MP Mathyssen Speaks on Housing, Disability Benefit, Fighting for Canadians and Budget 2024

It is always an honour to rise in this House to represent the people of London—Fanshawe. I am incredibly proud to do so and am happy to speak to this year's budget.

I, like so many I know in this House, are worried when they talk to constituents who are falling further and further behind. My constituents are working hard, paying their fair share and contributing to our country and our economy in so many ways, but the programs and systems upon which they rely are not supporting them in the ways that they should. I am a proud New Democrat and member of a party that worked continuously to create programs that support Canadians, but we know that not every party believes that we should all pay our fair share and other parties, time after time, work to ensure that only those at the top, those with the most power and wealth, do not contribute to the benefits that we should all enjoy. That is not the NDP approach.

As Jack Layton often said, it is the opposition's job to not only oppose but to propose. The role of opposition is not to spend four years campaigning or using slogans to divide people, and I am proud to say that I can return to my constituents and speak about the real wins that New Democrats have secured. We have used our power to lay the foundations for universal single-payer or public single-payer pharmacare for Canadians, beginning with free birth control for nine million Canadians and diabetes medication and device coverage for 3.7 million Canadians. We used our power to deliver dental care, with 1.7 million seniors already registered for the single biggest expansion of our health care system since Tommy Douglas.

We have also used our power for solutions to the housing crisis, and we do see some of that in this budget. For years, the NDP has raised concerns about the financialization of housing. I believe that housing is a human right, but the financialization of housing has eroded that right by turning homes into commodities for the wealthy. Across Canada, 30% of rental-built housing is owned by institutional investors. That means young people are not only being shut out of owning a home, but even when they are renting, they are at the mercy of greedy corporate landlords. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments decided to hand over our right of housing to the free market alone and since the 1990s, the federal government has completely stepped away from investing in non-market housing.

The government used to partner in the development of non-profit, co-operative and social housing to ensure that those who needed it had a place to live. It should be the role of government to create a balance on housing that benefits everyone. When housing is not ruled by a handful of corporations, it does so much better and we need renters to be empowered so they are not accepting those incredibly high rental hikes. However, since the government got out of housing, we have lost affordable housing units. When the Conservatives were last in power, we lost 800,000 affordable housing units that were bought up by corporate landlords.

Londoners know what happens when the housing market is left unchecked to the free market. According to a report by Acorn Canada, London is one of the top five Ontario cities for renovictions. I have spoken to this House repeatedly and asked the government repeatedly about renovictions in London. Last year, the leader of my party and I joined a rally for tenants of Webster Street apartments. The tenants had their homes sold to a Toronto-based corporate landlord and they were immediately issued eviction notices.

Those tenants included an 83-year-old woman on a fixed income. She had been living there for years, and rent increase caps meant she could afford her home, but when she got that eviction notice, she had no affordable options. These greedy corporate landlords have forced her and other tenants on Webster out of their homes so they can gouge the next tenant’s rent.

According to a January CMHC report, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in London was $1,479. That is already unaffordable, but it gets worse when tenants are turned over because of those renovictions. The report found that rent for a two-bedroom unit with a new tenant averaged 27.6% higher than apartments in the same building. We need to protect renters on Webster Street and across Canada. That is why New Democrats pushed for meaningful action in this budget and why I am very happy to see that we were able to secure the $1.5 billion for the rental protection fund. That money will be used to protect renters from losing their affordable homes to those corporate landlords and will purchase and transition buildings on sale into non-market housing.

That is not all we fought for in this budget. A UNICEF report ranked Canada 37th out of 41 countries in nutritious food for children. At a time when corporations like Loblaws are making $1 million in profits every day, millions of Canadians are turning to food banks. Parents are doing everything they can to take care of their kids, but Galen Weston and his friends just keep driving up the cost of food.

