Paul Manly

[Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020, February 2nd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, yes, I believe that the provinces should get the health transfers they need. We have seen continual cuts to health transfers, and the way the Harper government set this up cut it back even further. We need to go back to the plan we had originally and ensure that the provinces have enough funding to take care of their own people.

[Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020, February 2nd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, to start with, we need a just transition for oil and gas workers. It has already been looked at. We have done this before with asbestos. We know that we need to take bold climate action, and now is the time to do that.

Clearly, the Conservatives do not see things the same way I do. I see a lot of good things in the fall economic update. However, I do not think it is bold enough and that we are taking the steps we should be taking to ensure that Canadians get the kind of support they need and that we deal with the climate crisis. These are the existential problems we face.

[Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020, February 2nd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-14, the fall economic statement.

I miss being in the House of Commons for these speeches, but it is an honour and privilege to speak in the riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith in the traditional unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw, Snaw-Naw-As, Stz'uminus and Lyackson First Nations.

In the House, I represent the constituents in Nanaimo—Ladysmith, but I also feel a responsibility to speak for the 1.1 million voters who voted Green in 2019. If we do the math and average the number of votes by the number of MPs elected, I represent 387,000 Green voters. By comparison, the Liberal Party received five times more votes than the Green Party but elected 50 times more MPs, averaging 38,000 votes per MP. This is not a true representation of the democratic will of Canadians.

The fall economic statement contains a long list of much-needed spending to help Canadians get through the COVID-19 pandemic. The Green Party welcomes many of the initiatives that are listed in the fall economic statement. Our leader Annamie Paul is particularly pleased to see the government commit to exploring the implementation of carbon border adjustments to protect Canadian businesses and encourage climate action abroad. This is something Ms. Paul was advocating.

What is remarkable about this fall economic statement is what has been left out. This was an opportunity to implement much-needed reforms and improvements to our social welfare and health care systems. There are minor reforms to our tax system, but they do not go far enough to create more fairness in the system. There is program spending for indigenous people, but not enough to deal with the systemic problems with which they are grappling. Minor programs deal with the climate emergency, but not enough bold action to deal with the existential crisis.

I know that members of the Conservative Party, the official opposition, have been cuddling up with conspiracy theorists, with their questions and speeches referencing the World Economic Forum's great reset. Quite frankly, the Conservatives should be ashamed of themselves. I am no fan of the World Economic Forum and its gatherings of unelected billionaires at Davos. These billionaires talk a great game about social responsibility and protecting the environment, while they continue to press governments for more tax cuts for the wealthy and fewer regulations for corporations. It is not a conspiracy theory; it is unfettered greed in action.

The Conservative agenda has been much the same as the World Economic Forum agenda all along: tax cuts and deregulation while pretending to care about working people. When Stephen Harper was the prime minister, he spoke at the Davos conference several times, including the 2012 meeting, which planned for the so-called great transformation: same agenda, different title.

Canadians deserve better. It is time for bold action.

It is time for a guaranteed livable income so we can eliminate poverty by creating an income floor under which no Canadian can fall.

It is time for universal pharmacare to complete our universal health care system. We are the only country with universal health care that does not include universal pharmacare. It could save us billions of dollars in health care spending. We also need to fund proactive therapies, treatments and programs that keep Canadians healthy, and include these in the Canada Health Act.

It is time to fully include the mental health care services and counselling under the Canada Health Act. We need more than half measures to deal with the mental health crisis in our communities. This is particularly true as we near the one-year anniversary of pandemic restrictions.

It is time to fund universal child care and early childhood education. This is especially important to ensure that women can regain the ground they have lost in the workforce as a result of the pandemic.

We need to increase funding to deal with the affordable housing and homelessness crisis.

We need bold action to deal with the opioid overdose crisis.

It is time for much deeper reform of our tax system to ensure that the billionaire class, the big banks and the multinational corporations pay their fair share and cannot use loopholes and offshore tax shelters to avoid paying taxes in Canada.

