Sure.
I would say that I absolutely agree a hundred per cent that there needs to be immediate, very aggressive and very assertive action around housing. Since the seventies, there's been a real dire shortage of housing and social housing being built and a shortage of funding to the CMHC from the federal government. That's resulted in this really dire lack of housing, affordable housing and especially shelter-grade housing, which is what's really needed. There needs to be a real focus on returning to those levels and building housing for people who are homeless right now and also for people who are under-housed. That needs to be done in a very definite and assertive way immediately.
There's been all this research over and over through the years about how housing reduces other costs in terms of the justice system, the health care system and for so many other costs that are impacted, and how it actually would be more effective to build the housing. Despite all of that over the years, and all of the evidence about how people are impacted by homelessness, it's probably been harder to see the impact than it is currently. During this pandemic, everything is heightened and everything has sped up, and you see it much more clearly.
Just in these few months, it has become so much more obvious and so much more apparent that housing is health care and that it's really needed. Not only are we seeing that people are impacted around the pandemic and the health issues with COVID-19, but all of those connected harms that relate to the shutdown and the way we're responding to the pandemic are also impacting people. Those are the things that I touched on, like the fact there's nowhere for people to go outside and people are being displaced and there's a lack of sanitation. All of those other impacts are related to housing as well, and we see this being really heightened by the current pandemic.
Certainly, there needs to be a real change in how we think about housing and homelessness. With the hotels, what has been offered so far was really targeted and was more of an evacuation than really addressing health issues. When hotels were offered to people in Oppenheimer Park, it was certainly a targeting. That wasn't given to those most in need. We saw younger able-bodied men in Oppenheimer Park being offered hotels—