44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 9, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is a huge privilege and honour to rise today on the budget implementation act, Bill C-19. I am also very grateful to serve the federal NDP as the critic for mental health and harm reduction.
There are many things in this budget that are a movement toward progress. There are many areas of this budget where there are huge shortfalls. I really want to follow up on what my colleague for Mississauga—Erin Mills spoke about recently, which is housing, because housing has such an impact not just on the economy for small businesses, workers and volunteers in our communities but also on people's mental health, especially when we are seeing the skyrocketing rates of real estate and rents that are out of touch for Canadians. The people who are the most impacted are workers, seniors and those who are the most marginalized. People who were not homeless before are becoming homeless because they are being pushed out onto the streets.
In my home riding and the community I live in, Port Alberni, we saw real estate go up in the last year by 46%. In Oceanside, it went up 34%. The average price of a home is over $1 million, yet we have seen wages remain fairly stagnant. I am probably the only member of Parliament in the House who, after being elected, moved away from his home community to better serve his riding and cannot actually move home. This is because the price of real estate in my home community of Tofino has gone up 400% since I was elected. This not only has an impact on me, but we can imagine the workers in Tofino and how impossible it is for them, or for the small businesses that require workers.
I know this is a huge challenge. We heard solutions come from the Liberals and questions from the Conservatives about housing, but they are fairly consistent in that they have centred their efforts around the free market. The free market will not solve these problems.
I grew up in the seventies and eighties in Victoria, British Columbia. I am really proud of where I grew up and the community I lived in. It took leadership and worked with the federal government to develop some co-ops. As we know, Canada went on a robust co-op housing program that was actually developed through a minority government of the Liberals and the federal NDP working together in the early seventies under our leader David Lewis. It was that agreement that got the national housing program going. They started to develop about 25,000 units on average throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
I was really fortunate to grow up in a co-op housing development. My dad was a transmission mechanic. He still is, actually, and is in his early seventies. He has been working on transmissions for over 50 years. I am so proud of my dad. My mom worked at HRDC as a clerk. They were middle class, if we want to call it that. I am proud of my mom, and it was Mother's Day yesterday. To my mom I say that I know I was not home, but happy Mother's Day. I love my mom and thank her so much. To all the moms in our community, I give thanks.
My parents worked really hard. The co-op was unique in that it provided safe, secure and affordable housing for my mom and dad and my brother Rob and I, but it also provided safe and secure housing for seniors, single parents, people of lower incomes and people on income assistance. I can go back to that co-op in Victoria to this day and some of the friends I grew up with are grandparents and live in that co-op. Their kids and their grandkids live in that co-op.
The problem is that there are not enough co-ops anymore. When the government pulled out of building co-ops and pulled out of the national housing strategy in the early 1990s, we lost 25,000 units a year. We are talking about over 750,000 units to this day in the shortfall of co-op housing.
I was visiting my friends John and Beth last night, who live in co-op housing here in Ottawa. They received safe and secure housing. They were on a wait-list for four years, terrified, which impacted their mental health. They were working two or three jobs and trying to figure out how they were going to make ends meet. They wanted to make sure their daughter Kira could live in a co-op, but they are not even taking names now in the co-op where they live because the wait-list is so long.
In fact, my daughter, who just graduated from the University of Ottawa, dropped me off today and she said, “Dad, I can't talk about ever owning a home, because I don't want to be disappointed.” It is just terrible that this is what we are leaving our children and the people in our communities.
We can look to Europe. First, I will go back to where we are at. We were at 10% of our housing being non-market housing in the 1970s and 1980s. Now we are at about 3%. We can look to Europe, which is at 30%, and Vienna, which is at 60%, because they understand how important it is to have safe, secure and affordable housing. The free market is not going to give us that. It has not. We are developing very rapidly on Vancouver Island.
I sat in local government in Tofino. I remember how frustrated we were when the federal government downloaded to provinces, which then further downloaded to local governments. I was part of the initial Tofino housing corporation. I am proud that today we are finally building a development that we talked about 20 years ago. Here we were, this small local government: this small municipality was trying to figure out how we were going to develop non-market housing to meet the needs of our community.
What a task for small communities to take on. They do not have the expertise or aptitude, and often do not have the leadership. They do not know how to do it. I can assure the House that if the federal government puts money on the table, local governments will access it. They will find the land.