We encouraged the government to roll out and expand programs such as the Canada emergency wage subsidy to ensure that workers and companies could survive the economic lockdown. However, we were also very clear that government emergency support should not be used by companies to pay CEO bonuses or shareholder dividends as had happened in the past. The government did not include these conditions as part of the relief programs, and this has led to abuse and to corporate welfare.

A recent report found that billions in wage subsidies were paid to 68 companies that turned around and paid more than $5 billion in dividends at the same time.

For example, Imperial Oil received $120 million in wage subsidies and paid out $324 million in dividends during this period. The big telecom companies took in almost a quarter of a billion dollars in wage subsidies. Bell Canada received $122 million, despite having $5.2 billion in available liquidity.

For-profit companies running long-term care homes for seniors have also used government COVID emergency tax dollars to line the pockets of CEOs and shareholders, while the death toll in their facilities continues to climb.

The Green Party is happy with some of the environmental initiatives, but they are clearly not enough to deal with the crash in biodiversity or the climate crisis we face.

There has been a lot of talk about the government initiative to plant two billion trees as part of the Canada climate action plan. This sounds great, but I would like to point out a few flaws in this idea.

A 500-year-old tree sequesters far more carbon in a year than an acre of seedlings can. If the government is serious about using trees as a carbon sink, it should fund an immediate halt to the destruction of old-growth forests, especially in B.C. and on Vancouver Island where only 1% of the big tree old growth forests outside of parks remain standing. The B.C. government talks about preservation, but continues to allow old growth forests to be cut down. This needs to stop. Let us allocate tree funding for old growth.

The other trees we need to protect and preserve are in the boreal forest. The boreal forest is Canada's equivalent to the Amazon and provides enormous ecological benefit to the planet. It is time to leave the virgin forests alone and preserve them. There are plenty of places in Canada where second-, third- and fourth-growth forests can be used for timber supply. The forest companies must be required to replant trees after they have harvested, both on Crown or on private forest lands. It is the cost of doing business and should not be subsidized.

The Green Party welcomes spending on consumer initiatives addressing the climate crisis, including funding for home energy retrofits and zero-emission vehicle infrastructure. However, the climate crisis demands more than consumer initiatives. It is time for the government to take much bolder steps, starting with the cancellation of the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline. Experts have stated that this project is not financially viable and is predicted to become a stranded asset. It will not help finance climate change initiatives.

Fossil fuels will continue to be used in the foreseeable future, but in dwindling amounts. We need to end all subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

The truth is that if we do not take bold action to address the climate crisis, the spending needed to deal with mitigation and the disasters resulting from climate change will make what we are spending on the COVID-19 pandemic look like chump change. Canada is a climate laggard. Canadian governments have committed to nine international agreements and produced zero plans to meet the agreed targets.

Eight provinces and three territories representing 85% of the Canadian population met the Copenhagen target in 2020. However, two provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, increased emissions so much that they completely wiped out the progress of the rest of the country.

Canada has the worst record of the G7 for climate action. The U.K., the country with the best record, has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 41% from 1990 levels, while shamefully Canada has increased emissions by 21%. In order for Canada to catch up with the rest of the wealthy countries, we need to set new targets to reduce emissions by 60% by 2030.

Average Canadian consumers could take their emissions to zero and it would not mean a thing as long as we allow the oil and gas industry to continue to pollute our atmosphere with climate killing gases. The government should not let the conspiracy promoting MPs continue to intimidate it from taking real action. Be bold, that is what our children and grandchildren expect from the government.

Bill C-14 contains some much-needed spending and actions. In our view it needs to be much bolder. The Green Party will support the bill and we will continue to press the government to take bold action.

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 1st, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I, for one, really miss being in the House of Commons as I work from home in Nanaimo—Ladysmith, but I do see the value in electronic voting. My father, who was a member of Parliament, said that some MPs would drag themselves from their sick beds, those dealing with cancer, heart disease and other things, to get to the House of Commons to vote. There are things we can take from what we have done with the hybrid Parliament to facilitate the health of members of Parliament and lower our greenhouse gas footprint for those flying back and forth the way we do from the west coast. I would like the member's comments on that.

