I sit on the steering committee of CFAIA, but I actually am the executive director of a housing organization in Ontario and I run a national women's housing network, so I can speak directly to the issue of how the federal government is faring with respect to housing.
It is true that under the most recent economic action plan there were dollars for social housing. Obviously social housing is a very important part of dealing with poverty, but it's not the only way the federal government should be looking at housing to alleviate poverty. If you're a woman right now and you're in receipt of social assistance, and you live in Toronto and you don't have public housing or access to social housing, there is a seven- to nine-year wait. With these new dollars you're still going to have to wait, because it takes a long time to build social housing. So the federal government hasn't been as good at looking at other creative means of ensuring that low-income women can access units that are actually out there.
There are vacancy rates in many cities and smaller cities across Canada. If women and other low-income people were given other options besides social housing to access those available units, that would go some distance. I'm talking about things like rent supplements, we call them, or portable shelter allowances, or portable housing allowances, where you top up a person's income so that they can afford the available market value unit. The criticism of that is normally, “Well, we don't want to line the pockets of landlords.” There is no empirical evidence that landlords will increase rents based on rent supplement programs. It just hasn't happened, for whatever reason. I am not an economist, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't happen.
Also, the federal-provincial agreements in housing that exist at this point in time are a patchwork. Some provinces are very slow at rolling out the dollars, and Ontario is a very good example.
First of all, we don't have a national housing strategy. The United Nations has been clear that Canada is one of the only developed countries that does not have a national housing strategy and that this would go some distance to addressing that issue, particularly for low-income people. But it's also clear that we need some kind of accountability mechanism to see where those dollars are going, what the provinces and territories are doing with those dollars, and who is benefiting from those dollars.
Thank you.