Thank you very much.
It's nice to see you here.
As you know, we are undertaking a poverty study here, which is a really important piece of work that all of us are very committed to doing in a non-partisan way, but I want to say that if you don't have housing, it doesn't matter how many job training programs and programs to deal with all the other issues that we face if people don't have a roof over their head and a safe place to live. Frankly, if that is the case, the rest of the issues that we try to cover will not go anywhere.
Your number was 650,000 people who are in need of housing. Whether we're talking about mentally ill or not, we're talking about huge numbers. Peel Region has a 20-year waiting list for affordable housing. The City of Toronto probably has at least a 10-year waiting list. That`s a lot of people waiting to get into affordable housing who really want a chance to improve their lifestyle.
The affordable housing initiative and the renovation program will both expire in March 2009, as well as section 95, which refers to co-op housing. Those agreements will start to expire in March 2009, and we are almost at the beginning of May 2008. There are approximately 32,000 people living in co-operative housing across Canada who are very concerned about what's going to happen to those.
I've thrown a bunch of issues out to you, and since I'm sharing time with my colleagues, I would ask you to be as concise as possible with your answer.