Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I was glad to see that Mr. Hallan was not the only one fishing for a gold star today. I want to thank and commend Mr. Morantz for highlighting the good work of NDP MPs in respect of housing in their ridings. If I didn't know him better, I might have thought by his tone that he was insinuating something untoward was going on, but I would like to reassure him that this is not the case and share an anecdote with him.
When I was first elected in 2015, I ran on re-establishing a national housing strategy, as did, as it happens, what would become the Liberal government. One of the first things I did was bring together all the non-profit housing providers in Elmwood—Transcona and non-profit groups that might have an interest in building housing in the riding. We met together over a series of several meetings over months. We found people who had worked at Manitoba Housing and at CMHC in the heyday of federal funding for housing. We talked about how the national housing strategy pre-1995 worked. We talked about the kinds of things you would have to do if you wanted to properly execute a housing project—looking for land, getting drawings done up, monitoring websites for funding opportunities as they became available from the federal government and so on.
We ended up ultimately doing a round table that included lots of the non-profit housing providers and umbrella organizations for them across the city of Winnipeg. We brought everybody who had been part of successful non-profit housing projects in the city together to share best practices. At that time, folks were working on the Grace Co-op, which has since been built. Even though it wasn't, strictly speaking, in Elmwood—Transcona, we brought them in to talk about what they were doing, because we wanted to prepare our community as best we could for the funds that had been promised, so that when those funds became available, we would maximize the opportunities for investment in our communities.
Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, who was the previous NDP MP for Nunavut, I know did a tour of 14 or 16 communities in Nunavut documenting the housing need—the mould, the overcrowding, all of the problems. She published that publicly and worked with communities to talk about their housing needs and to present those in a coherent, forceful way to the federal government. Jenny Kwan, in Vancouver East, regularly meets with groups who are providing housing in their communities.
I'm not surprised that so much grassroots community effort in working with non-profits to deliver affordable housing in their communities has led to a higher level of investment in ridings where there are MPs who see that as part of their job and want to deliver more public resources for affordable housing in their communities.
I want to thank Mr. Morantz for having highlighted that good work and giving me the opportunity to explain how it's done.
I would wish—for him and for all members at this table—that they do that work in their own community, while government provides more resources, so that as more MPs from other parties learn how to do that work in their ridings, resources are available commensurately to increase the amount of social and affordable housing stock.
Thank you, once again, Mr. Morantz, for providing an opportunity for that education about one way that you can be an effective MP for your community.
I asked the minister earlier if we could get information on some of those non-profit projects that have already received federal funding but have stalled out because of high interest rates.
Can we get that information?