Thank you for the question. It's actually something that's near and dear to my heart.
I have been a board member of Vancouver Native Housing, which is an urban aboriginal social housing provider in Vancouver, for the last 14 years, and I can tell you that there have been points in time where I have looked at our waiting list, and I know that it has over 6,000 people. Those are typically aboriginal people coming from the reserves, coming into the urban community, and there is no housing for them.
Then I look at communities, particularly in communities with which I am most familiar in northern Manitoba and northern Saskatchewan. How do you even start? If you are living in a two-bedroom house and you have four families living in that house with 25 people, and you are sleeping on the floor, how do you even keep track of your homework? How do you do it? How do you even imagine anything different for yourself? There are health issues and it's an almost insurmountable situation. Everything really starts with a house, a safe, secure, affordable house.
One thing that's been on my radar for a long time is affordable home ownership. At Vancouver Native Housing, we're facing the expiry of some of our mortgages. We will no longer get that subsidy, so what can we do? We don't want to put our tenants, our residents, out on the street. One thing I see is the opportunity for our tenants to actually own their own units. That's something I personally have looked at over the last decade. I know that for our youth, it opens a whole new world of opportunity and possibility, but we just have not been able to unlock that funding. I think it is part of the solution.
In Vancouver right now there is a close to zero per cent vacancy rate. Can you imagine, if you're coming from a community with 95% unemployment to Vancouver and you're facing structural barriers and racism, and we can't house you at Vancouver Native Housing? It's an impossible situation, absolutely impossible, and I do believe that housing is part of the solution.