Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-74, the budget implementation bill. It is a daunting task, given the bill is over 500 pages and amends 44 pieces of legislation. It is an omnibus bill for sure, which is unfortunate in and of itself.
What is even more unfortunate is that the bill does not include all the things the government put forward in the budget. Just prior to getting up to give my speech, I made a comment about the fact that the pay equity legislation was not included and no dollars were in the budget to implement that pay equity legislation should it eventually come. This is disappointing.
The bill misses bringing a lot more needed change to address the inequity in the lives of people, to ensure the change that everyone pays their fair share of taxes, and the change we need to build an economy that is working for everyone, not just a few.
Child care, housing, and affordable prescription medication are the three issues that my constituents in Saskatoon West see as a need for real change, and fast. I raised these same issues in my very first speech as an elected member of Parliament. Three budgets later, I am still raising these issues, and those whom I represent are still waiting for the promised change.
Many in my riding had high hopes that the Liberals, given their promises on the campaign trail, would have moved the needle substantially on all three issues by this point in their mandate.
Let us start with child care. There are zero new dollars for child care in this budget. To date, the government's investment in child care has been more symbolic than anything. It is not a priority for the government. If it were, three budgets later we would not be talking about the lack of affordable and accessible child care.
In December of last year, I had the honour of meeting with an extraordinary group of women. They were participants in the trade journey program at the YWCA in Saskatoon. The trade journey program is a bridging program for women who are seeking a career in one of three trades: carpentry, plumbing, or electrical. I was invited to share some of my tips and, dare I say, survival skills for working in a male-dominated profession. My workplace was politics and their soon-to-be workplaces would be in the skilled trades.
As often is the case, I find myself so impressed and in awe of the determination of these women and their tenacity in the face of the both personal and institutional challenges of sexism and racism. As with almost 99.99% of the conversations I have with women in my riding, the conversation turned to child care. They were emphatic of the need for and the importance of affordable and accessible child care to their success as journey persons. They just could not understand why the government did not understand how critical child care was to their success in the workplace and to the health and well-being of themselves and their families. I agreed with them. I really did not have an answer for them as to why, regardless of what political party was in power, women continued to have to fight for child care.
The fight continues as we once again see a federal government paying lip service to one, if not the one, social policy that would improve the lives of so many women in our country and really increase the productivity of the country as a whole. A truly feminist government would understand this and by now would have invested what was needed to bring about real change for women.
Let me turn to affordable prescription medication. Almost a million Canadians give up food and heat to afford prescriptions in Canada. Affordable prescription medication is key to the health and well-being of all Canadians, to a sustainable universal health care system, and to the people in my riding of Saskatoon West. In conversation with older adults in my riding, the high costs of medication always comes up. It is raised because of the challenges of living on a fixed income and with that, the challenges of maintaining a home or an apartment, to be able to pay rent or a mortgage, and to pay for medication.
What happens, as was documented in a recent study, because of the unaffordability of medication? People get sick, they stay sick, and they end up going to the doctor for multiples visits and, in some cases, even end up in the hospital.
More than 1.6 million Canadians, just over 8% of people who were prescribed medication in Canada, did not fill their prescriptions or skipped doses because they could not afford it. In a riding with a median income below $40,000 a year, I represent a lot of people who are doing just that: skipping doses or not filling prescriptions at all. The UBC study that surveyed over 28,000 people found that people without insurance, lower-income people, and young people were more likely to struggle to afford medication. Women were twice as likely as men to report that they struggle to afford medication, as were indigenous people.
Canada is the only country with a universal health care system that does not include free access to prescription medication. It is time, after studying the issue to death, by governments, researchers, by Parliaments, to stop kicking the proverbial can down the road. I would like to use a phrase made famous by a certain shoe company, “Let's just do it”. However, instead we are going to study it again and offer ourselves further advice. It is time that the government moved from the hope to the hard work of pharmacare.
The only people benefiting from yet again more talk, more consultation, and no action are the pharmaceutical companies, which continue to gouge Canadians and the health care system. Canadians pay some of the highest drug costs in the world. If, right now, Canadians were paying even just the average prescription drug costs of OECD companies, we would have paid $3.6 billion last year. Instead, we paid $13.7 billion. That is a lot of home care services. That is a lot of money to address the crisis in mental health for young people.
Most of us are tired of hoping and wishing for the day of a universal prescription drug plan for all Canadians. It is time to stop giving excuses and start the work of implementing pharmacare in this country.
My final comments on the trifecta of challenges that folks in my riding face are on housing.
Last November, the highly anticipated national housing strategy was released. However, in the budget implementation act, we see no new legislation. The Prime Minister clearly stated at the launch of the national housing strategy that housing rights are human rights. However, instead of legislation and debate on a bill to legislate the right to housing, we continue with consultation. I believe that we need much more hard work on this file. We need more specifics. We need promised new investment now and not years down the road, and certainly not after the next federal election.
To elaborate, the $40-plus billion of planned spending connected to the national housing strategy over the next 10 years only budgeted $11.2 billion of new money. The rest of the funding envelope is a rearranging of current programs, loan funding, and of course the important matching funding from the provinces and territories.
The government's response to what, for many, is a crisis in affordability and a rising number of people living on the street is not good enough. We have a minimal investment of new dollars, the largest allocation of new investment coming three years down the road, and we have a huge 10-year horizon for the investment. The speed and the amount of the investment does not match the urgency faced by many communities, including my own. When we look at the amount of investment specifically focused on those Canadians with no roof over their heads, and the target number of reducing the number of Canadians who are homeless by 50% over 10 years, we do not see a government with the resources or the plan in place to truly recognize housing as a human right.
We know that the growing number of Canadians living on the street without the safety and security of a place to call home are often young people, and a large number of those young people are those who have aged out of the foster care system and are LGBTQ2 youth. We must speed up the investment. We must set more aggressive targets. We must work harder and set a much more courageous timeline if we are to make a difference in the lives of these young Canadians.
We are still waiting for a separate strategy for indigenous people living in urban centres. We saw a very modest amount of funding in the previous budget, but no detail.
Sorry, I did not realize that I had run out of time. I look forward to offering more during questions.
