Mr. Speaker, I will try to make my comments in two minutes and leave one minute for a response.
I have listened to much of this debate today. I want to make it absolutely clear that there are many people in the Reform Party who believe strongly in the need for social housing. We understand that decent housing is the cornerstone of many families. It is the first real step many families take to work themselves out of poverty. We have to be thinking in terms of the children, not of the adults, in terms of the potential of the children to have firm, consistent roots from which they can grow into adults.
We still have to pay the bills. We as a Parliament have to set priorities. We have to decide where we can spend money, where we can get money and where we can allocate it. In my view there are probably very few areas of spending that we could define that should have a higher priority than housing, particularly for the poor and also for single parents who are primarily female.
The problem is that somehow we have to make these projects self-liquidating. We have to ensure that the social housing projects do not all gravitate to one geographical area. They need to be spread out through the community so that we do not get blocks of high income and low income. We should be able to spread them out through the community.
The co-op programs we have work very well-