Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot for her question, because it gives us an opportunity to provide some clarification.

My colleague is calling on our government to bring forward “concrete new measures to make a real difference in the fight against poverty”. The truth is that since the first day of our mandate in 2015, we have brought forward many concrete measures to lift as many Canadians as possible out of poverty.

One example is the Canada child benefit, which has helped lift more than half a million people out of poverty, including 300,000 children. To put this in context, in Toronto, the city I represent, poverty among single mothers has been reduced by 52%. That is an astonishing statistic. I do not think it has ever been recorded in parliamentary history. It is a remarkable achievement. However, we are not patting ourselves on the back, because 48% of single mothers are still living in poverty. We have more work to do.

The Canada child benefit, in and of itself, would be a wonderful achievement alone. However, the reality is that we have also done a bunch of other things that are equally important for other segments of the population that face poverty as a lifetime challenge.

For example, the Canada workers benefit is a new measure we put into this year's budget. Starting this tax year, it will provide low-income workers with even more support. Thanks to the Canada workers benefit, a single person with no children could receive more than $1,300, while a single parent or a worker in a couple could receive up to $2,300. This is a concrete measure to support people's incomes, which is one of the quickest ways to eliminate poverty. It means these people will have more money to cover costs related to buying healthy food or clothes.

We have also worked on CPP, reforming it for a lifetime and making changes that other parties said were not possible. This was done, again, in our first year. We also increased the guaranteed income supplement and restored the retirement age from 67 to 65, which will prevent hundreds of thousands of people from falling into poverty.

Our other substantial contribution to reducing poverty is the national housing strategy. Throughout debate today, the party opposite suggested that federal housing dollars were not being spent. I can assure members that since we took office, the $7 billion we invested in housing have been delivered to Canadians right across the country. More than one million distinct investments in repairs, construction and subsidies have been made to Canadian families since we took office. Those dollars were set to disappear and we have restored them.

We tripled transfers to the provinces, and now they are starting to build new housing. Also, we doubled money for homelessness. Money for the reaching home program and HPS has been doubled, from $100 million to over $200 million, to provide front-line services.

The reason we have lifted close to 800,000 people our of poverty is that we made investments in this in our first budget, second budget and our third budget. We continue to look for ways to alleviate the situation facing too many Canadians.

Pharmacare is coming next, which is another important step toward eliminating poverty.

This government has committed to reducing poverty in every corner of the country in every form it takes. We will not stop making those investments until we have eliminated poverty. We have already reached our 2020 goals. We look forward to eliminating poverty even more, perhaps with the co-operation of the NDP.

Adam Vaughan

Transcript

Adjournment Proceedings

Discussions (0)