Thank you all for coming.
Let me first of all say how impressed I was with your presentations. While you all have an interest in housing, you all spoke about poverty more generally. You gave us some ideas on human rights, the child tax benefit, early learning, and child care. These are all good ideas, some of which we've heard before, but all of which we need to continue to hear.
Wherever poverty starts for people, whether it's mental health, addictions, education, or literacy, housing is at the core of this issue. More and more we are realizing, as a society, that it's not a question of whether we can afford to combat poverty, but rather, whether we can afford not to combat poverty. On the housing side, that's particularly acute. There is a cost attached to making sure we build affordable housing, but there's also a cost attached to not doing it. In the last week, I've heard reports of rising suicides and family violence. We're seeing people go to food banks, furniture banks. They're going lots of places for assistance, so we're having an impact.
I think it's important to understand that we had poverty long before we had a recession, but the recession is an opportunity to focus attention on poverty. There are more people who are hurting, and we have to take that into account. But we ought not to believe that once we come out of this recession everything will be okay, because we have not dealt with poverty as well as we should have. There've been some improvements along the way, like the child tax benefit. There have been some investments, but not much on the housing side.
So I want to thank you for the presentations you made. They're serious and they're very helpful.
I'd like to start with my friends in Co-operative Housing. Your organization does some very good work, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my friend JoAnn Bidgood from Nova Scotia, who's a great advocate, very strong on housing issues, and a solid supporter of cooperative housing.
I want to go to one of the points you made about the accountability for federal housing transfers, which is a very important point. You said that at present there is no direct link between federal housing spending and reducing core housing need. I wonder if you could expand on that. Just talk about the accountability framework and what should be done.