Human Resources Committee on Feb. 4th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 15 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of January 25, 2021, and the proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. The webcast will always show the person speaking, rather than the entirety of the committee.

I'm going to dispense with the other standard format directions that we normally give at the start of a meeting, because every single person here has heard them many times before.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Wednesday, October 28, 2020, the committee will commence its study of the rapid housing initiative. The study will examine all aspects of the proposed program, with specific focus paid to the number and location of units acquired.

I welcome our witness, Adam Vaughan, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, for housing, to begin our discussion with five minutes of opening remarks followed by questions.

Parliamentary Secretary Vaughan, you have the floor.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families]

Thank you very much.

I'm appearing here in part because the minister whom I committed to try to get to this meeting unfortunately has a COVID committee meeting and is also helping to initiate and start the new housing council as part of the national housing strategy. Also, with Black History Month, he has multiple bookings. I really do apologize, but I have worked very closely with him to develop this policy and deliver it, and I hope there are no questions you ask me that I won't be able to provide an answer to. Luckily, that very mischievous member from Spadina—Fort York isn't here to cause me trouble, so I'm in good shape on that front.

First of all, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you from the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, who hold the treaty on this land, but it's also the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Huron-Wendat. From across Turtle Island, and now in fact from around the world, it has been a gathering place for many people from many nations for generations.

We are now in to the 11th month of the pandemic, and to understand where rapid housing fits in to our response to homelessness during the pandemic we need to turn the clock back to almost a year ago when we realized the scale and the absolute devastating impact COVID-19 presented, both as a possible risk and, in fact, for too many Canadians, a reality, in terms of loss of life and hardship that have flowed from this unprecedented historic pandemic.

We immediately understood the impact on vulnerable populations. Especially as we watched COVID surface in Europe and in New York City in particular, we saw the impact it was having on homeless populations, people in precarious housing, people sleeping rough, and a whole series of populations that didn't have secure housing. We knew that we were going to have to act quickly because housing was effectively the medicine that was being prescribed to people. It was one thing to be told to stay home, but if you didn't have a home, that was medical advice that you just wouldn't be able to follow. What we immediately did was to work on the existing programs to see where they could be fortified, and this is the groundwork that, as I said, led to the rapid housing initiative.

Immediately, we more than doubled the resources for Reaching Home and removed many of the rules and restrictions and regulations to allow local communities to respond to COVID with as much flexibility and force as possible. We also then set up a stakeholder meeting, which we have been holding on a regular basis since, with our Reaching Home partners. Reaching Home, of course, is the housing program that addresses homelessness in the federal national housing strategy.

On top of that we've also been working on a weekly basis with the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness to talk to front-line workers to take a look at the research and the data they've been calling in to make sure that not only are the Reaching Home dollars working hard, but also that for housing solutions that were coming forward and being proposed for isolation, for safety reasons, for medical treatment, for people with addictions in particular who are difficult to isolate, we started marshal resources immediately as the pandemic seemed to project a longer and longer timeline into the future. Work on the rapid housing initiative actually started last March. It took us time to understand what the sector was asking of us, how the sector was responding, how different cities and different communities were responding, and we built the rapid housing initiative around the front-line experience of many of these organizations.

We also know that precarious populations, or populations that live in precarious environments, such as indigenous communities in urban settings, and also racialized communities, which were also going to be impacted differently. In response to this, we made a call to our partners through the Reaching Home network, in the indigenous, northern, rural and the designated community stream, to show us what they would acquire quickly, if they could, to help address COVID in an emergency response, but also not just to flow dollars through these communities to deal with COVID, but if there were a way we could pool those dollars to create permanent solutions to homelessness as we addressed the COVID crisis.

In fact, we got a very strong response from different corners of the country and with that data went back to CMHC and budget in the summertime and working with the FCM, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and in particular the Big City Mayors' Caucus, where homelessness tends to have the highest impact and the largest municipal exposure, as well as our provincial-territorial-indigenous government counterparts, and we came forward with a program to do a couple of things.

