Human Resources Committee on Feb. 4th, 2021

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I hope not.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

That scares me.

[Kate Young, Liberal, London West, ON]

As you know, London, where I'm from, is unfortunately one of the 15 cities that is most in need.

I was really happy to make an announcement in December that saw the City of London receive $7.5 million under the rapid housing initiative to build 150 modular and affordable housing units by the end of 2021. This news was hailed as a game-changer by our mayor, Ed Holder, who as you know was a former Conservative MP. He really understands how important it is for the well-being of Londoners who are on our very lengthy housing wait list.

Would you agree that it's not only a game-changer for London, but also for cities across the country?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

John Tory, a former leader of the provincial Conservative party in Ontario and now Mayor of Toronto, has said the same thing. Kennedy Stewart in Vancouver has also made similar remarks.

This is really the first, since the early 1990s and even before the 1990s.... Those of us who have worked on this file for a long time know this. No one has ever really specifically built supportive housing in the country. When mayors talk about the game changer, it's this particular form of housing that is making a huge difference. The rapid piece is tied to COVID, but the housing model is tied to supportive housing as a goal.

A number of communities have really taken this issue and are having some extraordinary achievements. Hamilton is another city. Edmonton and Victoria are all cities that are very close to getting to functional zero on homelessness. This may be the exact housing program that will put them over the finish line in that regard.

For example, London has effectively eliminated veterans' homelessness by focusing on moving veterans into housing environments with supports unique to veterans with services from Veterans Canada. As a result, their shelters have not seen a surge during COVID, which is quite remarkable because other populations have grown.

It's a game changer absolutely, but it doesn't work unless we have chapter two. Chapter two doesn't work unless you put the other two legs of the stool together, one of which is health supports. Poverty puts you on the street. Health care keeps you on the street. It's usually mental health and addiction issues, but brain injury is another big driver. Undiagnosed developmental disabilities is the fourth.

Getting the medical services and the income supports in place to make this acquisition and quick, rapid modular housing model work the best. Those three things working together will allow us to make huge savings.

The other big savings that accrue to government are in justice and the health care system. The City of Barrie is running a pilot project right now that shows that when you take the frequent users of police and the hospital services out of the mix, you save the justice and the health system huge money. In fact, 20 people were responsible for the most calls to police services in Barrie, Ontario. Twenty people generated 1,000 police calls over a two-year period. When you house them, the police calls stop.

This is one of the ways to save money in social services and justice as we move towards better outcomes for the people who are at the heart of the challenge in these situations.

It's good news for governments, but it's even better news for people.

[Kate Young, Liberal, London West, ON]

As you know, we also have a real problem with youth homelessness in London. We have some really innovative ideas. You have been down to London to see what Youth Opportunities Unlimited, or YOU, has done in building youth housing.

Is that one of the key features of this?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Youth aging out of care and custody in the child welfare system are referred to as being on the superhighway to homelessness.

If you're homeless at 16, the chances you will be homeless at 28 is close to 80%. As kids age out of care, if we don't have supportive housing to move them from the provisional housing they have had in the child welfare system to independence—if we don't have that hop, skip and a jump to a higher quality of life—those kids will end up as the chronically homeless we have to deal with in a generation.

Focusing on youth, and in particular gay, lesbian, two-spirit and queer youth, is fundamental to this. During COVID, one of the highest jumps and spikes in population has been kids in that community as they get kicked out of their homes because their sexuality or their gender presentation presents a challenge to their families.

The homeless encampments in Toronto in particular are seeing a much higher count of racialized youth and queer youth, so building intentional housing in that space is fundamentally important to ending homelessness.

[Kate Young, Liberal, London West, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Vaughan and Ms. Young.

Ms. Chabot, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you.

I will be brief, because I only have two questions.

The position of federal housing advocate was created as part of the national housing strategy. In other words, one person will oversee the strategy and act as a watchdog. As we speak, the position remains vacant. We know that housing is an important right. In fact, it is a major determinant of health.

Can you tell us when this position will be filled?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

The right to housing was legislated as part of the national housing strategy legislation. That called for not only the housing advocate, but also the housing advisory panel.

That panel met for the first time today with the minister. We wanted their input as to where they saw the advocate coming from.

We have five people on that panel with lived experience, but nobody with the experience of living rough on the street or with shelter experience. We're taking steps to address that through an additional appointment to the body. We're working through that process right now.

On the process to hire the advocate, we have put the call out and should be able to follow through on that appointment very shortly.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

All right.

Additional funding was announced for the Reaching Home stream. However, there is little information about the strategy, the plan, the forecasts and the criteria. Will there be any announcements along those lines? Will there be a plan for this strategy?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Reaching Home was restructured—

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

It's hard to figure out, because there are no details or timelines.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

The Reaching Home program was started in 1999. It was reprofiled from the homelessness partnering strategy, or HPS, into Reaching Home two years ago with the work we did to update it. It hadn't really been touched since 1999. That's when we added an indigenous stream and a northern stream to deal with the territorial issues.

One of the clear things we heard out of Quebec and from the panellists from Quebec—I might transpose their names, so I won't try to test my memory on this one—was the notion that, first of all, it's driven locally. The federal government doesn't decide how the dollars are spent locally. That's done by local leaders on the ground. In Quebec, because of the model of the National Assembly, we have regions with all of the stakeholders—hospitals, police, legal as well as housing providers, municipalities and the social service sector. They design the program. They take the dollars and they spend it into that program to coordinate both the access of people into a housing system and the services required to make them succeed in housing.

Chronically homeless individuals don't succeed if you just give them a set of keys and put them in a house. They do better, but they don't get better because of the housing. They get better because they're in shelter, but in order to give them independence and a higher quality of life, those social services have to be applied to the housing. Quebec does it better than any other jurisdiction in North America, I would argue. We used the Quebec model and changed Reaching Home to reflect it rather than make Quebec the outlier in this situation. Quebec is doing excellent work here. We shared the best practices of Quebec and rolled them into Reaching Home. In fact, Jean-Yves Duclos played a critical role in that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Vaughan.

Thank you, Ms. Chabot.

Ms. Gazan, go ahead for two and a half minutes, please.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Chair.

My next question is in regard to, first of all, an urban-led, indigenous-led, urban, rural and remote housing strategy. I'm wondering what the current plans are to rapidly and substantially increase new units of affordable housing.

I hear all of these announcements, but I'm not hearing dates, and it's dire. It looks like we could be in the pandemic until September. We're dealing with life-and-death matters. Can I get a date?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Do you mean the date that the URN strategy will hit the ground with housing dollars?

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Yes. We've been waiting a long time, with all due respect—

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

No, I hear you.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

—for the development of the urban, rural and northern indigenous housing strategy. When is it happening?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

It will happen when the budget is launched. You will have the dates when the budget is launched. I don't have that information to give you, because it's in Finance now. As they compose the budget with inputs from MPs, from the public, we'll get there.

Rest assured that the work this committee is doing feeds into the work our minister has been doing and feeds into the work I've been doing as the parliamentary secretary in composing both a new urban indigenous housing assembly across the country as well as getting the funding dollars. In the interim, every single chapter in the national housing strategy has explicit instructions from the minister, and it's also written into the program, that all indigenous applications must be received and no one can be turned away. That's the way it was four years ago—

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I don't have a lot of time here, but I want to let you know that every time we have to wait, there are lives being lost in my riding.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I hear you. Every—

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

It's a life-and-death matter. Would your office be willing to perhaps contact my office with a follow-up letter, giving us dates and times of when these things are going to occur? People's lives are on the line, certainly in my riding, and we've heard stories coming out of east Vancouver.