Government Orders
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to have a chance to join in this debate. It is clear that Bill C-22 is far less than what was expected. It does not provide the details and so much is left to be filled in later, yet the needs are clearly urgent. People living with disabilities in this country are disproportionately and scandalously exposed to poverty. I totally agree that having a job is a great way t…
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Mr. Speaker, we are looking at an affordability crisis for Canadians. and when I look at Bill C-31, I see band-aid solutions. I see no reason to be against band-aids while we look at what comprehensive changes need to take place. Does the hon. member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley not see that there is a benefit in providing some help now, even if it is not the totality of what is…
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise this afternoon to present a petition on a very important and urgent issue. The petitioners are calling for the Government of Canada to take the climate emergency seriously. They are calling on it to reduce emissions by at least 60% below 2005 levels by 2030, work to wind down the fossil fuel industry and its related infrastructure and ensure that no new inves…
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Mr. Speaker, this bill is one small step toward making real dental insurance a part of our public health care system. It is just the first step. When is the government committed to including, and will the government commit to, full dental coverage for all age groups in our national health plan?
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Madam Speaker, I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues in other parties who have held back so I could ask this question. Further to the excellent points made by the hon. member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay, I want to direct the hon. parliamentary secretary to the observations filed by the Senate's Standing Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources that accompanie…
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No.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my many colleagues who gave me this chance to ask questions. I would like to thank my hon. colleague for Cloverdale—Langley City, and I agree that there are many sections of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act that need amendment, which are not dealt with in Bill S-5. I hope we can bring them forward soon. I have actually been working on the bill for 35 years, since I …
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Madam Speaker, I do not think it is a point of order. I am trying to explain the concern that, while this may be routine, members in my position, when there is a 10-minute speech and a five-minute round, virtually never get a chance to ask a question. Bill S-5 is an enormously important bill to the Green Party—
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise this afternoon to speak to a very important, but also inadequate, bill. I am honoured to stand today and recognize the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin peoples. We are on their land. Bill C-31 represents two parts that would attempt to help Canadians when times are tough. Part 1 deals with dental care and an interim dental benefit and part 2 deals…
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Mr. Speaker, I completely agree that the provinces have an important role to play, but, unfortunately, I do not agree with the idea that these decisions should be up to the provinces alone. We have to participate. We have to work with all levels of government in Canada: indigenous governments, provincial governments, territorial governments and the federal government. We must demand a public healt…
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to see amendments to the Canada Health Act to make it really clear that we understand that mental health is public health and that dental care is public health. We need to look at the totality of what the World Health Organization definition of health has always been, which is a complete state of physical, mental and it even uses the term “spiritual” health. We do not tak…
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Mr. Speaker, actually, the current information that we have from the Parliamentary Budget Officer suggests that our debt-to-GDP ratio is not disturbing to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. It is interesting to note the statistic that the member shared of 61,000 employees hired, because when I look at Environment Canada, there was a 10% budget cut in 2012 in Parks Canada, and those people have not …
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Madam Speaker, I am going to reflect on the loss of the wheat board and its unintended consequences, such as the failure to organize grain shipments properly, which is causing the long delays that have been very difficult for grain farmers, and the fact that the residual assets of the wheat board are now owned by Saudi Arabia. For my constituents in Saanich—Gulf Islands, the inefficiencies in deli…
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Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to have a chance to rise and ask a question of my colleague from Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne. I have not had a chance to take the floor today. It is difficult when the rounds are 10 minutes and five minutes for questions. I want to put on the record that I plan to vote for this motion and I am grateful that it has been put forward. I am particularly concerned with an…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the petitioners for whom I am honoured to stand to present a petition are calling for gender parity, particularly in this place, the House of Commons. Since 50% of our population is female but only 30% of MPs are women, obviously we are not properly represented in the House. We are a long way from the top of the list of parliaments around the world that properly reflect the participat…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I am rising just to suggest that the Standing Orders say we must not speak disrespectfully of each other here as members. I am not questioning your ruling, but in light of Standing Order 16, I think that might have been within the rubric of a point of order.
