Mr. Speaker, a housing forum was held in my riding of St. John's South—Mount Pearl, Newfoundland and Labrador, in September. Before this forum began, a woman in a wheelchair handed the three New Democrat MPs in attendance a sheet of paper. The paper contained just five words: “family, shelter, food, career and health”. The woman asked each of us to take a moment to visualize what each word meant in our lives. Then she asked us to take a pen and eliminate one. The woman said, there is no choice; one has to go. Then she asked us to eliminate a second word and then a third.
They were tough choices. Even hypothetically, the choices were impossible. I eliminated career first, then my own health, and then food. I was left with family and shelter. I remember the exercise leaving me with a feeling of desperation in the pit of my stomach. The woman said the point of the exercise was for MPs to imagine it. Her point was that she is living it. That was a powerful point.
There is a housing crisis. Even in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the economy is booming, there is a housing crisis. This week there are stories in the news back home about two men struggling to make ends meet. They are struggling to meet housing costs in a boom town. Rental costs have gone up by more than 18% in the St. John's area over the past four years, which translates into some people struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
According to the Single Parents Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, rent for a three-bedroom unit four or five years ago was around $650, and now it is up to $1,100 to $1,300 a month. From $650 a month to $1,300 a month in four or five years is an incredible increase. People are having a hard time coping with that. In many cases, they are not coping. Their income is constant; their rent is not constant.
The stories in the news back home this week are about two men. One is a single father with a young daughter getting by on worker's compensation. The other story is about a single man making minimum wage. These men are having an incredibly hard time getting by because of the rent.
The man on worker's compensation has a total income, including his daughter's baby bonus, which he pointed out, of $1,479 a month. His rent alone is $1,200 a month, so he has $279 a month for everything else. His daughter does not take a lunch to school because there is no money for that, and he pointed that out as well.
The single man making minimum wage heats only one room in his apartment, and he hangs blankets in the doorways to keep in the heat. His rent is going up on March 1 by another $75. Where will that money come from?
Right now that original list of five choices—food, shelter, health, family and career—has a very real face, a desperate face.
During the 2011 federal election, I remember knocking on the homes of seniors in the middle of the afternoon. They would often come to their doors in coats and jackets. They wore coats and jackets inside their homes in the middle of the afternoon because they could not afford to turn on the heat. These are the kinds of decisions that people are being forced to make. Rents are continually increasing, and for people, seniors, on fixed incomes that means something has to suffer. Food suffers. Heat suffers. Medications suffer. People often do not buy the medicine they need because these are the choices they are forced to make.
Labrador City is another boom town in Newfoundland and Labrador. The mining industry, specifically the iron ore industry, is doing very well. The vacancy rate in Labrador West is almost zero. The local college offers a mining course that practically guarantees employment upon completion, but classes are not full because there is no place for students to live.
We heard stories about how women remain in abusive relationships because there is nowhere else to go.
I also visited Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the past year. That is another place that is absolutely booming. The average income is $100,000. The average family income is $180,000 a year. However, the cost of rent is astronomical. A new three bedroom home with a double car garage and an unregistered apartment can go for between $700,000 to $900,000, so we can imagine the cost of rental units. In the meantime, the income threshold for low-income housing is about $80,000 a year.
There is a housing crisis in St. John's. There is a housing crisis in Labrador. There is a housing crisis in Alberta. There is a housing crisis across Canada.
Canada is the only G8 country without a national housing strategy, which is what Bill C-400 is all about. What does it cost? It costs nothing. It costs no money. It simply requires the minister responsible for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to work in collaboration with the provincial ministers responsible for housing, with representatives of municipalities, with aboriginal communities and with housing providers in the non-profit and private sectors. It requires all of these groups to work together to establish a national housing strategy.
How does that not make sense? That is smart governance.
Between 300,000 and 400,000 Canadians are homeless. They have no place to live. Three million Canadians live in housing insecurity, including 27,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and almost 9,300 in St. John's South—Mount Pearl and St. John's East alone.
The Conservatives have said that their commitment to safe and affordable housing has helped over 775,000 Canadians since 2006. The Conservatives claim that their investment in housing has led to the creation of 46,000 affordable housing units. At the same time, waiting lists across the country for social housing are consistently getting longer and vacancy rates are dropping to record lows everywhere.
Bruce Pearce of the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing and Homelessness Network has described the bill as a life-saving bill. He said that Atlantic Canada would be hardest hit by the absence of a national housing strategy because there are fewer support networks in rural communities. There may be loads of shelters, for example, in downtown Toronto, but not so in places such as downtown Mount Pearl or places like it.
In areas of Canada that are doing well, where the economy is sizzling, the poorest people are suffering because of the increased cost of living, because of increased rents, because of increased everything across the board.
There was another story in the news recently back home of how 30 tenants in a low-income apartment building in St. John's were worried that they would soon be homeless. Their building is to be redeveloped into condominiums and they have until the end of April to move out. It will not be easy for those 30 families to find another place to live. One tenant stated, “Every time they put up the rent, that's less food you have every month, or it's a light bill you can't pay”.
Yvette Walton, the head of Newfoundland and Labrador's Single Parent Association told CBC news this week that rent is rising too quickly on the Northeast Avalon, which is on the extreme east coast of Newfoundland. She said that it was causing huge amounts of stress, especially for single parent families and that the solution is more affordable housing. That is where a national housing strategy would come into play.
Let me bring this back full circle. With respect to family, shelter, career, food, health, which ones can we live without? As MPs we are imagining it, but there are people who are actually living it. Maybe living is not the right word. Existing may be a more fitting term. It is those people who Bill C-400 is designed to help.