Since before the election, New Democrats have been hearing from seniors who have been seriously hurt by the Liberal government's unacceptable decision to claw back the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) from seniors who received emergency pandemic supports such as CERB. The NDP brought the issue directly to the attention of the Ministers before the election, sadly they just ignored it. For months, we continued to call for the government to fix this injustice immediately by excluding pandemic benefit benefits in the calculation of GIS eligibility.
“I think the program design is flawed,” said NDP housing critic Jenny Kwan. The income and mortgage caps means “there are many homes that would not qualify.”
“You need to go to the core of the issue, to bring down the cost of housing and not necessarily look at mortgage subsidies,” she added.
“It’s a start, and the NDP supports the measures in the motion, but the Conservative approach is not aggressive enough to meet the urgency of the housing crisis,” said NDP Housing critic Jenny Kwan.
Kwan put forward an amendment to the motion calling for a large campaign to build 500,000 social-housing units, but the Conservatives didn’t support it.
OTTAWA– Today marks six months since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan which launched the country into the worst humanitarian crisis in decades. Since Canada pulled out of Afghanistan the situation has become desperate. Children are facing starvation and over 18 million Afghans are in need of emergency aid right now. The NDP’s critic for immigration, Jenny Kwan, and the critic for foreign affairs, Heather McPherson, are calling on the Liberal government to change its insufficient and unnecessarily bureaucratic response and immediately begin helping those people who are suffering.
“This past summer Canadians were horrified by the violence the Taliban used against people in Afghanistan. Six months later and the conditions for people there are certainly not improving,” said Kwan. “The Canadian government has a responsibility to people in Afghanistan and the Liberals must do everything in their power to help as many people as possible.”
The Criminal Code currently prohibits any individual from delivering goods or financial assistance that will benefit a terrorist organization like the Taliban, making it very difficult for humanitarian organizations from Canada to help Afghans trying to feed their families due to their fear of prosecution. Canadian humanitarian organizations have repeatedly asked the Liberal government to provide an exemption, as other countries have, that would allow them to deliver the aid that Afghans desperately need. The Liberal government has failed to respond to this call appropriately, leaving millions of Afghans, including children, on the brink of starvation and vulnerable to an escalating humanitarian crisis.
“Those people have already missed the boat with respect to that processing standard,” Kwan concluded. “And they’re going to probably get another problem because soon people will come back and say, ‘how come the newer applicants got processed before me?’” Kwan called it a “short-sighted way of dealing with the situation.”
“They’re trying to create this perception that they are somehow on top of things, when in fact, frankly, they’re not. And the system remains opaque. There’s a lack of transparency, and lack of accountability,” she said.
Hong Kong-born Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan, who was invited to watch the screening on Sunday, says she was devastated at the scenes of brutality involving Hong Kong police and gangsters trying to suppress the protest.
"There were students as young as 11 years old coming out to protest on their own, trying to fight for their future, and you have seniors, elderly coming forward to try and protect them," she said.
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan urged the government to introduce special immigration levels to give the 500,000 migrant workers already in Canada a path to settlement and help address the labour-skill shortage.
Jenny Kwan, the Vancouver East MP, who also acts as the NDP Immigration Critic, said the government is actually scaling back the Federal Skilled Workers Program by almost 50 per cent by shifting resources and immigration levels from one stream to another.
“The immigration levels released today shows that the government is perpetuating the problems they created when they failed to adjust the levels to accommodate the new (temporary to permanent resident pathway) immigration measure,” she said.
MP Jenny Kwan, who represents the riding of Vancouver East, has been lobbying for Chinatown to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which would deem it an international landmark with legal protection and could help secure the funding to preserve and maintain its streets.