Mr. Speaker, the motion before the House calls on the government to create 500,000 units of quality affordable housing within 10 years and to commit in budget 2019 to completing 250,000 of those units within five years. This is not a new idea. This was tried in the province of Ontario in the early nineties, when the then government created non-profit housing corporations. It sounded good at the time. They were going to build the types of housing accommodations being suggested by the motion.
The problem was that when the public found out that the government was funnelling money into these non-profit housing corporations, which had consultants, builders, people doing retrofits and repairing buildings and building new buildings, the costs shot up tremendously and cost the government a lot of money. The program did not work. It was an absolute failure.
Has the government considered or reviewed the non-profit housing philosophy that existed in the province of Ontario in the 1990s?