- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Courtenay—Alberni
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $148,159.67
- Government Page
- May/7/24 5:46:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in the almost nine years that the government has been in power, we have seen that it has not reinstated co-op housing and scaled it up to the 25,000 units a year we were building in the seventies and eighties. The Conservatives built none.
We were able to get the Liberals to come gradually on, with a small amount in the last budget, but we are still not seeing that built. Now we have a pile of money in housing, but they have not told us how many units they are going to build of co-op housing. We are short almost 700,000 units. One just needs to go outside to see what this looks like; there are homeless people everywhere. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have a free market approach to an affordable housing crisis. There is nowhere in the world where the free market has solved an affordable housing problem. It is a myth and a falsity, and it will not happen.
Will my colleague please tell us when the government is going to get back into non-market housing, because it is going to be required instead of these free market trinkets, and actually build some non-market housing to solve this affordable housing crisis?
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- May/2/24 8:11:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his service to our country as an officer in the Canadian Air Force. His office is right across the hall from mine, so we spend a lot of time together, and I appreciate his work.
We know that no veteran should be living on the street. Someone who has served our country should not be homeless. We know that 67% of homeless people in my community of Port Alberni are indigenous. As my colleague from Churchill—Keewatinook Aski just raised, even if we were to double indigenous housing right now there would still not be enough housing to house indigenous people. That is absolutely shameful in a country like ours.
I have talked about, and the government talks about this in its budget, using public lands, but they have to be in public hands. It should prioritize military personnel, veterans and indigenous peoples.
I asked this question earlier, and a Conservative colleague said Conservatives were waiting until their platform gets rolled out in the next election. I get stuff done here all the time. I am not waiting for the next election to get things done. I think we can work together now. I do not think we can wait until an election next year.
I am putting my hand out and extending an olive branch to my colleague in the hope that he will work with me to put pressure on the government to do the right thing when it comes to public lands and getting our priorities in order. Will my colleague accept that olive branch instead of waiting until an election is called?
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- Oct/30/23 6:11:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am looking for what the plan is. If the plan is to put pressure on local governments to create density, what are the Conservatives going to do to ensure that a large part of that housing is going to be non-market housing?
Right now in this country, there is 3.5% non-market housing and 30% corporate ownership of housing, something I am sure the Conservatives are very supportive of. Europe has 30% non-market housing, but if we go to Europe, we will not see homelessness.
I want to work with my colleague. He is a friend. I respect a lot of the work we have done together on mental health and addictions. I want to hear what the Conservatives' plan is so that we can find some common ground in this place. That is really what is needed right now from all parties. I think there is a willingness, but we have to find a pathway to get there.
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- Oct/30/23 5:55:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the Liberals try to pat themselves on the back and say that everything is great, but all we have to do is go outside and we will find homeless people everywhere. It is not working.
We lost 800,000 units under the Conservatives. They failed to deliver. In fact, they said that they were going to commit to making sure there was housing for 50% of homeless people within a decade. That is not good enough. The member before him started talking about how they will not be able to house everybody.
What we need is a wartime-like effort with a commitment and a timeline so that we actually do build housing for everybody. However, someone at home is listening to this government saying, “Sorry, we cannot promise that we are going to make sure you have a roof over your head.” What kind of country do we live in?
Will my colleague and his government put forward a plan with a timeline to ensure that every Canadian in this country has a roof over their head? We need a wartime-like effort. We need it urgently. It is impacting everybody.
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- Oct/30/23 5:39:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I grew up in co-op housing, so I know how important it is. Back when I grew up in the era of non-market housing, we were actually building non-market housing, at about 25,000 units a year. This was before the Liberals pulled out of the national housing strategy and then the Conservatives carried on with building nothing.
Right now, we are at 3.5% non-market housing. Europe is at 30%. Can members guess where we are at 30%? It is for REITs, the corporatized ownership of residential housing. We should not have that. Long Beach Auto in my hometown of Tofino is closing its doors because the owner cannot find staff housing. His brother-in-law, Ryan, who owns Mobius Books, says his biggest challenge is homeless people everywhere. It is impacting small business.
The free market is having a free ride. While the Liberals are claiming victory, are they going to finally step back in and make up ground on non-market housing in this country?
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- Jun/21/23 8:10:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have heard the Liberals say that they have everybody's back. I do not know about other members, but where I live, when I drive around, I see more homeless people than I have ever seen in my entire life. It can be seen right across the country. At least with the Conservatives, we know they are not going to build purpose-built housing. However, that is what the government promised. It is building approximately 7,000 units a year, on average. There are 300,000 people who have core housing needs right now. How is that having people's backs?
This is a crisis. When is the government going to stop propping up its wealthy friends and its real estate income trusts and make sure it invests that money into making sure people have a place to live?
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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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- May/2/22 11:24:07 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I always enjoy my colleague's interventions.
We have talked a lot in the House about the housing crisis in this country. We keep hearing about incentives for developers and different programs for new buyers. We went from 10% non-market housing in the 1970s and 1980s, before the Liberals pulled out of the national housing program, to what we are today at 3%. Europe is at 30%, and Vienna is at 60%. We know the Conservatives' priorities and Liberals' priorities are to get developers to build housing. We are glad to see some co-op housing. We are glad to see some movement on that in this recent budget.
Does my colleague agree that we need to rapidly scale up non-market housing and co-op housing to solve the housing crisis for workers and for people who are homeless, and look at models that are going to make sure people have housing security? We need to take a new approach in how we look at housing and see it not as an investment, but in making sure people have safe, secure and affordable housing.
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- Mar/4/22 12:26:27 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, we keep hearing about inflation. We have heard about the housing crisis. Right now in my riding housing has gone up over 40% in value just in one year, especially in Port Alberni. People are being pushed out. We need non-market housing. There have been several applications made to the federal government, but it continues to give them the shuffle. More and more people are displaced or homeless. Right now, we have an opportunity, a partnership of multi-stakeholders wanting to purchase a hotel in the Alberni Valley to house the hardest to house.
I might outline also that the Parole Board of Canada has written a letter of support for this proposal. It has outlined that there is not a single space for its clients to live when they are released through the federal parole system. That is very alarming and keeps the cycle of incarceration going.
Therefore, I am calling on the federal government, and I would ask the member if she agrees, to invest quickly into non-market housing to address this need.
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