Good afternoon. I would like to introduce Nicolas Lefebvre Legault, Chairman of FRAPRU's board of directors, who works in Quebec City.
The name “Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain” probably doesn't mean much to people from outside Quebec. It's essentially a cross-Quebec association of groups that advocate housing rights. Approximately 120 organizations are members of FRAPRU across Quebec.
When we read the press release describing the theme that you've adopted as a committee, we were struck to see that it referred almost exclusively to economic competitiveness.
We want to add another dimension to the debate, one we think is no less important. And that is the question of compliance with the international commitments that Canada has made with regard to socio-economic rights. Unfortunately, a report published last May by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was highly critical of respect for rights in Canada, a country that, as the committee said, has the means to respect all rights. This committee made a series of recommendations, and we're still awaiting the Canadian government's comments on how it intends to comply with those recommendations.
I have submitted a copy of the report to you, which perhaps you've already seen. In it a series of recommendations is made on subjects such as transfers to the provinces respecting income security. These transfers have not increased since 1995, which has had an impact on the level of benefits across Canada. Recommendations were made on employment insurance and the problem of hunger and food insecurity, but also the subject of housing and homelessness, a question we will focus on more.
This past May, the UN committee repeated a recommendation it made in 1998 to all levels of government, that they consider housing and homelessness as a national emergency. In our view, the report that you prepare as a committee must be consistent with those UN recommendations, particularly those concerning housing. We think that should be done through concrete action. First, bigger investments must be made in social housing. The last budget confirmed investments of $800 million across Canada in what was called affordable housing. We heard the same figure of $800 million in the budget agreement between the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party, and that was confirmed in the last budget. We are anxious to see the colour of that money. We've been hearing about it for a year and a half, and we haven't yet seen its colour. It was confirmed that the money would be paid on September 25, but we haven't yet seen it, at least in Quebec. However, we clearly can't be content with $800 million over a three-year period across Canada. In our view, the problems of housing and homelessness are important enough to warrant much larger investments. FRAPRU and other groups elsewhere in Canada believe that the federal government should increase its direct investment in social housing by $2 billion a year.
In our opinion, a portion of those amounts should come from the implementation of a bill introduced by the Bloc québécois, Bill C-285, if my memory serves me, which concerns the budget surpluses of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. We feel a portion of that surplus, which currently stands at $4.4 billion, should be used to assist a larger number of people who are homeless or living in substandard housing.
We're also making other demands, including one I won't dwell on because we support it, the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, the SCPI, that it be improved and that it continue so that groups that work with the homeless are not required to chase after these grants from year to year. Lastly, we want to draw your attention to the budget cuts that were recently announced and that, among other things, have an impact of $45 million on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
In our view, if money is to be saved at CMHC, those savings must remain in the housing and be reinvested so that, among other things, the housing stock we have established is...