Good afternoon. Thank you.
I want to very briefly go over the proposals that we've put into our brief and then talk about something a little bit different.
First, like many others here, we recognize the economic situation Canada is facing and the impact it will have on next year's budget, so we are not proposing new housing spending for 2011. There is money, however, on the table. The federal government has put money on the table for the affordable housing initiative, and that runs to 2014.
Our recommendation is that in the redesign of that program, which is supposed to come next year, there be a much closer relationship between the amount of money provided to the provinces and territories and the outcomes Canada needs, which is a reduction in housing need among Canadians. Right now there is a lack of an accountability framework, and in my view far too much discretion in how the housing spending is targeted to, if you like, pet markets by the provinces. I won't go any further into that, but it's the same message I came here with last year: if you're going to hand money over to the provinces to spend on housing, we need an accountability framework.
Second, I'd like to alert parliamentarians to what I would describe as an impending crisis in existing social housing. We have some 600,000 units of social housing in Canada that have been federally sponsored in some way or other. Over the next decade, we're going to see the present funding agreements for those projects come to an end. A lot of that funding comes by way of assistance to help lower-income Canadians, particularly those with fixed incomes, pay their rents. Absent those funding agreements and absent that money, I think we are facing an affordability crisis of monumental proportions. Just to give you one example, there are some 60,000 units of federally sponsored cooperative housing. By 2020, fully 50,000 of those units will no longer have any federal assistance to help house low-income people. The situation is much worse still for municipal housing providers and for non-profit housing providers.
We're saying that this would be a very good time for the Government of Canada to study this problem and to decide what, if anything, they're going to do about it. Personally, I think we have to do a lot about it, and we have to involve stakeholders in that study. Right now all we're hearing from government is a deafening silence on this issue. It's going to creep up on us, and we are going to have a very hot potato to handle unless we consider how we're going to handle this crisis in advance.
Our brief also talks about the economic case for housing. I'd like to refer to the report from the Conference Board of Canada, “Building From the Ground Up: Enhancing Affordable Housing in Canada”, which came out earlier this year. Quite simply, what they said--and we agree--is that a better-housed population is healthier, better educated, more productive, and less likely to produce clients of the justice system. These are precisely the attributes of the workforce needed in an emerging knowledge-based economy.
The cost of inaction, when taken as a whole, including the relationship between poverty and a whole range of negative social outcomes, is likely greater than the cost of doing something about it. We can do something about it in two ways: better access to affordable housing--hence my accountability framework proposal--and better opportunities for personal income growth. We can go a long way toward achieving the latter by just making it easier for Canadians to escape the welfare trap and enter the workforce. We can do so through a combination of tax and benefits policies that will act as an incentive to escape income assistance dependency.
I'd like to conclude with a more general observation. There was once a report that was created that described the conditions under which the working poor lived. The study concluded that after paying for their shelter costs, many families were barely able to afford the necessities of life. If the family breadwinner were to become incapacitated in some way, or taken ill, the family would go hungry. Children and the elderly were found to be particularly at risk for malnourishment. That study was called “Poverty: A Study of Town Life”. It was released in 1900 in the U.K. It was written by a guy called Seebohm Rowntree, of Rowntree Foundation fame.
What I find amazing is that you can still find echoes of Rowntree's report right here in Canada, 110 years later. In Canada today there are an estimated 500,000 households that will spend more than 50% of their income just to put a roof over their heads. That doesn't leave very much room to feed and clothe the rest of the family. The result--and I think most Canadians are not aware of this--is that there are numbers of children, women, and men in this country who often go to bed hungry, and just as in Rowntree's day, the working poor are still vulnerable: 14% of food bank clients in this country are the working poor--