Thanks very much, and thanks for the opportunity to talk about situations confronting a lot of municipalities and provinces across the country as we deal with a surge of shelter users—not just in Toronto, the riding I happen to represent. I'm here, of course, in my capacity as the parliamentary secretary for housing and urban affairs. The situation, as it relates to the province and to the City of Toronto, does not differ radically from the situations in Quebec and large cities like Montreal.
First and foremost, we want to thank those cities for the hard work they've been doing in the last few months as we have experienced a surge of shelter users and people seeking supports, some of which has been driven, of course, by the situation at the borders. It is also part of a larger picture of challenges around housing facing us as a country. We want to thank those partners because we know that cities are on the front line, doing the heavy lifting. The provinces, quite often, are the organizations that provide immediate response as the federal programs kick in.
The situation confronting Toronto is not a crisis in the refugee system. The situation facing Toronto is a housing crisis, and there has been a housing crisis in Toronto since the mid-1990s. If you take a look at the recent statistics, you'll see that there has been a surge in a particular population, but the city's shelter system has been running at over 90% capacity for the last decade. In fact, the crisis was identified in a groundbreaking report in 1999 by Anne Golden, which shows that there is a significant and dangerous trend in housing dynamics across this country and that cities can no longer rely on shelter systems to provide housing.
Our government did not wait for a situation at the border to act. It did not wait for a call from the communities to respond. In our first budget, we doubled the money for homelessness, in particular to get people out of shelters and into supportive housing, and to provide more support for prevention. We tripled the dollars going to provinces by investing in affordable housing funds. Those investments are paying off, with additional resources on the streets. That's why the shelters in these cities haven't reached capacity.
The challenge is that we need a national housing strategy to address this in a fundamental, systematic way so that we have surge capacity in our emergency housing sector. The challenge is to depopulate our shelters, not simply to build more and more shelters. The $40-billion investment in the national housing strategy, which is already being spent in communities from coast to coast to coast—I've been from B.C. to Saint John to the north this year, cutting ribbons on projects—is our response to this present challenge. We have to take a look at exactly what kind of housing we need and work with our provincial and territorial partners, as well as with indigenous governments and municipalities, to make sure that those dollars roll out as quickly as possible.
In terms of the situation that has garnered the most attention, which is the situation of the Toronto shelter system, a long-standing challenge in Toronto has been that half the people in the shelter system are children. This is as true for long-term Canadian populations and multi-generational Canadian families as it is for immigrant and refugee families. Half the people in the city's shelter system, since 1999, have been children.
We've done site visits of the motels in the shelter system, which are currently housing some of the new refugees, asylum claimants, migrants, and immigrants. When you go up to those centres, what you see are buildings full of children. This image, this stereotype of a single person crossing the border, a meme that we saw recently on social media, is just false. It's just not the experience of Toronto, and it's not the experience of the numbers we're seeing.
What we need to do is figure out a strategy that houses families effectively. We are working very hard with the City of Toronto and other municipalities across Ontario, as well as with the Province of Quebec, to set up a system that triages at point of entry, whether it's a regular point of entry or an irregular border crossing, to move families in particular into housing and not shelters, and to support them with the dollars that are part of the federal government's investment in affordable housing and homelessness. This is the strategy and the plan that have been in place since day one when this government took office.
The issue here, as I said, and I will state it again, is that we have a housing crisis in major cities in this country. In large part that's because people flock to major cities when they are in need of housing, because they perceive there to be both employment and housing resources in those communities. Unfortunately Toronto, having sustained a 90%-plus surge in its shelter system, is at a point now where it needs a network of support around it to redistribute some of those families and put them in places where they're going to thrive and contribute to their own lives and the communities they're in.
The model we want to use in Ontario, or we thought we were on the way to using, was the model we put in place in Quebec. A triage system at a point of entry identifies the composition of the family, the composition of the group seeking asylum. It maps the provincial housing system across the entire province. It maps where the financial resources and immigrant support services are, as well as language supports for different groups, because they present at the border differently. It redistributes the pressure so that no one city carries the whole load. In fact, the entire provincial system is kicked into place, and the federal supports that are there are added to the mix to make sure that provinces and municipalities get the supports they need, but also that the people seeking asylum get the supports they're entitled to and are required to be provided with so that the system effectively works.
