HANSARD: What happened to caregivers' PR on arrival promised by the government?
Madam Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise in this House to enter into this debate. However, I must say that the debate before us is really a colossal waste of the House of Commons resources and the valuable time that we have in this chamber to debate urgent issues and situations.
Why do I say that? The motion the Conservatives tabled is effectively calling for the government to table a set of data by June 17, 2024. What we do know is that the government did table a set of data. In fact, the Liberals tabled it today, albeit they should have made the information available right from the outset and should have been transparent with it. Notwithstanding that, that information is now before us. It begs the question why we are here debating a motion that is, frankly, not relevant anymore. It has already been addressed.
In the meantime, what is happening in our communities? We have a situation in our communities, which is a housing crisis from coast to coast to coast. In fact, just today, I tabled a private member's bill to call on the government to use a human rights-based lens in addressing the housing crisis, something that the Liberals say they will honour under the National Housing Strategy Act. However, in reality, we know that is not being done. In fact, there are encampments all across the country where people cannot access the housing they need, adequate housing that they need.
My private member's bill calls for the government to incorporate into the National Housing Strategy Act provisions that would disallow decampment on federal lands and to work collaboratively with other orders of government, other levels of government, to properly address the housing crisis. That is perhaps what we should be doing: focusing on how we can truly address the housing crisis, instead of having the Conservatives putting forward motions that are moot and have been made irrelevant already.
I would also say that we have a situation with the immigration system, where there are a lot of issues. The government decided that it would bring in a cap on international students very suddenly, impacting international students who are now caught out in a very bad way. They would not be able to renew their work permit or their study permit because of the cap. Some of them are being exploited and taken advantage of.
I just got an email from someone who told me that they were advised to go and marry someone, engage in marriage fraud, in order to find a path to stay here in Canada. That is not the path forward. We know that international students are struggling. They contribute, by the way, to Canada's economy, to our economic, social, cultural and educational communities. They should be valued instead of being blamed for the housing crisis that both the Liberals and the Conservatives have caused.
It was the Conservatives who cancelled Canada's national co-op housing program in 1992. It was the Conservative leader who sat at the table and saw the Harper government lose 800,000 units of affordable housing for Canadians. Then it was the Liberals, in 1993, following the Conservatives, who cancelled the national affordable housing program. They also added to the loss of affordable housing in our communities.
Therefore, instead of talking about a motion that is no longer relevant, we should be talking about how we are going to earnestly address the housing crisis, how we are going to ensure that those who are unhoused can live in dignity and how we can ensure that Canada will not only build more housing faster, but also build the kind of housing that Canadians can afford and can live in with dignity. We should be talking about how we should not allow decampment to take place, to further displace people who are unhoused in our communities, to marginalize them and to further put them at greater risks.
If we want to, and we should, talk about the climate crisis, we should not talk about how we can enable the climate crisis to further escalate. I do not know if the Conservatives are blind to the fact that we have a climate crisis. They cannot continue to stick their heads in the sand and to deny this reality. In my community, in British Columbia, we had a weather-related crisis that happened in the heat wave that killed over 600 people. We had a fire that burned down an entire town, a flood that followed and a mudslide that continued to further escalate the climate crisis. We cannot pretend that this is not happening and that somehow the carbon tax is to blame.
Let us just be clear about who is to blame and what action we need to take. Big oil needs to take responsibility, and those companies need to be held to account. The government, the Liberals, refuse to take the action that is necessary to deal with the climate crisis. The Liberals refuse to ensure that big oil pays its fair share. The Liberals refuse to stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry. Why are they doing that when the oil and gas industry is actually making record profit. It is to the detriment of everyday Canadians, to our collective detriment.
When the earth is burning, and it literally is with the wildfires and the forest fires that are taking place, we cannot just sit in the House and blame the carbon tax. What planet are we from? If we continue to go down this track, we are not going to address the climate crisis, which is desperately in need of action. We should be saying to Suncor that we are sorry, but it has made over $2.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and enough is enough; we are going to make sure that we stop the subsidies for the oil and gas industry and that the industry is made to do its part to address the climate crisis.
Madam Speaker, let me say this. We also have a responsibility in the international community to address the climate crisis because there are more people being displaced as a result of weather-related situations. Therefore, we have a collective responsibility to do what is right. There are many issues we need to debate, and debate seriously, but not a motion to which the very data that the Conservatives want has already been tabled. With that, I welcome questions.
