Last month, I shared the priorities I heard from our community this summer. Today, I’d like to report back to you how I’ve been addressing each in the weeks since Parliament has resumed.
This summer I held a townhall on the Canada Disability Benefit at KW AccessAbility, where I promised that I would share our petition, signed by thousands, urging the governing party to keep their promises to lift people with disabilities out of poverty and fix the Canada Disability Benefit. On day one, I did just that. My team and I then followed up by amplifying what I’d heard from people with disabilities in my submission on the draft regulations for the Canada Disability Benefit – directly to the Minister of Diversity, Inclusion, and Persons with Disabilities.
I also pushed for follow-through on other promises, like the two-way all-day GO train service from Kitchener to Toronto that our community was promised over a decade ago. Given the federal government has already committed three-quarters of a billion dollars to the project, and that over a year of advocacy still hasn’t resulted in the answers our community deserves, I put our call for accountability directly to the Prime Minister in Parliament.
Next, on housing, I started by raising an idea the team at Habitat for Humanity shared with me this summer – removing the HST on non-profit homeownership builds – at committee. It’s an incredibly reasonable idea, especially given that for-profit developers building apartments already have this exemption and it could be paid for by removing the tax exemptions large corporate investors currently take advantage of – just as I proposed two years ago in Motion 71.
I also continued my push for affordability solutions in Parliament– urging the federal government to address Big Oil’s price gouging and with a windfall tax on their record breaking profits – and generate $4.2 billion to fund essential measures that will save people in our community money and help our planet. Measures that could include free heat pumps and other incentives for deep energy home retrofits, or investments into public transit to both reduce fares and increase service.
I’ll be continuing to push for action on these, and other priority areas you’ve shared with me in the coming weeks and months.