Let me be very clear that decades of consecutive governments have peeled away at Canada's social safety net. Successive governments have prioritized the bottom line of folks like Galen and his friends over working families and have ignored warnings about food insecurity for our children. The leader of the NDP and I joined the Lunchbox London group, a not-for-profit organization that provides over 600 food bundles to families in need and addresses some of the food insecurity of kids who are in school from kindergarten to age 12. Their work is essential for our community, and after decades of neoliberal cuts, one in six London-Middlesex households faces food insecurity.

The NDP could have solely opposed progress in this way, and we could have spent years pointing to these horrible insecurity statistics for kids, but instead we chose to use our power to fight for those kids, so we now see the $1-billion national school food program. Until now, Canada was the only G7 country that did not have such a program, but now, more than 400,000 more children will be able to access nutritious food each year, and I am very proud of the NDP's work to secure that food for children.

However, again, this is only a first step, as has been mentioned many times in this House, and the NDP envisions a truly universal national school food program where every kid, no matter their postal code, knows they will have a nutritious meal.

I am also very proud of a lot of the things we have accomplished over the last couple of years. The New Democrats, with our small but mighty caucus, have made real gains for Canadians, but we are not the government, as much as the Conservatives will debate otherwise, and this is not an NDP budget. At the end of the day, the New Democrats have pushed as far as we can, but so much of the budget does not go far enough, and if it were not for the NDP, the budget would not address the concerns of Canadians.

However, I do want to address one of the concerns I have with the budget, something I am not happy with and many of my colleagues are not happy with. Of course, this is the disability benefit. Of Canadians living with a disability, 1.4 million live in poverty, and those with the most severe disabilities often live in the deepest poverty. Liberal and Conservative governments, provincially and federally, have balanced the books on the back of legislating persons with disabilities into poverty.

My office has heard from so many community members facing that legislated poverty. We have worked with community members who have even gone on hunger strikes to raise awareness of the horrific conditions imposed upon them. We know that it is not enough to raise people out of poverty and we know that attaching this benefit to the disability tax credit will create serious systemic barriers to access. I hope that when the government said this is a first step, it truly means that it is only a first step and that we will soon see additional measures to ensure that people living with disabilities do not continue to suffer.

To wrap up, I wanted to reflect on the state, overall, of what we are seeing in Canada and in politics. On one hand we have a Liberal government whose arm has to be twisted to come close to meeting its own promises. Time after time, it resists every step toward dental care, pharmacare, renters protection and the school food program. On the other hand, we have an ideologically-driven Conservative leader who tries to divide Canadians and exploit our real pains for electoral gain while his advisers take out big cheques from big corporate interests.

Canadians are facing an incredible cost-of-living increase, and the NDP, instead of spending those 40 years in just opposition, decided to use its power to deliver for Canadians, and we want to continue to fight for those solutions. This is not an NDP government; this is not an NDP budget, but this is what happens when enough Canadians reject the legacy parties and dare to elect a party that has the courage to fight for what is right. New Democrats will keep fighting against the corporate coalition, and we will put people first.

Madam Speaker, I always find it very interesting when Conservatives stand up to talk about who they are trying to help. Ultimately, “axing the tax”, as they call it, would help the wealthiest in this country. I would like to ensure that Canadians do not fall for that misnomer. Conservatives try to sell it as if they are fighting for people when they are actually fighting for corporate profits.

Maybe, later on in debate, the member could tell us why her party refused to vote for a national school food program, which we know will help students and families with the nutrition they need. Why would they vote against pharmacare, which would go directly back into the pockets of women who deserve and need contraception, as well as the pockets of people who live with diabetes?

Why would the member vote against that sort of measure and why would she vote against the dental benefit? Those measures would help people across Middlesex, across London, and across this country with the everyday costs that seniors, especially, are facing. I would like to know why she would vote against those things that would actually help people's pocketbooks.

Madam Speaker, New Democrats have been at the forefront of pushing back against those corporate giveaways to the oil and gas sector. It is incumbent on those corporate owners to pay their fair share.

As I said in my speech, we will continue to push against that. This is not an NDP budget. I will fight for the day when we see a fair share being paid by everyone in order to ensure that we have a safe, healthy future, both with all those social programs and in terms of our environment.