Mr. Speaker, I will be brief and to the point.
Point number one is subsidized housing. There are two groups of people, those who need it and those who do not. For those who do not, I have had them in my office. They are Gucci socialists. These individuals are making good money and what they are doing is taking away homes from those people who desperately need them. This is an absolute outrage.
Point number two is the issue of the people who are homeless and on the street. There are a number of groups. Group one consists of those individuals who are psyche patients, as was mentioned before. This bespeaks of the deinstitutionalization that has taken place and that has been an abysmal horror for the people who suffer psychiatric problems.
We must provide areas where these individuals can be taken care of. Not only does this make sense from a humanitarian point of view but it is also good medicine and cheaper.
Point number three is the individual on the street suffering from drug problems. It bespeaks of the abysmal failure we have had in terms of how to deal with drug problems.
What we can look at as a solution is the Geneva experiment, the post-needle park experiment, which is probably the best program in the world right now on how to get hard core drug addicts off the streets, employed and integrated members of society. I ask that this issue be dealt with in a multifactoral manner.
On the long term approach of preventing these people from becoming homeless, what we need to do is address the problem at time zero. We can have a national head start program using existing resources based on the motion I had passed in the House last year. It would go a long way in preventing a lot of the social problems that are occurring.
I implore the Minister of Human Resources Development to work with his counterparts, the Ministers of Justice and Health and their provincial counterparts, to develop an integrated approach where they can start of with the medical community at time zero, train volunteers in the middle based on the Hawaii head start program and use educational services for children starting at age four to eight.
Essentially it strengthens the parent-child bond to ensure that children have their basic needs met in those formative years. If children in their first years of life have their time disrupted through child abuse, drug abuse, being subjected to alcohol while in utero, et cetera, it has a dramatic and damaging effect on the psyche of these children and therefore does not enable them to become integrated members of Canadian society.
This has been proven time and time again. We have wonderful programs from the head start program in Moncton that the Minister of Industry was a leader in to programs in Michigan and Hawaii. If we incorporate those and use the motion that I had passed we will have a seamless program that will prevent a lot of these problems from occurring in the future.