In the absence of the provincial system being available to us—and the provincial government has suggested that this is uniquely a federal responsibility—which the federal government actually funds on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year basis through the social transfer, we've had to reach out to municipalities and municipal partners across the province and basically remap the system that is already in place. We're now working with other municipalities across Ontario to redistribute the pressure and to move people into good, strong housing communities with the right supports. That situation is being mitigated and being worked on.
At the end of the day, quite frankly, if this country is not prepared to move children out of shelters, regardless of their immigration status or citizenship status, if this country is not prepared to put an end to the practice of putting children in emergency shelters, this problem is going to persist. The fear we have, as it relates to emergency housing, is that as we watch the forest fires in northern Ontario, as we see what happened in Fort McMurray, with 80,000 people being displaced very quickly, and as we watch the floods in New Brunswick or the floods in Manitoba that have yet to be addressed in terms of new permanent housing, what we know and what we are seeing is that significant, volatile, sudden, and large population displacements are the new normal. Whether they come from across the border or from inside your province or from across the border of provincial jurisdictions, the reality is that we can no longer sustain an emergency housing system at 90% capacity. It is not sustainable. If we're going to take care of Canadians, we need to create a different kind of housing system. If we're going to make sure we have capacity going forward into the next century, we're going to have to build a housing system that doesn't utilize emergency housing at a 90% capacity rate. It's just that simple.
I'm very proud to be part of a government that recognizes this. It did it from day one of taking office, almost three years ago. As I said, it doubled the amount of money going into homelessness supports across this country and tripled the provincial transfers. It has sustained the social transfers to provinces, and it is currently signing bilaterals, province to province to province right across the country—including, I might add, already one with Ontario. The resources are there. The system is being rebuilt. The focus on getting children, regardless of their status, out of these shelters is under way.
The plan, from our perspective, would be enhanced with provincial participation, but it is not the first time that a provincial government has shirked its responsibilities. In fact, if you go to the Anne Golden report from 1999 and take a look at the recommendations contained in that report, which was the first significant response to homelessness in Toronto, you'll see that it talks about provincial–federal gridlock. At that time, the provinces demanded total control of the housing sector and asked the federal government to get out. At that time, the provincial government in Ontario said that it, and not the federal government, was responsible for housing. What has changed is that now we have a provincial government that says it needs federal help. The good news is that the federal government is there to help.
This jurisdictional gridlock is what has sustained the housing crisis in Ontario and Toronto. It has hurt other provinces just as much. It's time for every level of government, all orders of government, to pull together and solve this problem. If it's migrants today, it will be people from a forest fire tomorrow, or people from a flood the day after that. We need to build a stronger housing system in this country, and that means we have to step up as a federal government.
One reason I'm here today is that when I was a reporter covering this issue back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I happened to come to Ottawa and question one Stephen Harper about this. Stephen Harper's response to me was to go read the Constitution. His instruction was to read the Constitution. His explicit instructions were that housing was not a federal responsibility and his government wouldn't participate. What made the housing crisis worse since the Anne Golden report was the previous 10 years of government, which effectively cut supports for homelessness, cut supports for construction and repairs, and eliminated the federal presence and subsidies right across this country.
If we had not come through the last decade with weakened housing resources, the City of Toronto, the City of Montreal, Vancouver, and other municipalities right across this country would not be in a position to be frustrated in their response. We would have a robust system. We would have emergency housing being constructed and maintained. Instead, we have the exact opposite.
I'll add one last note. The first act, the very first act, of the provincial government in Ontario was to eliminate $800 million in committed funds for repairs to Toronto community housing. Toronto community housing will now lose one unit of housing per day more than they're building. That will only make the situation worse. We need provincial partnership on this, and we are looking forward to Ontario stepping up regardless of the citizenship status of children.
