moved that Bill C-223, An Act to develop a national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Madam Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to support Bill C-223, an act to develop a national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income. This bill, in fact, addresses many of the critical issues that we are facing today, and I hope my colleagues will join the NDP in voting in favour of this bill and sending it to committee for consideration.
Before I go on, I would like to remind all of my colleagues in the House, across party lines, that every single party has committed to implementing all 231 calls for justice at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. One of the key calls for justice that is being advocated to end the ongoing genocide against indigenous women and girls is call for justice 4.5 to put in place a guaranteed income for indigenous peoples and for all other Canadians. My bill is merely heeding that call, particularly in support of ending gender-based violence for all people, including indigenous women.
This bill is essential because we know that Canada's current social safety net has become totally inadequate. I will give a couple of examples. The guaranteed income supplement for seniors is an income guarantee that is not livable. As we hear disability advocates lobby government across the country with the new disability benefit, once again, what is required to live in dignity is not being provided.
We have income guarantees in this country. My bill is actually not offering up a new idea. What my bill would do, however, along with over 100,000 advocates across the country, is urge elected officials to ensure that everybody in Canada has what they need to live in dignity, and that is not happening. According to a recent study by Statistics Canada, one in 10 people lives in poverty in Canada as of last year. We have also seen a disturbing rise in child poverty in recent years. Some of the poorest children in this country, in an urban centre, live in my riding of Winnipeg Centre, and even though we have been talking about how to lift people up in Canada, nobody has put anything on the table that achieves it beyond cheap political sound bites.
Ed Broadbent, in 1989, passed a motion to end child poverty by the year 2000. However, here we are with piecemeal approaches to deal with poverty that contributes directly to a gender-based violence crisis that has been noted in some urban centres as an epidemic. We talk about families struggling to buy food. In 1989, Ed Broadbent called for the eradication of poverty in the year 2000. We are now in the year 2024 and inequality is increasing, as we see a growing disparity between the ultrarich and those who are barely making ends meet, if they are.
We are seeing a rise, for the first time, in people becoming unhoused. Families are rolling onto the streets. Why? It is not that we do not have a solution that has been studied, as I will speak to, but it is that members of Parliament have not joined in unity and political will to uphold human rights in this country, to uphold our Canadian Charter of Rights and to ensure that nobody has to live in poverty.
Poverty is something I have called one of the most violent human rights violations. If we want to talk about a mental health crisis in this country, we have one. I can tell members that when we do not provide people with their basic human rights, such as housing, as my colleague from Nunavut brought up today, access to clean drinking water, food security or the ability to know that the next day one would be able to survive, that is bad for one's mental health. It is guised in the House, as I hear lately, as this visceral, cruel rhetoric around people struggling, particularly those with addictions, and around poor-bashing, bashing people who are already down instead of talking about comprehensive solutions to lift people up.
It is for these reasons, for the things that I see every day on the streets of Winnipeg Centre and around the country, for the wonderful people who surround me, for the human beings living in encampments and are my constituents, whom I visit, have relationships with and have respect for, I put forward this bill. If we are going to complain about people living in encampments and about people struggling with mental health, if we are going to talk about issues around ending gender-based violence, I do not want to hear about it in this place anymore, unless people are willing to do what they need to do to make sure that people can live in dignity.
In the case of violence, should people choose to leave, they should have the financial resources to do so. They should have a guaranteed livable basic income in addition to other programs and supports meant to meet specific and special needs as my bill stipulates, such as affordable housing with rent geared to income and extra benefits for persons with disabilities so that they have what they need to pay for extra costs, for medications and for things to help them physically should they need them.
I am offering us an opportunity to do the right thing and lift people out of poverty, including the number of children in care in my riding. They age out of care and, at age 18, get dropped off at the Salvation Army without any income or housing, and we wonder why things are the way they are today.
Then I have to listen to Conservatives, even though as a teacher, I know that families and children have been struggling with hunger longer than the last 10 years. I know that families have had housing insecurity, longer than the last 10 years, that has been made worse by Conservative and by Liberal governments that have failed to invest in affordable social housing with rent geared to income and that have failed to provide people with income guarantees that allow them to live in dignity.
We can do better. That is why I put forward this bill. For anybody over the age of 17, including students, refugee claimants, temporary foreign migrant workers, kids who would age out of care into income insecurity and without housing, and any seniors in my riding who are currently on the verge of being houseless, it would provide them what they need, especially for women.
Many seniors who worked in the unpaid care economy and who do not have pensions cannot live off what they get from the guaranteed income supplement. Is this how we want seniors to live in this country? Is this how we want children to live in this country? Is this how we want the disability community to live in this country? We turn a blind eye to human rights violations, turn a blind eye to gender-based violence and turn a blind eye to ageism, targeting primarily women. We do not have to. A lot of people say this is going to cost a lot of money, so why implement a guaranteed livable basic income? We have inflation right now. It is out of control.
Let us talk about the high cost of poverty. I want to talk about, specifically, the Dauphin study in Manitoba that an NDP government put forward in the 1980s. What they found was that folks who participated in the program had higher rates of graduation and their mental health improved. In fact, although there were a lot of myths, which have not ever been proven by research, that people stopped working, what they found was that they saved in health care costs. What they found was they saved costs by not having to provide what was needed to support good mental health, which includes ensuring that people have what they need to live in dignity.
In research, a lot of the myths around guaranteed incomes do not add up. In fact, the Government of Ontario, in 2017, launched a basic income pilot that provided 4,000 low-income people with cash transfers to help with their cost of living. Observers found that work placements and community involvement actually increased, not decreased. School retention improved. Health outcomes, especially mental health, were more positive, as reported by program recipients, affirming the findings from the study in Dauphin in the 1980s.
It is not like Canada would be the first. In fact, there are countries around the world that have implemented a guaranteed livable basic income, where people feel the happiest, and, in fact, those countries have growing economies.
I do not want to hear in the House about the cost of living. I am tired of hearing poor bashing and bashing people with addictions in the most grotesque, pathologizing and stereotyping terms. I am so tired of governments talking about lifting people up when we have something before us that is a good economic policy and, in fact, is a cost saver.
If we do not have the political will to implement a guaranteed livable basic income, I question our commitment as parliamentarians to eradicating poverty in this country. I question our commitment as parliamentarians to doing what pretty much every single women's organization that deals with violence has stated very clearly, and I say “pretty much” because I have not talked to every one. We need a guaranteed livable basic income now.
It is through that, through respecting our charter and through respecting human rights, we will build a better country for all.
