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House Hansard - 180

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 19, 2023 02:00PM
Context: House Hansard - 180 - Apr/19/23
Mr. Irek Kusmierczyk (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, Lib.)
  • Apr/19/23 7:30:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague and friend from Kitchener Centre for the excellent question on an issue that both of us truly care deeply about. Just last week, I met with over a dozen stakeholders and community leaders in my community of Windsor—Tecumseh at a round table focused on the issue of affordable housing, and that includes housing for those experiencing homelessness. Our government has made housing a priority since the very beginning of our mandate. That is why in 2017 we launched the landmark national housing strategy, a first in Canadian history and a return to federal involvement in housing. Prior to this, the federal government had not been seriously involved in housing for decades, and we knew we had much work to catch up on. The range of programs under the strategy addressed the needs of people across the housing spectrum, from building new shelter units to supporting the purchase of a first home to support directly for renters. The rapid housing initiative is an example of one such program having tremendous success. The initiative helps people most in need, like people who are homeless or at risk of becoming so. This program provides grants to support the rapid creation of permanent affordable housing units. It has continually exceeded its targets, and now, with the third round, we hope to create a total of nearly 15,000 units. The national housing co-investment fund is another program lifting people out of homelessness. Among its achievements, it has yielded over 3,700 shelter beds, 3,500 supportive housing units and 1,600 transitional housing beds so far. However, I do not want to talk about numbers here. I would rather talk about people. These are people like Emily from Vancouver, who was homeless and struggled with addictions. She found a home at Union Gospel Mission's Women and Families Centre, and she says the support she received changed her life. The centre was built with funding from the national co-investment fund. There is also Bill, a Canadian Forces veteran in Ottawa who went from being homeless to living in Veterans' House. That project was also financed by the co-investment fund. Projects like these are successful because they acknowledge the complex nature of homelessness and the range of factors that lead to it. Our government's homelessness strategy, Reaching Home, takes a whole-of-government approach to the issue. We also work closely with partners in other orders of government and elsewhere in the housing sector. Our government takes a human rights-based approach to housing because we fundamentally believe that access to housing is indeed a human right. This is unlike the Conservative Party, which has no plan for housing, did nothing when it was in government and still will not say whether it believes housing is a human right. This should be something that all parties agree on.
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