Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Conservative MP Alex Ruff is weighing in on the Federal Liberal Government’s $452 billion 2022 budget, saying it needs to do more to address housing, jobs and defence spending.
“Although the 2022 Budget contains some needed support that will help constituents within Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound there are some serious shortfalls,” says Ruff.
The budget includes $4 billion for a Housing Accelerator Fund which aims to help build 100,000 affordable units over the next five years. It is also allocating $1.5 billion to address homelessness through 6,000 new units.
Ruff says, “It does include some welcome and long overdue investments in things like homelessness. However, it doesn’t address the issue by any stretch especially with our housing market. In the last three years alone, prices in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound have risen by 115 per cent, just shy of $760,000.”
He says, “The housing accelerator fund promises to construct $100,000 homes over the next five years across Canada when according to the estimates from the Department of Finance, we need 3.5 million units in order to resolve our housing shortage across the country. I think more needs to be done so we can have affordable homes especially in our riding.”
Freeland announced Thursday, the economy has recovered over 112 per cent of the jobs that were lost in the first few months of the pandemic.
Ruff says, “Despite them saying we’ve gotten back to pre-pandemic numbers, we still have over 1,200 jobs just locally in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound that are unfilled.”
As for the agriculture industry, Ruff says, “Some modernizations to Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program are welcomed, although it appears the implementation of these changes will come too late to be beneficial to many agri-food businesses in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound. These businesses rely on assistance from the TFW program but are facing undue burdens when accessing the program, which is hurting local businesses. The overall lack of attention for Canada’s agri-food sector in the 2022 budget is concerning.”
Meanwhile, on defence spending, the Liberal Government announced $8 billion in defence spending which includes $500 million for Ukraine, about $100 million to strengthen defence leadership and modernize the military justice system, and about $893 million to enhance cybersecurity capabilities. On April 6th, the day before the budget was released, MPs voted 303 to 27 (NDP and Green all voted against) to support a motion from Conservative Critic Kerry-Lynne Findlay. It called on the government to increase defence spending to at least 2 per cent of our GDP, to meet Canada’s 2014 Wales Summit commitment to NATO.
Ruff says, “This budget only gets us to 1.5 in the next number of years. The commitment is not laid out as they just voted that they said they would.”
Ruff adds, “The $500 million in military aid to Ukraine is definitely welcome and needed and hopefully they can get that out the door sooner than later, however I’m very disappointed they referred to an update defence policy review but there’s no deadline for that and at the same time, no mention of the necessary and long-awaited foreign policy review.”
Ruff says he noted as much in the House of Commons last week saying, Canada needs a non-partisan foreign policy review done before updating its defence policy because, Ruff says, the two are interlinked.