Mr. Speaker, I am happy to speak today on the budget implementation act. There is a lot to talk about, so I will stick with a few important issues, and I will start with the good.

This budget has a few elements that are remarkably similar to parts of the NDP election platform in 2015. One, of course, is the promise of $10-a-day child care. The Liberals criticized the NDP in 2015 for that proposal and I am glad they have finally seen the light. I am sorry it took a pandemic to make them realize how critical child care is to Canadian families and our economy, and I am disappointed that it took them six years to figure that out, but I am glad to see it here.

The second is the $15-an-hour minimum wage for workers in federally regulated sectors. Again, that NDP idea was criticized by the Liberals in 2015. I say good work, but it is six years late. I am really disappointed that there is no part of the bill that is designed to ensure that ordinary Canadians do not end up paying for the necessary pandemic stimulus and programs to build back better. There is nothing in the budget that makes sure the superwealthy, Canadians who literally made billions of dollars in extra income in the last year while most Canadians struggled, pay the lion's share of those pandemic spending programs.

The NDP has put forward a plan for a 1% wealth tax applicable to all Canadians who have more than $20 million in assets. That is a very small number of Canadians. It is fewer than 1% of Canadians, yet the Parliamentary Budget Officer has calculated that such a tax would net $5.6 billion every year. The NDP has also demanded the government close off access to offshore tax havens. That would net the treasury $25 billion per year. An excess profit tax, such as the one we instituted to pay off the debts accumulated during World War II, would bring in $8 billion. Instead, this budget suggests a luxury tax that would make sure the wealthy would pay an extra 10% for their Lamborghinis or private jets. That would net us less than $1 billion. Apparently it is all talk anyway, as it is not included in this budget implementation act.

I would like to turn now to aspects of the budget that have real resonance in my riding of South Okanagan—West Kootenay. It is the most beautiful riding in the country, as I have said on numerous occasions. It has a high percentage of seniors on fixed incomes, a high percentage of people working for minimum wage in the service sector and a high percentage of people working for low wages in agriculture, yet it has some of the highest real estate prices in Canada. The ratio of average income to housing costs here is one of the worst in the country. The big issues in my riding are housing, housing and housing.

The average cost of a single-family home in Penticton, my hometown, is over $800,000. That is the average. Many families, especially young families, are forced to rent, but in many communities across the riding rentals are very expensive or simply not available. There was an ad recently offering a single room with a shared bathroom and no access to a kitchen for $1,000 a month. A local family in the news recently lost their rental suite when the landlord decided to cash in on the housing market and sell the house. The new owner was not interested in renting, so this family had to find a new home. There was none available. The family eventually set up a GoFundMe account and raised enough money so they could buy an old RV to live in.

It gets worse the lower one's income is. People on income assistance or disability pensions are eligible for subsidized housing because the income we provide them is far too low to live on: It is about $1,000 per month for everything. As of last week, there are officially no subsidized rental units available in Penticton, so if a house someone rents goes up for sale, that individual is literally homeless. They are unhoused and on the street. For those who are still lucky enough to have rentals in old motels, the news is not much better. Penticton has a large supply of old motels that are mainly used for affordable rental accommodation. Two were sold recently and the residents evicted. Three more have just been sold and the concern is that they too will be unavailable to low-income residents. A hundred more people will likely be unhoused in Penticton.

Homelessness is not just a Penticton problem. It is a crisis in almost every community in B.C. In my riding, it is a huge concern in Grand Forks and Trail. The City of Trail recently wrote to the provincial and federal governments pleading for help with housing and mental health and addictions, and for support for the RCMP to make sure detachments are fully staffed. These communities are overwhelmed with these complex problems. This is a crisis across the country. We need urgent action from the government.

The NDP would create 500,000 affordable housing units across the country in 10 years to catch up with the backlog that has been building up over the last 30 years, since Liberal and Conservative governments gave up on federal housing programs. Instead, what we get in this budget are relatively small investments that will not make a dent in the housing crisis, not in the short term and not in the long term.

Now I will get back to the good pieces in this budget.

There are a couple of line items that would be welcomed in my riding. One is the $100 million over two years for the wine sector to make up for the loss of the excise tax exemption, a loss that will kick in next year. Losing that exemption will be very hard on many small wineries in my riding, and I have been lobbying hard, along with other MP colleagues from other wine-producing ridings, to find a trade-legal support that would ease that transition, so this is good news.

Another change comes a little too late to help my riding, and that is the new disaster mitigation funding that will cover projects between $1 million and $20 million. I have been trying to help the Town of Oliver get federal funding to cover some of the costs of irrigation canal repairs after a disastrous rockfall in 2016. Those critical repairs cost about $11 million, but federal infrastructure funding covers only drinking water and waste water, not agricultural water that is absolutely essential in the South Okanagan.

Federal DMAF funding only kicked in for projects costing more than $20 million. I repeatedly pointed out this problem to successive ministers of infrastructure, suggesting they allow smaller projects under $20 million to qualify as well. Unfortunately, the Town of Oliver could not risk waiting one more year to make these fixes, so it went ahead with the project last winter with provincial funding, but without federal help. While I am disappointed this change took so long in coming, I am sure it is welcomed by other small communities facing larger costs to repair infrastructure after floods, landslides and wildfires.

One topic I have spoken up on in this House on numerous occasions is the important of home retrofit programs. I even had a private member's bill in the previous Parliament to bring back the ecoENERGY retrofit program the Conservatives had in place. It was a hugely successful program leveraging five dollars for every dollar spent, allowing thousands of Canadians to make their homes more energy efficient, saving them monthly heating bills, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and benefiting the local economies in every community in Canada. I am happy that the government included a similar program in the fall economic statement and a loan program in this budget, but both these measures fail to help the Canadians who need that help most.

Twenty per cent of Canadian households live in energy poverty. They spend more than 6% of their income on home energy. They cannot afford the upfront cost to access grants, and they cannot afford to take on more debt, no matter how low the interest, to do those necessary retrofits. We need a turnkey, fully funded federal program, like the one Jack Layton proposed years ago, to make these older homes more energy efficient and support Canadian families who live in energy poverty.

To conclude, this budget gets gold stars for the child care program, a federal minimum wage, help for the wine industry and small communities facing big infrastructure repair bills, but it fails on so many other fronts. After decades of promises, it only promises more talk on a public pharmacare program. It does almost nothing for students facing crushing debt after post-secondary education. It cuts the Canada recovery benefit for workers still jobless because of the pandemic. It does nothing to take the profit out of long-term care. It does nothing to end fossil fuel subsidies and it does nothing to make the ultrarich pay their fair share.

As the government knows too well, better is always possible. These better ideas are needed now more than ever.

Richard Cannings

$554,545.00