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Madam Speaker, my sincere thanks to my colleague. We have to think about preparing for future hurricanes, floods and heat waves. In my province, British Columbia, more than 700 people died last summer because of climate change and heat waves. At this time, we are not ready to deal with disasters, which really damage our economy. We must eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel industries and plan to sto…
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Madam Speaker, obviously no one can blame the Governor of the Bank of Canada for assuming that it was situation normal. It is not situation normal. I remember when the previous governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, was testifying at the finance committee. When asked if he was worried about the inflationary impact of the government using quantitative easing, he said that inflation was a pr…
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the hon. member for Whitby, for sharing his time with me. I am honoured to stand here on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin nation and say meegwetch. This has been a somewhat frustrating debate, as many speakers have noted. There is unanimous support in this place for Bill C-30, yet there are things we want to debate. For my part, I woul…
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Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise in this place to present a petition that deals with public transportation. The petitioners note that the government's current 10-year transit plan will end in 2027, yet we still have not seen public transit significantly improved to reduce greenhouse gases, nor to reach areas of Canada that are remote and more rural. As members will know, today actually happens…
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Madam Speaker, we may not agree on exactly what the problem is. I can agree that the temporary band-aid is not going to fix it. Just on the point I had before closing, the profits that big oil is getting right now, which are off the charts and are really contributing to pain for Canadians, are essentially war profiteering. The profits are solely due to the war in Ukraine. The Parliamentary Budget …
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, back in April, even before the government approved the drilling in Bay du Nord, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, pointing out that we were on track to more than double the 1.5°C Paris target, said, “Some Government and business leaders are saying one thing, but doing another. Simply put, they are lying.” Since 1990, our emissions have risen more than any other G7 country. When A…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, this is my first opportunity to enter into this debate having listened to it all afternoon. I want to thank the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman and many members of this place, such as the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and the member for Etobicoke North. We heard many strong denunciations. The member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount spoke too. We, here, are quite unit…
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Madam Speaker, this is my first opportunity to get in on the debate, although I have been listening to it for hours. I would like to ask the hon. member for Lakeland a question that I have been wanting to ask since the hon. opposition House leader, the former Speaker of the House, made his speech. The context in which the Conservatives put this forward is somehow that Canada, alone in the world, d…
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Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition from constituents and others who are extremely concerned about the climate emergency. They note that the House carried a motion that we are in a climate emergency, in June 2018. Constituents note that this requires that we act as if we are in an emergency, something that has not happened yet. The petitioners call on Canada to address the climate emergency …
Read full speech →Statements By Members
Mr. Speaker, as we know, our friends, our colleagues and, as in my case, being a Cape Bretoner, our families are recovering from hurricane Fiona. We know that five Canadian provinces were walloped with one storm. Now that is a record. We also know that as we show, speak to and, in an emergency debate, declare our solidarity with the people of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfo…
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise and present a petition on a burning issue for my constituents, which is the plight of Pacific salmon. It is a species on the brink. Petitioners call on the Government of Canada to remove the conflict of interest found within the Fisheries Act, which calls on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as a promoter of salmon aquaculture and also a regulator of salmo…
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much my hon. friend from Foothills correctly stating Green policy, because we do support Bill C-234. We think that what happened here was that the government's intention was to not put a carbon tax on farm fuels, and then we had that extremely flukey weather situation. We had farmers with wet grains, and they had to spend a lot more money than usual to dry the grain.…
Read full speech →Emergency Debate
Mr. Speaker, I am going to follow up on the question from my friend from Victoria. I do not disagree with him that, if the Liberals were serious, they would actually do the right thing on climate change, but I equally do not quite understand, as I am not quite certain that his caucus would support the government if it did the right things. We immediately need to, for instance, cancel Bay du Nord, …
Read full speech →Emergency Debate
Mr. Speaker, this is apropos given the last debate we were having about the fixed link. I was actually in the minister of the environment's office when we signed off on that being the first piece of infrastructure that adapted to climate change, because it was built for a one-metre sea level rise. We need to stop taking our attention off an issue once it is no longer in the front pages, and we nee…
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Mr. Speaker, I completely agree with my friend from South Okanagan—West Kootenay, but I would add that we need to make sure that we have distributed energy systems, such as solar panels to run generators to make sure that people who are relying on a heat pump do not have it conk out because their power grid has gone down at the same time. When we are looking at Fiona, right now people are running …
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Mr. Speaker, the Green Party did submit a very long piece of advice to the consultation the government is running on how we adapt and what changes we could make. We went through what we could do for farmers and the forest industry. We have to put saving lives up front. We have to make sure that if there is a heat dome we actually get people to safety. One of the more chilling things I heard in pre…
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Mr. Speaker, it is in fact a late hour, but it is a good metaphor for where we are on the climate crisis, because at the moment, we are standing on the very edge of too late regarding the advice we have been given by the international scientific process, the largest peer-review process in the history of human civilization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I want to start by acknowled…
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Mr. Speaker, I have had similar concerns in the past about the matching programs. I wonder how the member might suggest that in the short term, in the next few days, we make an impact in how we would access the best and most effective charities on the ground.
