Thank you. It's interesting and it's great to hear that you met with those advocates in Burnaby.
There was just the discussion about the private market and home affordability. Yes, of course that's important, and for many Canadians, yes, home ownership is a dream. However, we also have to remember that for millions more Canadians home ownership is not the dream: it's just simply having access to any home that is the dream. For those roughly 250,000 Canadians who are homeless every year, it's any home that is the dream.
Are we in crisis? For many years the federal government had not been investing what it needed to into the non-profit and affordable housing sector. We saw growth in social and non-profit housing in the sixties, seventies and eighties. It was the ending, the completion, of operating agreements in 1993 that really precipitated the decline in both the quality of affordable housing and the supply of it.
Would I say we are in crisis? Yes.
Just to clarify, the wait-lists are more than 125,000 people. I was referring simply to two cities in Canada. When you add in everything else, it's significantly higher.