Thank you for the opportunity to appear today. Sharing my time will be Rainer Driemeyer, who is a member of our steering committee.
The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee is a group of social policy, health care, and housing experts; academics; business people; community workers; social workers; AIDS activists; anti-poverty activists; people with homelessness experience; and members of the faith community. We provide advocacy on housing and homelessness issues.
We declare homelessness as a national disaster and demand that Canada end homelessness by implementing a fully funded national housing program through the 1% solution. There are approximately 300,000 Canadians homeless every year, including 65,000 youth and 10,000 children, and 1.8 million people lack adequate shelter.
In 1998 we called for federal emergency relief money to provide disaster relief for communities struggling with increasing homeless populations. That call led to the introduction of SCPI, the supporting communities partnership initiative, part of the national homelessness initiative.
The national homelessness secretariat reported that in the first 4.5 years of the program, more than 9,000 beds in transitional housing were created, 725 homeless shelters received funding, 49 federal properties were made available for the creation of new homes, and 3,600 services were funded. This money is desperately needed across the country and makes up our first recommendation of $202 million for homelessness funding, $67 million of which would be new.
The federal homelessness program is to expire in March 2007. Many services will have to shut down earlier if there's no commitment to renew and extend this funding. TDRC urges the government not to wait for the next federal budget for this item, but to act now to renew and expand homeless funding. Additionally, we are recommending that the current funding be increased by 50% from the 2006 fiscal year to allow for additional funding in communities across the country, many of which receive no funding presently.
It's important that Canada redeem itself not just on the world stage but here at home. This is a national emergency, a national disaster. From the end of World War II until 1993, our national housing program built 650,000 units of affordable housing and two million Canadians were housed; now we build a fraction of that amount.
TDRC has called for the implementation of the 1% solution, $2 billion per year from the federal government and an additional $2 billion from the provincial and territorial governments. This funding, divided between supply and affordability, would support 20,000 or more new homes annually, which would go a long way toward preventing some of the crises we see on our streets. The Calgary Drop-In and Rehab Centre, for example, which has a capacity of 11,000, is turning away 125 people a night, and that is expected to double to more than 300.
In the 2006 budget, $466 million for new housing was allocated for each of the next three years, so the net new dollars required to meet the target of the 1% solution in 2007-08 is slightly more than $1.5 billion.
Another program due to expire at the end of the 2006 fiscal year is the federal residential rehabilitation assistance program, better known as RRAP. This program assists homeowners and landlords to bring aging buildings up to standard and to make the necessary upgrades to heating and other systems to promote conservation and cut utility bills. RRAP has also been used by creative developers to build affordable housing. Last year the former federal government proposed a $100 million annual increase in rehab funding specifically dedicated to energy conservation, but this initiative has been cancelled.
Our third recommendation, therefore, is that the federal housing renovation funding be increased by 50% over planned 2006 fiscal year spending, and that $150 million be added to assist low-income homeowners and tenants with energy conservation. The net new spending would be $114 million.
It's been almost eight years since the big city mayors' caucus of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities declared homelessness to be a national disaster. In that time the situation has only become worse. This month Toronto's homeless memorial will register the name of the 500th homeless person who has lived and died on the streets of Toronto.
Now I'm going to turn it over to Dri.