[Request for Emergency Debate, February 1st, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to request an emergency debate on the current situation regarding the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically to the new threat posed by mutations, known as variants. The spread of the novel coronavirus variants is cause for grave concern, if not alarm. We believe it constitutes an emergency in which Parliament should engage.

The variants have been primarily identified as being from the U.K., which is known as B.1.1.7; from South Africa, known as B.1.351; and from Brazil and Japan, known as P.1. The evidence as to whether these variants are more deadly than the original COVID-19 appears to be divided. However, medical reports from around the world consistently point to the variants as being significantly more transmissible.

With COVID-19 spreading more rapidly due to the variants, there is risk of exponential growth in cases of COVID-19, which may overwhelm our health care systems. There is also the risk that increased spread will lead to more mutations, which may be more deadly or vaccine-resistant.

As a nation, Canada has struggled with establishing a coordinated response to the pandemic. Green MPs are concerned that there have been moves to ease restrictions precisely at a time when federal health officials have recommended that we maintain or even increase measures in response to these new variants. Canada should be able to identify the jurisdictions that have had the greatest success and use those examples to inform winning coordinated strategies across the country. We believe there is an urgent need to debate whether now is the time to shift gears from bending a curve to going to zero cases, or as close to zero as possible.

We are entering more dangerous territory. Should the government increase warnings about the changing nature and risks due to the variants? Should the federal government increase the coordination of efforts among the provinces? An emergency debate would assist in identifying those options.

[Canada—United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement Implementation Act, January 29th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I think we missed the questions for the last speaker. I was hoping to ask him about the record for the Harper government and the Canada-China FIPA, which is an outrageous agreement with a 15-year clause on it before we can get out of that agreement. This is unlike all our other FIPAs, which have one-year get-out clauses. That agreement gives Chinese state-owned corporations extraordinary powers to invest in this country and then challenge our laws and policies when they do not like them.

I would like to ask the hon. member about this agreement and what he thinks about giving Communist China so much power over our resources and over foreign investment in this country.

[Petitions, January 29th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to table a petition signed by constituents of Nanaimo—Ladysmith. The petitioners call upon the House of Commons to commit to upholding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's calls to action by immediately halting all existing and planned construction of the Coastal GasLink fracked pipeline project in Wet’suwet’en territory and prioritizing the real implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

[Canada-United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement Implementation Act, January 29th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, that is a really good question and it is something we are concerned about as well. This should have a termination date on it. We should be negotiating a fair and equitable trade agreement and dealing with all of the issues I outlined in my speech and the member outlined in her question.

We need to ensure that we protect our manufacturing base and stop hollowing it out. We have seen what this has done to our pharmaceutical industry. We have become too dependent on the export of raw resources, such as raw bitumen through pipelines, and when the price of oil changes or a pipeline project is cancelled, it affects our economy in a detrimental way.

We need to really examine how we do trade properly and take into consideration a long list of other things, aside from corporate profits.

[Canada-United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement Implementation Act, January 29th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has a very short memory because the Green Party caucus voted for the CUSMA agreement. We voted for it because the ISDS provisions were removed. It took away the corporate rights part of that agreement. The proportionality clause about exporting oil was taken out of that agreement as well.

We are looking for fair trade. We are looking for trade that protects the rights of workers, protects the environment and protects the health, safety and consumer standards that we hold dear. We want to see regulatory levels go up, not down; it is not a race to the bottom. We want to see measurements like the genuine progress indicator when we measure how well we are doing with trade so that we consider things like health, the economy, social good and the environment, rather than just how much we rip and ship raw resources for export from this country.

[Canada-United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement Implementation Act, January 29th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the member for Hamilton Mountain. This is an egregious situation for pensioners in Canada who are not getting indexed increases to their pensions. This has to stop, and the government needs to take this opportunity, when it is negotiating a trade agreement with the U.K., to make sure this ends.

The U.S. allows indexing. It has an agreement with the U.K. for indexed increases, as well as a with a whole bunch of other countries, but here we are, a Commonwealth country, being abused by the U.K. Where is the allyship in that? It needs to end.