Thank you very much for being here today and for being helpful in this exercise that we're in at this committee.
We're looking at the federal role in a national anti-poverty strategy. We're almost at the end of that process and are preparing to table a report with government with some action items in it. There's no lack of good ideas. We've tried to focus on a few that the federal government could and should have responsibility for, and to work in partnership with the other levels of government to actually implement those.
The big question, though--and it's been referenced here at this panel, and the panel previously, and yesterday--is that we can bring forward the best ideas possible and lay out a number of things that could happen now and in subsequent years, but if the government decides that it doesn't have the money, or if we as a people in Canada decide that we are not going to provide the money for the programs that we know we need for our neighbours and family members and our communities, then it just isn't going to happen. We've seen a pattern of that, actually, over the last 10 to 15 years in the country, where we've decided that the priority was tax breaks, not tax increases, and we've done that in a major way.
I remember listening to the Prime Minister in the last election saying at a leaders debate that there was a $250 billion tax relief package rolling out, and indeed, he's correct. That's $250 billion that's not going to be available to government for all of the programs that we've suggested we need here--although government does and continues to promise. For example, housing is a huge issue. We hear about that over and over again. And the government did, in the election and in its budget, promise $1.9 billion for housing, and so far we've seen $68.4 million rolled out. The housing ministers from the provinces met yesterday and are meeting today, and they've identified as one of their priorities a more efficient and timely flow of that money so that we can get those houses built in communities and first nations and across the country.
CCPA has come out very clearly to say that we have the money, that the money's out there. It's a question of ideology, whether we believe, as we have for the last 10 or 15 years, that the private sector will take care of all of this. We were led to believe that if the economy got better, everybody would benefit. If we leave the building of affordable housing to the private sector, it will get built. None of that has happened.
So I guess the big question for me today, and I think it's a discussion we're going to have to have over the next number of months if we're going to deal with all of the different challenges that we've heard about as we've crossed the country, is where do we get the money, and how do we deal with taxation? Do any of you have any ideas on how that might happen or how we might do that more effectively or efficiently?