Thank you very much.
We have been hearing a lot from different organizations that argue that our system's social safety net is underfunded, particularly in the area of housing, which arouses a question for me. When I was first elected, the Martin government began increasing funding for housing. The Harper government then maintained that funding, and during the great global recession, we had something called the stimulus, between 2009 and 2011, which saw massive one-time infusions on top of the funding that existed. Provincially, in Ontario, we hear regularly about funding increases for housing. Municipal governments make similar announcements.
Speaking of municipal governments, their revenues have been growing at two and a half times the combined rate of inflation and population growth for roughly a decade and a half, all while two-thirds of the costs for capital projects have been uploaded to provincial and federal governments. All of this money is pouring in and growing, yet I don't hear anyone appearing before us saying, “We have enough money now. We've finally met our needs”. In fact, what I hear is the opposite. As these budgets just seem to grow at rates that vastly exceed the population and cost-of-living increases, so too do the shortages of funding.
I have a hard time understanding what's going on here, where we see vastly increasing budgets yet the need, far from diminishing, seems to grow. Does anybody have any explanation for that paradox?