Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak to this bill today.
The notice from the clerk said we'd have 10 minutes, but we'll do our best to get down to seven.
The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada is the national association of evangelical Christians. The EFC's affiliates consist of 39 denominations, 125 ministry organizations and, additionally, more than 1,000 individual church congregations across the country. In general, there are estimated to be approximately four million Canadians who are evangelicals.
As Christians, we believe each person is created by God, thereby possessing inherent dignity and worth. This affirmation and respect for the life of every human being compels us to care about the people around us in our communities, our nation, and around the world.
We know it to be true that, next to government, the church is the second-largest provider of care and housing to the poor. There are hundreds of churches, ministry organizations, and street-level agencies addressing Canada's homelessness crisis in practical ways. What they do and what they know first-hand is vital to the public policy discussion on homelessness.
The EFC recognized the need for a strong voice from within the evangelical community to communicate on this issue, both on public policy and back into the evangelical community. To that end, in 2003 the EFC engaged in a partnership with leaders of significant Canadian Christian organizations that work among our nation's poor and homeless. The goal of the partnership was to create a national shared voice in advocacy and to address this question: what can we do better than what each of us is doing on our own?
At the street level, our national round table on poverty and homelessness is the product of those discussions. Although the EFC has a number of affiliates that are engaged in the development and provision of housing—