Our province of British Columbia is building half of the non-market housing in the country right now. It needs a federal partner to go to the lengths it is going to. The province just had applications for over 12,500 shovel-ready units by local governments: local non-profit housing. They had funding for 2,500. It would have been great to see the federal government pick up the other 2,500. We are halfway there on shovel-ready developments that could help make sure people have affordable housing.
I get frustrated. I look to my community. We have a non-profit housing group in Ucluelet. Randy Oliwa called me the other day and said, “Gord, we can't even get an answer on a $5,000 planning grant to get things off the ground.” The Beaufort Hotel was being purchased. It is a hotel that already has low-barrier housing and private sector housing. The group made an application through the rapid housing initiative. The applicants were told that it looked very positive, but they got denied because they were oversubscribed. They had $5 billion in applications and they only had $1 billion on the table.
They were told to reapply, so they reapplied and got denied again. They decided to apply through the women and children shelter and transitional housing fund, and then got denied again. They brought in Lookout, a great partner from Vancouver, to develop non-market housing and ensure that the people living in this building were not going to get punted and thrown out on the streets. Again, they got denied. Now they are using the co-investment fund. The steps and hurdles these groups have to go through to make sure people have affordable housing are just ridiculous.
I want to speak a little about how important housing is, not just for small businesses, workers and people in our communities, but also to ensure that people are not suffering: those who are on the streets and who may be living with a substance use disorder. I was at a low-barrier housing unit in Duncan, B.C., where they built these sleeper cottages. I met a man who had his first home. It was basic needs. It was not low barrier; it was no barrier. For the first time in his adult life, he told me, he was not homeless or living in prison. He was on opioid therapy as a result, which he could never access living as a homeless person. He was treated like a criminal: He was moved from park to park, living in fear and not sleeping.
Another woman I met at the same low-barrier housing was moving to low-barrier from no-barrier housing. As a result of having that, she had been sober for eight months. For the first time in her adult life, she has a chance. Without housing, how can people have mental health? When people are homeless, they do not sleep.
The Prime Minister's goal to house 50% of the homeless people in the next 10 years is not good enough. It is not good enough. We need to move rapidly. We need to build non-market housing, and the government needs to step up its game. We need all parties to work collectively on this, because the free market simply will not solve the problems of our needs right now. Housing is a basic human need. It is a human rights issue. It is an economic issue. It is a social issue.
I have not even tapped into indigenous housing, because I am being told I am running out of time. I could speak another 10 minutes on that alone. I hope we can work together in the House to scale things up rapidly.
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Madam Speaker, I would say we are getting a start and we are talking about thousands now when it comes to co-op housing, but it falls far short of the 25,000 units we were building per year in the 1970s and 1980s. That is still 19,000 short of what we were doing then. How are we going to make up the gap?
Right now, the federal government's plan in terms of filling the workforce labour market shortage is to bring in new immigrants, but it does not tie housing to immigration. There are huge problems when it comes to the lack of cohesive planning, when it comes to housing and ensuring that we have a strong workforce.
In terms of indigenous housing, there is some money in the budget, which New Democrats helped negotiate, to get this agreement going. We talked about the agreement as the floor. We have much work to do. I have lots more to say on this, and I will.
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Madam Speaker, we have skyrocketing inflation, but we also have a skyrocketing concentration of wealth and skyrocketing inequality. We have seen grocery store prices and fuel prices go up. We see bank fees go up, and yet banks are having record profits. Grocery stores have record profits. Oil companies have record profits. How is that flowing down to seniors? How is that flowing down to Canadians? It is flowing down in increased costs to them and increased profits to the richest Canadians and shareholders.
What we need is some balance. Corporate taxes have gone from 28% to 15%, and yet people cannot find a place to live in our country. We need to bring a median to this situation and it needs to happen rapidly. Fairness is not happening right now. Inequality is skyrocketing, and we need to address that. It is part of the solution when it comes to taking on inflation and ensuring that people get the best support they can, and there is money. We can make sure that the wealthiest people can pay their fair share. That is a beginning in taking on this crisis, and we absolutely need to do more.
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Madam Speaker, it seems there is commonality in that not just veterans, but seniors are being targeted, and there needs to be more work. The gold-digger clause absolutely needs to be revoked. It is discriminatory to Canada's veterans, the people who put their lives on the line so that we have a fair and free society. We are indebted to them, and we owe them the benefits that every Canadian deserves. This is an unfair penalty on the very people we should be supporting the most.
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