Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to witnesses for being with us today, particularly Teesha. Thank you so much for sharing with us a little of your experience, and I'm glad to see that you're now through that part of your life and successfully moving on and helping others.
My focus today is going to be as much as possible on seniors. We have a massive demographic change happening so quickly in our Canadian population. Over the next six years we'll go from one in six Canadians being seniors to one in five, and in 13 years it will be one in four. If we don't prepare for that, we are going to have a homeless problem like we've never seen in Canada. Seniors need to be shown respect and dignity, especially in their later years.
Another premise is funding. We've heard requests for funding throughout the study on poverty reduction. All levels of government struggle with that, and if you increase funding for a program, it has to come from somewhere, either reallocating the money, taking it away from this program and putting it to that program, or increasing taxes. To increase taxes is always the choice of last resort.
Councillor Williams, you shared the story about a senior gentleman and in that story, if I understood it correctly, the rent was about to double. Mr. Armstrong, you alluded to rents going to go up 11%. I did a quick check online and in British Columbia there is a maximum that rents can go up. In 2013, the maximum was 3.8%. In 2014, it was 2.2%. In 2015, it was 2.5%. In 2016, it was 2.9%, and this year it's 3.7%.
I have a primary residence but when planning for the future I also bought an investment property, a townhouse, and my strata fees, maintenance costs, and taxes keep going up way more than that, but the maximum I as an owner, as a landlord, can raise rent this year is 3.7% and that makes it really difficult. Each year I get a little further behind. I subsidize that even more out of my pocket. That's a struggle as a landlord and in encouraging more and more people to invest in that.
Councillor Williams and Mr. Armstrong, where do those figures of doubling and 11% come from? Because in my experience, that cannot happen. Could you elaborate?