Human Resources Committee on Feb. 4th, 2021

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

If you give me until the budget, I will sit down with you and walk you through what the budget means and what that means for a timetable.

In the interim, as I said, we inherited a program that disqualified indigenous applications. That was the previous government's approach on indigenous housing. We've changed it. We've made indigenous applications eligible in every stream and then prioritized them in the case of rapid housing. When we hit the ground with the new....

When we get the committee report and when we get the budget, I will sit down with you and show you what the timetable looks like as we compose both the system and the delivery of real housing to real people.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Okay. I will hold you to that.

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

Please do.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thanks, Adam.

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

I'll hold myself to it as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Ms. Gazan and Mr. Vaughan.

Mrs. Falk, you have five minutes, please.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, MP Vaughan, for being here and taking our questions. A few times now I've heard you mention the budget. Is budget day going to be in this Parliament or the next one?

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

Oh, oh! Like you, I am eager to see it. Budget day is an important day in the parliamentary cycle, and it's when we get to do the work we need to do as MPs. The sooner the better for me.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Absolutely, and also for Canadians. It's very important for Canadians and—

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

Absolutely, I agree.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

—for the provinces. We see this with health transfers in particular.

As you know, I've been on this committee with you for a very long time. You know that I come from a rural riding. I guess something's bothering me in hearing some of your testimony today. You did say that rural homelessness is just as important or just as—I can't remember the exact word you used, but that urban and rural is all bad; we need to make sure that all homelessness is looked at.

Given the streams here, and as a rural Canadian, I hear from my constituents all the time that they feel they're treated unfairly by this government, or that their ways of life are not recognized because they're different from downtown Toronto.

An example is the carbon tax. They're paying more taxes because of where they live, for example. When I see and look through this program, it doesn't look like rural homelessness was taken into account. It really doesn't.

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

I disagree. We could have taken the top 25 largest cities in the country and spent a billion dollars. We still wouldn't have solved the problem in the largest cities, and we wouldn't have had a project stream to deal with smaller applications and small communities where the work is just as critical.

One of the ways in which we balanced that was to look at the major cities and take advantage of the large governmental structures in major cities. Toronto has a population of—I'm going to get the number wrong, and I'm from Toronto. It's almost as large as Atlantic Canada in population terms. The challenge has been—

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

But that's not all of Canada. That's just my point.

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

Understood.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

There have to be lenses used for different parts of this country.

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

That's why we compressed the list of designated cities to create more bandwidth for smaller communities, so that we could distribute the money more equitably geographically into smaller rural communities.

We have also, during the Reaching Home changes during COVID, added dedicated funds to smaller communities, which has allowed more dollars to be left in the hands of a smaller cohort of rural municipalities.

We've been very focused on making sure that we move upstream on homelessness from where it is in major pools of homelessness into the headwaters of homelessness, which, unfortunately, also are present in rural Canada. We have to do both simultaneously, but we have to do both differently because homelessness is different in major cities than in rural Canada.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Absolutely. That's kind of my point, right? It needs to be acknowledged and done differently, so those lenses have to be applied.

I've heard you mention a lot this hour a second chapter or rapid housing 2.0. Have there been lessons learned thus far that are going to make that different? If so, what is going to be different, and are there going to be...? For example, I've spoken to a lot of seniors and seniors' groups who have been left out of this. What is the government going to do differently or put an emphasis on to make sure that we're reaching all of the vulnerable populations that need this help?

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

There are two things to say.

One was the organization that Brad Vis referenced, the rural homelessness chapter of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. They're giving us good data and good information as to where to direct dollars. We are just now receiving and assessing the project application pool. Inside that pool, those will be the lessons. That will tell us where the opportunities lie and where the focus is being placed in different communities across the country, and it will allow us to start to articulate a rural strategy that responds directly to the opportunities and the work that's being done on the ground in rural Canada.

I agree with you about seniors' housing, and I would add to that long-term care, which is just a form of supportive housing. We need to bridge the divide between the housing sector and long-term care. Long-term care has always been seen as part of the hospital system and therefore a provincial responsibility, but the pathway to long-term care.... I know that in St-Pierre-Jolys in southern Manitoba, I was at a complex that had retirement housing, seniors housing with some support, long-term care, and then a space in-between for families that had one parent on one side of the hallway and another parent on the other side of the hallway. It was a brilliant program in Ted Falk's riding. It was near Jolys; it wasn't in Jolys, but that's the kind of modelling into rural Canada that will give a full continuum to seniors who want to stay in the community, close to family, close to business and close to doctors, to and evolve and age in place with different chapters of their life being approached in the same project.

We're going to be taking a look at those supportive housing models that come to us through the application process and use that information and data to strengthen our response to housing needs in rural Canada, because we can't solve homelessness in Toronto if we don't solve it in your community.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mrs. Falk and Mr. Vaughan.

Now we're at the moment that Mr. Housefather has been waiting for, for some time.

You have the floor for five minutes, sir.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I was fascinated by all that was going on.

I want to congratulate Adam not only for being the subject matter expert on this—and I have to say that his passion is so clear when he talks about housing—but also on his ability to speak more quickly than anyone else.

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

Peter Kent will know that every producer I have ever worked with has told me that.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I must say, that as an MP from Quebec, I was very pleased with—

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

I apologize to the translators.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I was very pleased with the January 22, 2021 announcement of the agreement between the federal and Quebec governments to create projects in Quebec that will receive $116 million in investments. This will lead to 54 projects and 1,201 housing units. Furthermore, $56.8 million will be invested for rapid housing in Montreal, where my riding is located. As a result, 12 projects will launch, and 263 units will be provided.

This will help many of our society's most vulnerable people.

Adam, I am going to switch back to you.

Could you talk to me about some success stories that you've seen in Quebec, if you can, but if not, in Canada. What kinds of people have really been helped here? Give me one or two examples.