I would like to comment on the affordable housing part. I'm also a member of the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia.
We examined the Nova Scotia poverty reduction strategy with regard to affordable housing, and certainly it doesn't go far. It basically sounds as though it's just an introduction of existing programs, and as we all know, the existing programs are not really working, looking at the numbers. We produced the Community Action and Homelessness community report card on homelessness, so we have the numbers of existing affordable housing units in the province and how many were created over the last 10 years, and this surely indicates that it's not enough.
The poverty reduction strategy, in my opinion, is not a strategy. It doesn't have any targets. It doesn't have any money behind it. Even from other provinces charging the strategies.... There is already a lot of criticism coming out in the discussions I'm taking part in.
This is a ten-year plan. We should be really mindful that we are dealing with people and people's lives, and they cannot take ten years to solve a problem. At a conference in Calgary one author really got me thinking. We are doing all this work, and we were all happy to have a strategy, but we have to stop sometimes too. Are we doing the right thing, or are we just following a model from the States, which sounded so exciting--the ten-year plan to end homelessness, the ten-year plan to end poverty? Some of these things are like slavery. He said slavery wasn't ended by saying, “Okay, 25% of you stay on for a while, 10% I release this year, and in five years 25% more will be released, and it will be ended.” We have to make a decision ourselves. Do we want to end poverty? Then it has to end right now, not in ten years; it has to end now.
This is my criticism with the ten-year plan in general. Our poverty reduction strategy for Nova Scotia seems to me to be a cut-and-paste from existing programs. That's all it is, so it's really a piece of paper. As long as there is no passion and money behind it, if we want to end this, it's just hot air for me.
I feel strongly. Everything is, of course, money-related, but here in Halifax, for instance, we're looking at over 200 homeless people, while 1,200 individuals accepted the shelter system in the last year. Let's say 240 people are living in the shelter system. Shouldn't we be able to solve this problem and create 200 units of affordable supportive housing? We are able to do that. With a national housing strategy with the right money behind it, we would be able to solve this in two years.
We don't need ten years and we don't need a poverty reduction strategy. We should be more pragmatic. That's my opinion.