Thank you.
I'm very interested in Madam Farha's conversation on the human rights angle of poverty. I would expand on that. We have to talk about rights, but equally important are freedoms.
One of the freedoms most ignored but also most important is economic freedom, the freedom to earn a living and enjoy the fruits of one's labour, to escape want, and to live in dignity.
One of the things I'd like to hear more of from our witnesses is how the government's violation of economic freedoms leads to poverty in the first place.
Witnesses have talked about how housing is too expensive. I was in Belleville about a year ago. I spoke to an older Italian man who was taking an old Victorian mansion and turning it into five to seven affordable housing units, with no help from the government. The number one cost to him was not materials or labour. It was paperwork. It was the delays that the government imposed upon him.
This is a perfect example of the transfer of wealth. You're taking a mansion that would be a house for a millionaire and turning it into an apartment building that will be homes for people who pay $500 or $600 a month. And far from being helpful, the government is standing in the way. As I understand it, he's still not done—I spoke to him over a year ago.
Ms. McLachlan spoke about her challenge to pay hydro bills. In my province, Ontario, hydro bills have more than doubled, because the government has made a decision to subsidize investment bankers and well-connected insiders through inflated electricity payments. There are a lot of people making a lot of money, people who don't need it. There are a lot of people on fixed incomes who are scraping by and can't afford to pay their hydro bills. Or we have people who, we're told, need to be on social assistance because they can't find a job, and yet we're raising taxes on people trying to hire.
I wonder if people can talk about the ways in which government is causing poverty in the first place rather than just talking about how government can be a solution to that poverty. We don't need a doctor to administer poison only so that he can then administer an antidote. We'd rather he didn't administer the poison in the first place.
Do you have any comments on how government is robbing us of our economic freedoms and then proposing itself as a solution to the resulting suffering?