From connecting at community events to chats on your doorsteps – all throughout the summer, I’ve been grateful to hear from so many of you about your most pressing concerns. This has included everything from ensuring essentials – like housing – are affordable, to protecting our children’s future, to pushing the Liberal government to keep its promises.
Now that I’m back in Ottawa, it’s those concerns that guide my work in Parliament – here’s a bit more about each:
First, we need to the address the rapidly rising cost of housing in our community. In addition to my push to end incentives for large corporate investors who raising rents on previously affordable housing, I’m doubling down on my calls for rapid investments in new affordable units. This includes my new motion to fix the criteria for federal affordable housing funding, which currently allows for the vast majority of federal housing money to go to units that aren’t affordable.
We also have to reduce the strain on community infrastructure, from housing to employment, that has been worsened by exponential increases in temporary residents – while protecting these residents from exploitation. To-date, the federal government has taken up four of ten measures I’ve proposed with respect to international students – including doubling the money they must have in the bank before their arrive in Canada, and reducing the number of hours they can work each week to better focus on school. I will continue to press for the adoption of the remaining measures my motion recommended.
Second, I will continue to call for proven climate solutions that save folks money on the essentials – like funding to improve service and reduce fares on public transit, alongside free heat pumps and other incentives to retrofit our homes – all of which could be paid for by a windfall tax on the excess profits of Canada’s biggest polluters.
Finally, I’m continuing to advocate for the Liberal government to follow through on its promises. This includes fixing the Canada Disability Benefit so that it fulfills their promise to lift people with disabilities above the poverty line. I will also continue to build cross-party support to more equitable distribute federal arts funding across the country. In our community, this would close an over $9 million gap when compared to the average of areas like Montreal, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. I will also continue to call for accountability on the three-quarters of a billion dollars the federal government committed to a two-way all-day GO train service from Kitchener to Toronto – a project promised to our community more than a decade ago!