One was to bolster and reinvest in Reaching Home, and $236.7 million was announced in the fall as additional dollars for this year. Moreover, in the fall economic statement an additional $299 million was forecast for the next year as a starting point so that the system would know what was coming from the federal government to help them plan and coordinate their communities' response to homelessness.

Second, we could see, certainly in major cities, that renting hotels was becoming extraordinarily expensive, costing up to $3,000 a month in some cases, which could actually buy you a condominium in Toronto or Vancouver. We thought these dollars could be better spent acquiring those properties and acquiring distressed assets and building modular housing, as opposed to simply renting emergency temporary shelter. We formulated a program. We—the minister and I—moved it through cabinet and in September launched the rapid housing initiative. It's a billion-dollar initiative. The funds are forecast to be expended by March 31.

Based on research we had done, we broke it into two streams.

One was the designated community stream, in which there are 15 major centres. CMHC is with me today and they can break down for you some of the formulas that were used.

The second stream was on a project-by-project application basis and is open to all communities right across Canada, including indigenous-led housing programs and indigenous-led programs that are on reserves. There was a wide open throw that included all major housing systems and all major providers to try to get to the rapid housing initiative.

To date, we have closed the application process, but I can tell you that for the major city streams, there are a couple of cities where we are just finalizing details of the transfer agreements, but the properties have been more or less secured. To date, we have executed the city stream. Almost every city now has an agreement in place. In Toronto, for example, their $203.3 million will secure 540 units of housing, some of it modular and some of acquired. Again, the details are for CMHC to share with you.

Even in Montreal and Quebec—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

I'll get you to wrap it up, please, Mr. Vaughan.

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

—we've also had success. The city stream is out the door.

We are in the process of finalizing the applications that have been submitted through the project stream. There has been a significant oversubscription on that program, which is good news, because we expect to have a second chapter to this program. Those are to be announced in the coming days and weeks as we move through to execute the second part of the strategy, but we expect to be able to meet the deadlines.

With that, I'll leave it to my colleagues from CMHC to provide further details and turn it back to the chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Vaughan.

We're going to start off with Mr. Vis for six minutes, please.

Mr. Vis, you have the floor.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Parliamentary Secretary Vaughan, for your opening testimony today.

Just as a point of clarification, how many projects that we know of so far under the major city stream were truly distressed assets purchased or were agreed to be purchased by the major municipalities under RHI for affordable housing? How many of the projects were either new or co-op existing projects? In other words, were these funds just put toward other housing projects?

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

CMHC may have more of those details, but it has been a blend of what we would call “distressed assets” or assets that have residential capacity but weren't residential. Think of a hotel, a motel or a closed student residence and that sort of thing.

The second part of it has been a conversion of commercial space to residential. Think of an office block that could be converted. There has been modular housing as well, but CMHC has more detail on a city-by-city basis.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

If CMHC could provide that after our meeting today, that would be very helpful.

As you described, this was part of the government's response to COVID-19. It's clear that under the rapid housing initiative, we've seen some results, and I'm looking forward to hearing about how many people have already been housed under the program or will soon be housed.

Do you believe that the need for the rapid housing initiative is a result of the fact that the co-investment fund, as we've heard from so many people in our committee, hasn't been working up to expectations?

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

No. The co-investment fund is actually over-performing, and we've heard testimony before from CMHC on how we've compressed the turnaround times. It was a program that was launched from a dead start, because there wasn't a housing strategy in place when we took office in 2015.

The rapid housing initiative seeks to build a different kind of housing. The co-investment fund does not in and of itself create deeply affordable housing. Housing requires you to buy land in the market and to buy materials and labour in the market, and there, to get it down to deeply affordable, you need government subsidies. There are no two ways about it.

