Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to enter into this debate.
With respect to housing in Canada, as we all know, we are faced with an intense chronic housing crisis. In fact, I would argue that the Conservatives, when they were in government, were the ones who cancelled the co-op program, which is a proven model in Canada that provides safe, secure, affordable housing to community members. More than that, co-op housing provides a community within a community through that model. What did the Conservatives do in 1992? They cancelled the national co-op housing program.
Now, based on the discussion and the leader of the Conservatives, one would think they are going to be the saviour in addressing the housing crisis, but let us be clear: They Conservatives were the people who helped cause the housing crisis we are faced with today in this country. Of course, after the Conservatives cut funding for housing programs and eliminated the co-op program altogether, we had the Liberals come into office. What did they do? They cancelled the national affordable housing program in 1993, further escalating the housing crisis. The truth is that successive Liberal and Conservative governments failed Canadians. They failed to ensure that there was social housing built, and they failed to ensure that there was co-op housing built, to the point of where we are today.
I still remember, when I was in the community in 1993 working as a community legal advocate, the shock that went through my system and through our whole community when we heard that the government had cancelled the program. Part of my job was to try to assist people, including seniors, people with disabilities, indigenous people and women. There were women fleeing violence and women who needed housing because they were in a domestic violence situation. They needed housing for themselves and their children, and they were losing their children because they could not secure safe, affordable housing. It was not because they were bad parents, but because successive Liberal and Conservative federal governments walked away from them and did not provide the housing that was critically needed then.
Fast-forward to today, and where are we at? We have a situation where, just today, a report came out that in my community in Vancouver East and in the greater Vancouver area, it was found in the most recent study that the homelessness count had increased by 30% from the last count. The truth is that, in many ways, I do not need a report to tell me so, although having that data is really important, because I see it in the community with the encampments that have surfaced. It is everywhere. It has proliferated everywhere. In my riding of Vancouver East, we have a permanent encampment. What is wrong with this picture? We have to ask this question.
Why is it that successive Liberal and Conservative governments have allowed this to happen? It is unjustifiable. Housing is for people to live in; it is not a commodity for investors to use to turn a bigger and bigger profit. That is what has happened over the years since the Liberals and Conservatives walked away from co-op and social housing. They allow the market to flourish and then to benefit from it at the expense of people who need homes. Not only are people unhoused; renters are also getting renovicted. Seniors on fixed income, long-time tenants in a building, are being displaced and renovicted, and they will no longer have access to a home. They cannot afford a home. They will no longer be able to live in the place where they have lived for many years. This was allowed under both Liberals and Conservatives and was escalated, I would say, by their bad housing policy and by their walking away from the people in our communities that are in need.
We will hear the Liberals say that in 2017, they entered back into the housing environment with the national housing strategy. If anybody has taken the time to read it, and I urge all Liberal members to pick it up, the report from the Auditor General indicated they do not even know who is benefiting from the government's programs. In fact, they do not even know whether those who are in need, those who are most vulnerable, are accessing the supports they need. “Incompetence” would be one way of describing it, but it is not justifiable with where things are at today.
Now, the Conservatives have a leader who goes around acting as though he were the saviour. Let us be clear: When he was part of the Harper administration as a cabinet minister, under that administration, Canadians lost 800,000 units of affordable housing. That is close to a million units. A million families or individuals could have had access to housing that they do not have now. What is their solution today? It is more market-driven solutions. Let us be clear: It is the market-driven solutions that the government had relied on that got us here today. Nowhere do the Conservatives in their plans talk about building social housing or co-op housing.
The Liberal program does not talk about affordability. How strange is it? What planet do we live on that we operate in this way? It is no wonder we have a housing crisis. The bill that the government has tabled on the GST piece is to facilitate more housing being built. I want to be clear that we need more housing, but we also need to make sure that the housing that is built is accessible to people, meaning that it is truly affordable for people. It is strange to me that the government decided in some weird, altered universe, in this bill, that it would exclude co-ops from accessing the GST exemption. Why on earth would one do that? It makes no sense whatsoever.
The co-op program, as indicated, is a proven model in the delivery of housing in our communities. Co-ops create communities within communities. One can see it when walking into a co-op housing project. One can see the love within the community and the supports that are there for each other. People take care of each other and they build community with each other. To not support co-ops makes no sense. The NDP will absolutely be moving amendments to address that issue.
The other piece the NDP will doing is calling on the government to amend the bill to allow for existing non-profit housing projects to access this exemption. This would allow for some projects to become viable and, in other instances, for projects to create better affordability for the communities in need. That is what we need to do, to work towards, in that direction. We also need to actually set up some level of eligibility criteria in terms of affordability, to make sure the private developers are not just going to get a benefit but that there is also a further return to the community, and that is on the affordability criteria.
We have to think about housing in a holistic way. The NDP is putting forward these ideas. Above all else, we need the government to build social housing and co-op housing like we used to. Housing is for people to live in and not just to make a profit from.
