Mr. Speaker, I appreciate having the opportunity to participate in the budget debate.
I want to split my time with the hon. member for London—Fanshawe.
I would like to talk about something that is absent in the budget and that is any action on housing and homelessness. I hope, Mr. Speaker, you will not rule me out of order for addressing something that is clearly not in the budget. I plan on speaking on the problems with this budget and I see this as one of the fundamental problems with the budget.
We have a crisis in housing and homelessness in Canada. It is not just me or New Democrats who say that. Last fall the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Mr. Miloon Kothari, visited Canada and met with people across Canada in many communities. In his preliminary findings he said the following:
Everywhere that I visited in Canada, I met people who are homeless and living in inadequate and insecure housing conditions. On this mission I heard of hundreds of people who have died as a direct result of Canada's nation wide housing crisis.
In its most recent periodic review of Canada's compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the United Nations used strong language to label housing, homelessness and inadequate housing as a national emergency:
Everything I witnessed on this mission confirms the deep and devastating impact of this national crisis on the lives of women, youth, children and men.
He went on to say:
Canada is one of the richest countries in the world, which makes the prevalence of this crisis all the more striking.
That is not a New Democrat speaking. That is a United Nations representative who was here in Canada doing a report on the housing crisis, and that is his term, “housing crisis”.
That same analysis has been echoed by report after report here at home and by community after community. In fact on my desk in my office I have a stack of reports, which is now at least a foot high, that have been issued in the last five months on housing in Canada. All of them report on the crisis that exists here in Canada.
Those reports are from organizations like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the big city mayors, women's organizations in the three northern territories, the Citywide Housing Coalition in Vancouver, the Burnaby Task Force on Homelessness, and many other organizations in almost every community across the country. They all recognize that there is a crisis and that it is not being addressed. They all recognize that the federal government has a role to play in finding the solution to that crisis.
The Canadian cooperative housing association said today that four million Canadians live in inadequate, unaffordable, insecure housing, or are without housing. That number is phenomenal, but represents the extent of the crisis we are facing.
Yet we have a budget that does nothing to address this kind of crisis. Absolutely nothing in the budget will alleviate these conditions or ensure that something is done to address the crisis.
I should clarify that there is one measure in the budget and we hear it constantly from the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development. He points out that there is $110 million for the Canadian Mental Health Commission to do five pilot projects in Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, Montreal and Moncton to deal with mental health issues.
We know that some of these are likely to deal with mental health and housing issues, but not all of them. There is some money for pilot projects, but we do not need more studies. We do not need more pilot projects. I am not saying that these pilot projects are not important, but when it comes to housing, what we need is a program that actually builds homes for people in need in Canada, not another study and not another pilot project.
In this budget what do we get? We get this pilot project money, but we do not get a national housing program. There is nothing here to establish ongoing funding that would address this crisis in Canada.
We do not even get a commitment to renew some of the current programs that exist for housing in Canada. There is no commitment to renew the residential rehabilitation assistance program, RRAP.
There is nothing to indicate a renewal of the homelessness partnership strategy which is a key program we had to fight tooth and nail for earlier in Parliament. The member for London—Fanshawe led organizations all across Canada to push the Conservatives to finally commit to do something for homelessness, when they were not about to renew the former SCPI program and they finally relented and renewed this program.
There is nothing in this budget that would renew the affordable housing program. Those three programs all expire in fiscal year 2008. When doing a budget that looks forward, one would think that if it were intended to renew these programs, it would have appeared in this budget, to ensure that the organizations that depend on this and the people who depend on these programs could do some planning around what was available in the future.
We are going to be back in the same position of having to fight tooth and nail to see these programs restored or to see the commitment continued, like we had to last time. Organizations are not going to be able to do the kind of planning they need to do. People working in this area are going to be in danger of losing their jobs and people who are homeless will not know if there is something coming down the pike to ensure they have a place to live.
There is that commitment. It should have been there. There is no program in this budget that actually will build homes for Canadians. That is a huge failing of the budget. Earlier, a Liberal member said there was nothing offensive about this budget. The fact that this national housing crisis is ignored in the budget is absolutely offensive. That Liberals can vote for or ignore a budget like this when it contains an offensive provision like this is outrageous.
Why is it outrageous? Why is it so offensive? Because we have so-called surpluses. I think it is a bit of a misnomer to talk about a surplus when we have the kind of housing deficit we have in Canada, when we have thousands and thousands of Canadians who are without homes to live in. How can we talk about a government surplus of money over programming when that kind of deficit exists?
How can we even consider giving further corporate tax cuts of $14.6 billion in the last little while from the government alone? There are commitments for corporate tax cuts that extend years into the future. It would be so nice if we could commit to a national housing program that extends years in the future, but we cannot even make a commitment beyond this fiscal year. That is absolutely outrageous.
Why we can do it for corporate tax cuts and not for a national housing program is absolutely beyond me. I think it basically comes down to a lack of political will. We can do it. We can say that the military gets increased funding and has long term funding for years, for the same reason, which is so military planning can happen. If we can do it for military planning and military spending, we should be able to do it for our housing spending to address this housing and homelessness crisis in Canada.
It is unbelievable that the government could brag about reducing the fiscal capacity of government by $200 billion over the next five years when the kinds of needs represented by homelessness exist in Canada. We know that the health and security of Canadians are at risk when they are homeless. There is absolutely no excuse for gutting the fiscal capacity of government when that kind of need exists in this country.
How the Liberals can support this is absolutely beyond me, but it is no wonder since back in the 1990s they were the people who cut the last national housing program that existed in Canada, a program that came about in the 1970s when the NDP was in a balance of power situation with a Liberal minority. We managed to impose that national program on unwilling Liberals at that time. I guess it is no wonder that the Liberals can deal away a national housing program or any concern about the homeless in Canada in this budget.
The Liberals also gutted CMHC. It was one of the most creative housing agencies in the world years ago. It has been absolutely gutted. The Liberals commercialized its mandate, saying that CMHC should worry more about mortgage insurance than it should about housing development. It has done that and it has done it in spades. It makes billions of dollars every year, but none of it goes back into housing development.
The NDP has a plan. We believe that a national housing program has to be long term. We have called for a 10 year national housing program that would actually build homes in Canada. We have talked about 200,000 new and affordable social housing units. We have talked about renovating another 100,000 existing affordable units and also 40,000 rent subsidies.
We have put forward a national housing bill of rights that would establish the right to housing for all Canadians. To ensure that right is put forward and enacted, we have put in a mechanism for coming up with that kind of national program. We believe that is fundamental. It is one reason why we are voting against this budget.
We also believe that we have the capacity in Canada to address the homelessness crisis. We will not let Conservatives or Liberals tell us that it cannot be done.