The housing strategy allowed us to get our house in order, much like other federal strategies that we put forward. Legislating housing as a human right was our way of responding to what advocates had been asking for. Minister Duclos, the minister who did the outreach across the country on this, and Adam Vaughan as his parliamentary secretary came back and said, “This is what we've heard. We need to address affordability. We need to address supply, and then we need to make sure that it's not just the federal government in 2015 until whenever that is working to uphold this. We need to make sure that every Parliament recognizes access, and the dignity that comes with a safe roof over one's head, as a human right.”
Legislating that and also doing the back end work of having a strategy in place, building and repairing existing affordable units, focusing on women, on seniors, on veterans and on persons with disabilities are all things we did on the back end to get to legislating it as a human right.