Calgary Nose Hill live, work and play on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region, which includes the Blackfoot First Nation tribes of the Siksika, the Piikani and the Kainai; the Stoney Nakoda Nation tribes of Chiniki, Bearspaw and Wesley; and the Tsuut'ina Nation. I acknowledge that the city of Calgary is also homeland to the historic Northwest Métis and to Métis Nation of Alberta Region 3.

I hate these debates because I find that even though we mark annual events, so little progress is made. I know we have to talk about the progress that has been made, but it is never enough, particularly when the issue we are discussing is still so prevalent.

Many of my colleagues, in the spirit of good faith, have shone a light, and rightly so, on the statistical evidence of the hardship, violence and misogyny that many indigenous and first nations women experience. It is very important for us to wake up to those realities and hear them, but again, as the parliamentary secretary said earlier, what next? What do we do?

I have with me the master list of the report recommendations from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and I have read the subsequent reports. What really strikes me is that there are short-term solutions that we need to move on and there is longer-term systemic action that needs to be taken as well. With the brief time that I have tonight, what I want to focus on is the lack of representation of first nation indigenous women in the Government of Canada and the organizations that are tasked with implementing these recommendations.

What strikes me tonight is this. If I asked anybody here how many first nations women and indigenous women held positions of power in the RCMP and in the bureaucracies of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Indigenous Services Canada, Public Safety and Health Canada, I think the answer would be woefully inadequate.

Even when we look at representation in this chamber or in the other place, where are they? That lack of footprint and lack of voice speak most starkly to the violence and misogyny that these women face. Even when they are here, it is not easy. We all know one colleague from the NDP in the previous Parliament who gave heart-wrenching testimony, which will stay with me forever, about her experience here. We cannot erase these stories.

Tonight, in debate, the topic of violence near resource extraction camps is coming up. I believe we have to acknowledge that this is happening while not impugning everybody working in these industries. At the same time, we should say this is a problem and actually address it. These women are counting on us and they are not here. Who is going to speak for them if we are not being precise and if we are not trying to get them to positions where they have control in their hands on the levers of power?

There have been many a day when I, so close to the levers of power, have felt the violence and misogyny of this place, and that is me from a position of privilege. They are not even here. If we are truly going to change the “what next?”, these women have to have the equal say, equal voice, equal power and equal agency that they deserve and are owed as inhabitants of this shared land. That is just the reality.

More importantly, we all have a duty to be their allies and fight for them while we fight to bring them here. We have to change the patriarchal system of power that works against them. We cannot gloss over it. We cannot let the inertia of bureaucracy work against them, because every day more of these women die and more of them are just another statistic.

I hate these debates being about victim porn and talking about what happens next. We have to have action, and that is what I call on all of my colleagues here to take.

[Public Safety, May 3rd, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for her thoughtful and kind response. There will be people who watched that response and will disagree with some of the things that she said in terms of policy, but I would hope they would agree in terms of the approach: When we disagree, we are disagreeing on something and we are not hating someone, and we are actually trying to build consensus on issues that we feel convicted about very strongly, one way or the other. I believe that our country has the capacity to do this. I believe that people in this place have the capacity to do this.

With the time I have left, I would just like to ask my colleague what she thinks we need to do to show Canadians, by example, that this is something that we all need to do, starting here in this place and then across this country, for the betterment of the nation that we all serve and benefit from.

[Public Safety, May 3rd, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I think the last couple of years have been hard on Canadians across political stripes. Whenever I talk to somebody, there is something about the last two years that has caused them a trauma. I would argue that every person sitting in here right now has probably had a similar experience, but what worries me now is that after these two years I feel like we do not know how to talk to each other. I feel like we do not know to be kind to each other, and I feel like we do not know how to be human. That does not mean that we cannot passionately fight for our ideas or advance things, but what I worry about is that we are so focused on calcifying our beliefs, entrenching our beliefs and being convicted in our beliefs as opposed to trying to listen and do something to better the country, that I feel like Canadians are feeling like they have to resort to civil disobedience to be heard. This is on the right and on the left; it is across demographics, and it really bothers me. It is the thing that keeps me up most at night.

I could use examples from any political party, but one example that sticks with me the most is calling a certain group of people who believe a certain thing racist and misogynist during the political campaign in 2021. I firmly believe vaccines had a major, incredibly positive impact on limiting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there were people in Canada who had legitimate concerns or were vaccine hesitant. Instead of trying to listen to their concerns or address those concerns in a meaningful way, name calling was used, and I think that pushed civil disobedience. I am not justifying civil disobedience. There should be no room for that, but what I am trying to say, and we could use any example, is that maybe we need to do a better job of listening to each other on all sides. Even people who hold a certain belief should ask why this is happening and try to listen.

I have not seen a lot of movement on our ability to listen or treat each other kindly, so tonight, to follow up on a question I asked several months ago, my question to the government is this: In the spirit of collaboration and in trying to actually fight for some dignity in this country, what is the federal government doing to lower the temperature on political rhetoric, to actually try to listen to Canadians and to bring us together after a significant event and a significant crisis in our country over the last two years?