Thank you for the reference to Ms. Bidgood. I'm sure she'll be very pleased to see her name in the record.
If you look back over the history of government involvement in affordable housing in Canada—and this goes way back to the post-war period, back when there were significantly large programs—the focus was generally on inputs rather than outcomes. In those days we used to talk about numbers of units in the ground, amounts of money actually going into housing budgets.
But even then, we never paid sufficient attention to the government statistics that tell us what levels of housing are needed. I referenced core housing need. That's not a number that comes from the stakeholders; core housing need is a term defined by the federal government. We have groups of people in core housing need, approximately 1.5 million households in Canada, which amounts to some four million people, yet we've never said that the money going in has to produce outputs at the other end. The outcomes must show that we're reducing those numbers.
But that's not happening. We seem to have adopted a scatter-shot approach, and this can lead cynical people, or even neutral observers, to ask why we even spend money on affordable housing programs if, since 1991, there's been no real change in core housing need. There's been a drop of only one percentage point. I think the reason is that we're focused on what goes in instead of what comes out. I think there was a policy parallel on the table with respect to health care spending and outcomes, and I think we need to adopt an outcomes approach to housing spending in this country. Until we do that, I think we're going to be all over the map.
Provinces do different things with money. The present government put $1.4 billion on the table in 2006, which was transferred in the form of housing trust funds to the provinces, with no strings attached. My own city, Ottawa, wanted to apply that to the general tax base, until housing advocates cried foul. Eventually it did go to housing. There have to be more strings attached. I think all parties will recognize this. Whether you're a fiscal conservative or a fiscal liberal, you want value for public investment, and the only way to do it is to insist on certain outcomes from the spending going in at the front end.