Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you for appearing here today.
I first have to highly compliment the minister and everybody involved in responding to this disaster. It must have been a horrific scene to initially approach it with so many missing, probably including colleagues.
I know that I was there in 2006, and I may very well have been interacting with some of the people at that time too. It was just a tremendous effort, and it shows what the Government of Canada can do in a bad situation.
I'd like to discuss a little further the issue of housing. When the Red Cross was here, they identified that there was a need for housing for some one million people. They used a number of approximately five persons per household. Doing the math, that would mean that there would be a need for 200,000 homes. And these homes really are, when they say transitional, plywood shoeboxes. This is just for transitional housing. They haven't started on the permanent ones yet.
My understanding is that they have supplied some 30,000 units to date. If we do the math on that, it really means that we would still be providing transitional housing five years from now. The type of shelter they do have, these hundreds of thousands of people, is tarpaulins, I suppose for the weather. I would suggest that there could be a huge disaster coming up if another bad hurricane blows through. It would be a very high-risk area.
It seems to be around land tenure and removing debris. Looking at the housing unit, I would suggest that it's very portable. So I don't understand why land tenure should get in the way of building these houses. If you do the math on the 30,000 that have been built, that's roughly 100 a day. A crew of 10 people can put plywood sheets together and housing on that basis.
I'm very much concerned that if it is land tenure, can they not somehow get beyond it and get these houses built? Who cares where they're going or who owns the land? Straighten that out later. Is this not something they can do?