Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I want to say that in my day job I'm executive director of the Vancouver Native Housing Society. We provide housing for urban aboriginals in Vancouver. We have about 600 units there. All of our projects, I'm proud to say, are in east Vancouver, in Libby's constituency. I've worked in the downtown east side, what's known as Canada's poorest postal code, for 25 years. We couldn't have a better champion for social and affordable housing than Libby, so it just makes the day a little more special for me to be here.
With respect to CHRA, today we proudly released a policy paper titled “An Affordable Housing Policy for Canada”. When we set out to develop this paper, we anticipated that on the day of its release we would call on Parliament to bring forward a bill like Bill C-304. We are more than pleased that instead we can focus on discussing the specific content of a bill to mandate the creation of a national housing strategy, and that the bill has passed through two of the three House votes required to send it to the Senate and eventually into law.
I'm going to turn this over to the acting executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, Geoff Gillard, to speak on some of the specifics.
Thank you very much for allowing us to be here.