To celebrate Asian Heritage Month, OMNI Television sat down with some Canadian politicians of Asian descent to hear about their career path in politics, their thoughts on how to get more Asian voices into parliament and what Asian Heritage Month means to them.
In our second installment, we hear from Jenny Kwan, NDP MP for Vancouver-Mount Pleasant
Several NDP MPs pressed that point. Jenny Kwan, MP for Vancouver East, urged Pam Damoff, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of indigenous services, to adopt the word "genocide" in reference to residential schools.
"In order to move forward on closure and to honour the children and the lives that's been lost, we must also accept and acknowledge and admit that this was genocide," Kwan said. "Will the member call this a genocide and not a cultural genocide but genocide as defined by the UN convention on genocide?”
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he and many Canadians reacted with "horror at what had happened to these children."
"We as a nation saw people around the country continue to hold memorials to reflect on this horror, to reflect on what this means," Singh said. "What it means very clearly is these residential schools were not schools; they were institutions designed to eradicate and eliminate Indigenous people. They were institutions that were designed to perpetuate a genocide."
Several NDP MPs pressed that point. Jenny Kwan, MP for Vancouver East, urged Pam Damoff, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of indigenous services, to adopt the word "genocide" in reference to residential schools.
"In order to move forward on closure and to honour the children and the lives that's been lost, we must also accept and acknowledge and admit that this was genocide," Kwan said. "Will the member call this a genocide and not a cultural genocide but genocide as defined by the UN convention on genocide?"
The Canadian Council for Refugees called on the government months ago to introduce exemptions to the travel measures for people being resettled as refugees and entering to make a refugee protection claim. Janet Dench, the organization’s executive director, said refugee travel is essential, saying that those awaiting resettlement live in precarious circumstances and that the pandemic has only added to their vulnerability.
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said processing delays were significant before the pandemic and “things have just gone from bad to worse.”
Ms. Kwan said the lag can be particularly burdensome for refugee families who left family members behind and made applications to reunite. “I am regularly in discussion with people who made an application, been waiting a year, two years or more with having their application processed,” she said.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan drew Tremblay’s attention to the spike, starting about six years ago, in REITs acquiring properties with moderate rent. “What safeguards are there in place,” she asked, “to prevent REITs from jacking up the prices in the properties that they have acquired?”
Tremblay then added: “The private sector is the largest provider of rental housing, including housing that is affordable, in this country.”
When Kwan gave Leilani Farha a chance to respond, she reiterated that “the business model of REITs requires an escalation of rents.”
Farha explained her concern in more detail: “Real estate investment trusts rely on investors. They’re often institutional investors like pension funds, insurance companies and that kind of thing. If you’re an investor, you want to know that you’re going to get a good return on your investment. The way the REIT guarantees a good return on your investment is they show how they’re going to generate income through rent.”
REIT managers need to show investors how they are going to make those rents go up and up. Since many provinces set guidelines for rent increases on existing tenants, one strategy for REITs is to push tenants out and bring in new ones.
The program is retroactive to Dec. 1, 2020, so homeowners who complete an evaluation before starting renovations can qualify for the grant.
The Liberal government's latest announcement was met with mixed reactions. NDP MP Jenny Kwan said the energy adviser program was too little, too late. “They of course, are… way behind on action that's necessary to address the climate emergency,” she said.
Recruiting more energy advisers and federal loans and grants for homeowners are a good start, said Brendan Haley, policy director of Efficiency Canada, but retrofit programs will need to ramp up in coming years to have the desired impact.
It is wonderful that some of the seniors may be able to book an appointment with the help of family, friends, or support workers; sadly, there are those who unfortunately do not have access to such a support network I have heard from some of the elderly seniors in Vancouver East who are concerned that they will have difficulty in registering for the vaccine due to language barriers.
To help facilitate access to this potentially life-saving immunization for vulnerable people, especially for the elderly where language and mobility is an issue, I would like to offer two suggestions for your consideration.