Where does one begin?
First of all, it's worth noting that you can't discuss a productive economy without also considering how the people who work in that economy are housed and, importantly, where they're housed with respect to access to their jobs. This is why we talked about the idea of joined-up cities, where people can live, work, and travel with relative ease and efficiency between work and home. For example, it's estimated that the productivity gap based on commuting alone in this country costs us about $5 billion.
I think your point about Toronto and the existing housing is important. Canada, together with the provinces, has invested over the years, as I said, in something like 630,000 units of affordable housing. But what we don't have in this country is a plan to sustain that housing beyond the present funding commitments.
We're arguing that we need a plan for that. We can certainly discuss and argue what that plan should contain, but what's worrisome right now is the deafening silence around the issue. Canada's own housing corporation has said for some time that it's considering the financial future of this housing, but nothing has come out.
Meanwhile, the agreements are coming to an end. There are projects out of funding now with the federal government that are not sustainable. Just last week I heard from an aboriginal housing cooperative under the urban native program. It's losing its subsidy and it's not going to be able to supply affordable housing to its existing residents. If you multiply that across the country, we have a real danger that while we fight for more affordable housing, the housing we have already is lost.
We have a major affordable housing problem in this country, and it can't be addressed in one budget cycle. I think we have to recognize that we have 1.5 million households that are considered, not by me but by the federal government itself, to be in what's described as core housing need.
We need a plan to address that. Part of that plan is not losing what we already have, because it's enormously valuable. The real estate assets that we have for affordable housing in this country are priceless, and we need to sustain them.