Mike Morrice

[Opioid Crisis in Canada, February 8th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Longueuil—Saint-Hubert.

My priority is Bill C‑216, which was introduced here in the House.

It is a mix of policies. We do not need to choose one over the other, as we have in front of us a bill that would allow us to do a mix of what experts are already calling for.

[Opioid Crisis in Canada, February 8th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, I thank the member for the question and for the tone with which the question was asked. It sounds like it comes from a place of genuine curiosity.

My perspective is to follow the expert advice that parliamentarians are being given, and that expert advice from the task force on substance use shares very clearly the need to move away from criminalization alongside other recommendations, many of which are reflected in Bill C-216, that would ensure that we would not only save lives but better take care of people across the country.

[Opioid Crisis in Canada, February 8th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, I do agree, and to go a step further, we recognize that mandatory minimum penalties, as has been called out in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, need to be moved away from. I would actually encourage the governing party to go further with that legislation to ensure that we follow through on the calls to action from the TRC.

[Opioid Crisis in Canada, February 8th, 2022]

Mr. Chair, I want to start by thanking the member for Yukon for his leadership in ensuring we have this conversation this evening. It is such an important conversation to come back to the critical need for us to save lives in the midst of a poisoning crisis.

Before we talk about that crisis, I want to share that in Waterloo region alone in 2021, there were around 155 overdose poisoning deaths. As a baseline, to give members a sense, we had 145 deaths from COVID-19 in Waterloo region. As many members also know, the average is now 19 deaths a day across the country.

For those in this place who like talking about the economics of decisions that are made here, in 2017 we spent $6.4 billion on policing, courts and correctional costs with respect to criminalized substances. Tonight and often, I have heard many folks say that this should be a public health matter, not a criminal justice one, and I could not agree more. The good news is that we have advice for all parliamentarians on how to ensure that our legislation reflects that, because the fact is that today it is not true. It continues to be that we are criminalizing unregulated substances across the country. To do that, I would encourage all parliamentarians to review the expert panel's advice from Health Canada on substance use.

This is why I am so supportive of the member for Courtenay—Alberni's private member's bill. It is taking a road map from this third-party advice to move toward legislation that would do exactly that. It would treat this as a matter of public health and, because it is a crisis, which is a view that every speaker this evening has shared, we should move forward with the urgency it deserves.

That is why I would encourage all parliamentarians to support the private member's bill. Specifically, in doing so, that bill includes recommendations from the expert panel, including the decriminalization of simple possession of unregulated drugs, expunging or wiping clean the records of folks so they do not have that discrimination throughout their lives and a national strategy that would include low-barrier access to a safer supply.

As we do that, I also want to point out the need, which was mentioned by the task force, to talk about the social determinants of health while also directly addressing the poisoning crisis we are in. We know that, for those who are currently addicted to unregulated drugs, that is heightened by the lack of access to quality, dignified and affordable housing. It is heightened by the lack of truly universal health care across the country and the lack of proper income supports.

With the rest of my time, I would love to share a quote from a frontline worker in Waterloo region. This is from Alice, who works at the Sanguen Health Centre, who supports and works with people every day who are on the front lines of this crisis. Her words are the following:

Regardless of the political climate, we are going to spend every minute of our day caring about people who use drugs, honouring their lives, their perspectives and their expertise, and advocating with them when their needs are not met. We will continue to build and create relationships that are based on mutual respect and love and walk with people in their times of joy and in times of heartbreak. We will remember each life that has been lost in preventable overdose deaths as the vibrant, complex and beautiful spirits that they were instead of cold statistics, and we will continue to refuse to accept the status quo: that people who use drugs are considered less important than other people in our communities. We will proudly declare to anyone who is listening (and many who aren’t) that people who use drugs are a welcome part of our community, not people happening to our community, just as we have every day for many years.

[Opioid Crisis in Canada, February 8th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I particularly appreciated your choice to quote directly from the report of the expert task force on substance use. I was curious if you would be open to sharing more with the House on recommendation no. 7, which reads, “The Task Force strongly urges Health Canada to respect the sovereign rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada and support their governments in providing appropriate prevention and treatment approaches.”

Would you be open to sharing your advice with parliamentarians on how to ensure that this is brought to fruition?

[Opioid Crisis in Canada, February 8th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Yukon for his leadership on this issue. The House is better with his contributions.

Earlier, the member for Courtenay—Alberni shared his passion on this issue, as well as the fact that he has put forward a private member's bill that would do what so many in the House have spoken of, which is to move toward this crisis being treated as a public health crisis as opposed to a criminal justice one.

Would the member for Yukon comment on his openness, and potentially that of others in the governing party, to working with other parliamentarians toward bringing that bill to fruition?

[Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021, February 4th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it is so important that across every piece of legislation while we are in the midst of a climate emergency, we take the opportunity to ensure that the funds are spoken about. When we talk about being a climate leader, we need to actually follow through.

One of the ways we can do that is by looking at buildings across the country. We need to retrofit buildings right across the country, from workplaces to homes. To do so will take a significant investment and it will also create millions of jobs, while reducing energy poverty for those who need it most.

[Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021, February 4th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my Bloc Québécois colleague for her question. I have been really impressed over the past two months with the Bloc Québécois's reminders about federal versus provincial areas of jurisdiction.

I would be happy to have a follow-up conversation. We need all levels of government working together, which includes the leadership we are seeing from the cities of Vancouver and Toronto with respect to a vacancy tax. It also includes provinces stepping up.

I think that is part of the conversation we then need to have to ensure that, with respect to jurisdiction, we can move past and ensure that the funds are there so all levels of government can invest in the affordable housing that we so desperately need.

[Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021, February 4th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to reiterate for my hon. colleague for Calgary Centre that these are not numbers that are coming from me. They are from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. It has already done the research on the funds that Export Development Canada currently allocates, which is around $13 billion a year. We purchased a pipeline for another $4 billion. In fact, we intend to spend many billions of dollars more on expanding that pipeline.

I would be glad to have a conversation with the member across not only about the dollar amounts, but more meaningfully about how we can use those funds to reinvest where we need it most, which is in workers across the country who are on the front lines. We either allow them to go through an unjust disruption, or we support them today to ensure they have the supports they need to transition to the economy of the future.

[Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021, February 4th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise this morning to offer some reflections with respect to Bill C-8.

I would like to start with some points I appreciate in this bill. Specifically, I think we can all agree that, in the midst of a pandemic, adding more ventilation and more supports is a good thing. In this bill is $100 million to improve ventilation in schools. There is also a refundable tax credit on taxes payable for up to 25% of ventilation expenses for small businesses.

In addition, I really appreciate that the bill includes $1.72 billion for provinces to allocate rapid tests to expand school and workplace testing. In the Waterloo region, for example, the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce shared last month that it was short on 200,000 rapid tests. This is the kind of support I know businesses in my community will really appreciate.

When it comes to housing, house prices in Kitchener went up 35% last year alone. In 2005, the average house price was around three times the median income. In the last year, it rose to 8.7 times the median income. There is no doubt that house prices are skyrocketing out of control. Young people are concerned they might not ever be able to purchase homes of their own. Seniors on fixed incomes in my community are anxious about whether they will be able to stay. I spoke to a nurse last summer who shared that her rent is going up too, and she wondered if she would be able to stay in our community at all.

We need policies that address this crisis head-on. Homes should be for people to live in, and not commodities for investors to trade. One of the problems we have in this crisis is the number of vacant homes across the country. A recent study showed that 1.34 million homes across the country are sitting empty because speculators bought them with no interest in ever living there. They were simply speculating on the value. That is 8.7% of the housing stock. At our current rate of construction, it would take us six years to build the housing supply we already have in vacant homes.

Now, we have solutions that work. For example, Vancouver has gradually raised its empty homes tax to 3%. In doing so, it has reduced the number of vacant homes by 25%. It has added at least 18,000 units back onto the market, and generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for new, affordable housing.

If we turn back to this bill, there is what is called an underused housing tax. It is set at 1%. For speculators who are earning returns well over 8%, my concern is that this level will not meaningfully discourage the speculation from investors we are currently seeing in the market. Not only that, but almost everyone is exempt from this tax. Canadians are exempt. Permanent residents are exempt. Every corporation is exempt. It applies only to a small fraction of non-resident, non-Canadian-owned vacant homes.

It feels to me like we all know the house is on fire and someone has called the fire service, but the fire service arrived with a bucket of water. I wonder why the governing party will not move more quickly to bring on the variety of tools we know we need to address this crisis, such as new investments in non-market public subsidized housing and co-op housing.

I noticed that there was a promise in the platform of the governing party to consider introducing an end to the blind bidding process. There are so many tools we can and should consider, and I strongly encourage the governing party to look into doing so.

If the Liberals are serious about addressing the housing crisis and they are looking to set the priorities, I would encourage them to at least look at the tax in this bill to consider if we could be more serious about ensuring that this is a tool that would address the reality of the crisis we are facing across the country. Certainly in Kitchener, it is hitting home across our community.

I am also disappointed that there were two other opportunities in Bill C-8 that were not addressed. I would like to bring those forward here.

The first is with respect to the crisis in long-term care. This past summer I spoke with a woman whose mom had been waiting in a hospital for three months. She was in tears as she shared with me that she wondered if her mom would make it to long-term care before she passed.

She was one of 52,000 people on the wait-list, as of this past summer, for a spot in long-term care. The solutions are self-evident. Last year, the former MP for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, Paul Manly, introduced Motion No. 77. That motion offered a number of potential solutions, including national standards for long-term care and an end to for-profit care; ensuring that personal support workers were not providing four minutes of care a day, but four hours of care a day; eliminating the wait times altogether, and ensuring adequate pay so that PSWs would not have to run from one care home to the other in the gig economy.

Thankfully, the Parliamentary Budget Officer costed the plan out. The good news is that for less money than we currently offer to oil and gas companies every year, $18 billion, we could be taking better care of our seniors.

Finally, another disappointment for me that I would encourage the governing party to consider prioritizing, if not in this bill than in another, the introduction of a national pharmacare program. We have been hearing promises about pharmacare since 1997. It has been 25 years.

This past summer, I spoke with a woman who shared with me that, given the cost of her medications, she needed to intentionally take less than she required every day so that her medications might last longer. This is in a country where we claim to be proud of truly universal health care. Obviously that is not the case.

Because we have had this many years of study, we know that currently Canadians are spending $24 billion a year on pharmaceuticals. We also know that we would save money by having a national program. Not only is it more compassionate and a moral imperative, but economically, we would collectively save $4 billion a year by introducing a national pharmacare program.

I would encourage the governing party, and all parliamentarians, to continue to advocate for Canadians across the country who deserve access to truly universal health care. One element of that is ensuring we have a national pharmacare program.

In closing, there are elements of good propositions in this bill. I am glad for those, specifically around rapid tests. Those will really help in my community.

However, if we are going to be serious about the housing crisis, and we are going to follow through on promises that have been made over many years, I would encourage all parliamentarians to continue not only to advocate for improvements in long-term care and a national pharmacare program, but also to meaningfully address the housing crisis that we find ourselves in.