Mr. Chair, members of the committee and Ms. Desbiens, good morning.
I am the director of the Office municipal d'habitation de Baie-Saint-Paul. Today I want to shed some light on the significant and urgent need to increase the core need income threshold, the CNIT, used to determine social housing eligibility.
To qualify for social housing in rural areas, applicants must have incomes of less than $23,500, whereas the threshold in Quebec City, for example, and other major centres, is $34,500.
In my job, I am regularly required to tell people working 30 hours a week for minimum wage that they're too wealthy to qualify for social housing. I would sincerely prefer not to have to tell heads of single-parent families with two dependent children and incomes of $31,000 that they earn too much money to be live in low-cost housing.
This is 2023, and it's high time we acknowledged that maintaining such a large gap between the CNIT for large cities and the one for rural areas isn't justifiable or fair for everyone. It's essential that action be taken to solve this problem, and I'm very much relying on you to ensure that message is heard.