I have a question about affordable housing and I wanted to thank you for the graphic that you handed out to the committee about the funding crunch.
As you mentioned in the graphic, there's $1.7 billion in annual money from the federal government for supporting mortgages or operating agreements for social housing units. In the city of Kingston, for the next four years or so, that amounts to about $200,000 in lost funding from the federal government. At the same time, the city of Kingston is legislated to have 2,003 units of housing, so there's a legislative requirement for the city of Kingston to provide those housing units. There's also a moral responsibility because the queue for affordable housing is quite long in Kingston; the vacancy rate is something like half a percent.
Is it reasonable to ask the federal government to simply keep that funding steady by reinvesting funds from expiring mortgages or operating agreements, just keeping that funding level? That would mean that the taxpayers of Kingston would not have to make up the difference. This is the time of year that the city council goes through the budget and tells the taxpayers how much their taxes have to go up. This federal government policy is contributing to increased property taxes in Kingston.