In this particular case, the hardest to house, that particular population—the chronically homeless in particular, but people who are sleeping rough, in the shelter system or couch surfing, otherwise known within the sector as the “invisible homeless”—has never really had a focused intentional policy aimed at driving those numbers down in specific ways. What Reaching Home does is that it transfers people to that housing system. You need a housing system to transfer them to and house them—

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

That's a fair point.

I'm going to cut you off.

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

This is intentional on the lowest income, hardest to house.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Vaughan.

Go ahead, Mr. Vis.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Okay, that proves my point, that probably from what we're hearing from stakeholders, what you're hearing and I'm hearing, the co-investment fund wasn't flexible enough, that it wasn't responding—

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

I disagree.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

—to all of the needs according to the criteria set out on the CMHC website.

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

No, I disagree with you. That statement—

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Okay, but I'm not asking you to comment on that. I'm just going to go to my next question.

According to CMHC's press release today, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the territories have yet to receive funding per the announcements outside of the major streams. When will we see announcements in these provinces?

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

As the program says, it will have the dollars out the door and the projects established by March 31. Between now and then, we will have announcements in, hopefully, all of those jurisdictions and right across the country. I can't comment on which ones specifically, but the entire $500 million in the projects stream, which will be distributed more widely, will hit those communities.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you.

How many recipients are double-dipping? How many from the major cities stream have also applied to receive funding under the projects stream?

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

Well, I wouldn't call it double-dipping; it's flexibility built into the system to move the resources to where they're going to have the biggest impact. We are currently evaluating and assessing the applications to make sure they're compliant with the program, and as the programs stream moves forward, we'll know.

What we have to understand is that homelessness is not distributed across the country on a per capita basis. The point-in-time count shows concentrations that need to be addressed.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you.

We do know in the north, for example, that homelessness or people couch-surfing, as you mentioned earlier, is a very big problem, yet I'm perplexed why Iqaluit, Whitehorse and Yellowknife were not part of the initial tranche of funding.

Can you provide an explanation for that?

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

Sure. The 15 cities were chosen because of the extraordinarily high populations of people in distress.

For example, in my riding alone, there are 15 parks with encampments of over 30 people in each of them who are currently sleeping in tents in downtown Toronto.

That situation is replicating itself right across the country, so there is an asymmetrical or a non-proportional distribution of people in extreme housing need that presents a clear and present danger, where high levels of COVID are present in communities. High levels of homelessness and a lack of affordable housing are present due to market rents being beyond the reach of people on social assistance.

There are patterns of homelessness in certain parts of the country that are much more severe.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you. You answered my question.

To your first point about the Reaching Home resources, I will commend the federal government for doing that. Abbotsford and Chilliwack did receive funding, although a little less because it was split in half between the two communities.

I still believe we need to look at rural communities more, and the funds provided through ESDC for the rural stream, which I believe is still woefully inadequate to address indigenous rural communities and other remote parts of the country that have acute homelessness issues. What we're seeing is actually the reason the rates in major cities are so high, because people are leaving areas like the Fraser Canyon that I represent and going to Abbotsford to access resources.

Does the government have any plans in the upcoming budget to meet some of the points put forward by the National Alliance to End Rural and Remote Homelessness, to provide Reaching Home funding for remote communities?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Mr. Vaughan, please give a short answer.

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

As part of our response during COVID, we added six new communities to the designated communities stream. Those all came out of the rural community funding without taking dollars away from the rural communities, and that allowed us to serve more effectively the rural space.

The three commitments made in the throne speech and in the fall economic statement are about an urban and rural northern housing program that builds on the work our committee has been doing; secondarily, another investment into rapid housing and chronic homelessness with supportive housing; and the third part is deepening the capital commitments inside the social housing and non-profit sector within the co-investment fund to meet the full spectrum of housing challenges we face across the country.

In all three of those areas are expected new investments and additional chapters to the national housing strategy, which has gone from $40 billion at announcement to $70 billion as we move towards solving more housing challenges in Canada.