Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming in for your presentation today.
I'm going to echo Monsieur Lemay's frustration. I was interested to see comments around personal responsibility in this document. I was in a home last summer that was absolutely spotlessly clean; you could have eaten off the floor. But on the outside of the house there was tin covering rotten floor boards that a contractor, who'd been in a couple of years ago looking at the house, didn't repair. He just nailed tin over top of them. We had to leap from the stairs of the front porch into the house because the boards were so rotten that the stairs pulled away. The house was absolutely spotless, but in the bathroom there was a piece of plywood over the floor so you didn't fall through the floorboards. In the second bedroom there was mould growing up the wall and over the ceiling. It wasn't an overcrowded house, which was unusual. The grandmother and her partner lived there, and occasionally the grandchildren stayed there. They would sleep in the living room so they weren't exposed to the mould.
This woman kept the house spotless, so tell me about personal responsibility.
In the Auditor General's report of 2003--and I think we come to some fundamental issues here--she talks about the fact that there are some fundamental differences in who has responsibility for what. She talks about the basic challenges with roles and responsibilities. Then in CMHC's report, “Aboriginal Housing Background Paper” draft, November 2004, it seems that the underlying problem comes down to the federal perspective that the Government of Canada does not recognize universal entitlement to government-financed housing as either a treaty or an aboriginal right, on- or off-reserve. It says, “However, housing challenges faced by aboriginal people greatly exceed those experienced by other Canadians. Consequently, the federal government has an interest in improving the socio-economic conditions for all aboriginal people regardless of location.”
So in that context, and given that we've heard from Statistics Canada that there's a growing crisis around housing, I wonder if any of you would care to comment on whether or not you see first nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples as having a fundamental human right to housing that other Canadians in this country expect as a right. Do you agree that first nations, Métis, and Inuit people have a human right to housing? If you do, what challenges do you see will face the government if they actually pass Bill C-44, repealing section 67? What's your estimate of what kinds of human rights complaints we might see filed against the federal government for its failure to provide adequate housing in this country?
Take it away.