Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you to all the witnesses for being with us today.
I'm Peter Julian. I'm the member of Parliament for New Westminster—Burnaby. I'm particularly pleased to see two of my constituents—two of my bosses—here, Mr. Armstrong and also Mr. Dobrovolny from Metro Vancouver. I'll be on my best behaviour.
I'd like to start with you Mr. Armstrong.
You cited the real source of the crisis that we're seeing in affordable housing across this country. You talked about the last few years. In the last 17 years, under the Conservative mandate and then the Liberal mandate, we lost over a million affordable housing units, as you know. We lost 800,000 under the Conservatives and 200,000 under the Liberals. It provoked this massive crisis.
The NDP caucus has been pushing hard to ensure that the indigenous housing fund is set up and to take the GST off co-operative housing.
You referenced two particular recommendations, the federal acquisition fund and the co-op housing fund. How important is it to move immediately on those two funds to ensure that we can actually preserve the affordability that remains but also start building co-operative housing and affordable housing across the country again?