Read full speech →Emergency Debate
Mr. Speaker, I did not miss church on Sunday, but I am still glad I heard that. If we think about the kinds of investments we will need for the storms of the future, my friend from South Okanagan—West Kootenay pointed out where we are headed. We are at 1.2°C global average temperature increase right now, versus what it was before the beginning of the industrial revolution. With every fraction of a…
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Mr. Speaker, I would say to my hon. friend from Sydney—Victoria a huge wela'lin. I do not know that I have ever been more proud to stand here as someone who still considers herself a Cape Bretoner as well as a British Columbian. I think the words of the hon. member for Sydney—Victoria have been the most profound of this whole evening's debate. I would like to ask if he would agree with me that our…
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Madam Speaker, I am really grateful to the Conservative Party that the hon. member for South Shore—St. Margarets got a whole 20 minutes, because that means the time for questions and answers lasts for 10 minutes. The hon. member is a friend and we have been texting each other all day because I am both a British Columbia MP and a Cape Bretoner. I remember hurricanes that we used to have in Atlantic…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia for her speech. I could not agree with her more: It is impossible to speak about this terrible hurricane without mentioning its cause, that is to say climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels. The waves that swept houses into the sea were like something out of a sci-fi movie. It is almost unbelievable, but that is t…
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Mr. Speaker, as someone who has been a Cape Bretoner much of my life and is now a British Columbian, I have seen the climate crisis hit communities I know and love really hard. It is heartbreaking. I want to extend thanks to all in this House for the solidarity in supporting Atlantic Canadians at this critical time and for continuing to support them, because the people of Lytton, whose town burned…
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Madam Speaker, the statement of the hon. member that any more government spending leads to inflation is not borne out by many periods of time in this country and around the world. Certainly some kinds of spending can fuel inflation. This is a very strange inflation we are experiencing. There are some real increases in price due to supply chain disruptions. There are real increases in price based o…
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Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition from a number of constituents. This petition deals with the subject matter of what is generally called “just transition”. The petitioners note that Canada has a commitment to the Paris Agreement, which includes in its preamble the concept of making sure workers and communities in the fossil fuel sector receive transitional support so that they can be trans…
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Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise today to present a petition to the House of Commons that has been signed by people in my riding and across Canada regarding the climate crisis. The petitioners express concerns about our government's commitment. The government signed the Paris Agreement, but it does not appear to be sufficiently committed to meeting the Paris targets of limiting warming to 1.5°C …
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Mr. Speaker, I wanted to make a link between the high prices we see in the grocery store and the climate crisis. Moms noticed this summer that ice cream went up, and one of the reasons was that vanilla beans come from Madagascar, which was hit with six cyclones this year. Hurricane Fiona is on its way to the Maritimes, which we have mentioned multiple times, and we are all thinking of people in th…
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Mr. Speaker, members can see, as I extend my hand, that I can nearly hold hands with the member for Whitby. He is in a different party. I sit here because I am assigned to sit here, but he is a friend. I wanted to say that the chance to support this bill is important for me as a member of the Green Party because we were the first party in this place to call for dental care to be included in our pu…
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Mr. Speaker, it is my first opportunity to speak today on Bill C-31, so I want to put on the record that I support it and wish it would go further. I want to ask my hon. colleague from Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes this. He made the claim that health care is provincial. I wonder if he is familiar with the 1982 case, Schneider v. The Queen, in which the Supreme Court of Canada r…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in Adjournment Proceedings this evening to pursue a question I asked on World Oceans Day. World Oceans Day, June 8, is observed every single year within what is the United Nations' and Canada's Environment Week. I asked about the impact of the climate crisis on our oceans and whether the government was prepared to take it seriously. Every single second, and I n…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, this is the tragedy we see before us. I know the parliamentary secretary cares about climate. I am sure the Prime Minister and the Minister of Environment care about climate. However, the totality of their efforts puts us on track to an unlivable world for our kids, as assessed by the science. Global atmosphere is not interested in negotiating with the Liberal government. Liberals are…
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Joliette for his speech. I completely agree with the member for Guelph. It is good to reflect with him on ideas that are slightly more complex and on a nuanced approach. These are not very simple issues and it is difficult because of the different challenges, which are complex. For example, we have the war in Ukraine, Canada's current situation, and issues …
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the member's focus on the excess profits of the oil and gas sector. I do not like using the term “excess profit” and I do not like using “windfall profit”. Let us be clear about what we are talking about: We are talking about immoral war profiteering. That is what we are seeing right now. If hon. members across the way want to laugh, let me refer to the business columnis…
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise here and present a petition that has a number of points. I will try to summarize them briefly. In general, this petition calls on the government to act to protect endangered ecosystems, particularly old growth forests. The petitioners specifically mention Fairy Creek on southern Vancouver Island, but the petition is broader in its scope. It is looking for the G…
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