Mr. Speaker, I must say right off the bat that if I were ever forced to make a choice between that analogy and the analogy of the NDP, I am afraid I would lean toward the NDP. Fortunately, I am not about to accept that either. I thank the Lord that we are not in a position where we will be looking at creating some Dickensian community of rooming houses at a subsidy rate of $15,000 a room, as the member said. That is absolutely unbelievable.
What we need in the way of housing for people in our communities is a home. We need a place where children can have meals before they go to school in the morning or where they can come home at night and spend some time with their family. We do not want to create some mythical solution that the private sector will magically snap its fingers and build a bunch of rooming houses.
In fact in the previous speaker's area of Edmonton, a rooming house called Urban Manor applied for a RRAP grant to try to rehabilitate but it did not qualify. Why? Because the building was condemned. The government gave the money to another group, the type of group that the member blamed in his speech. Blame the victim, blame the homeless because they do not have a home. What an astounding comment. I am a little aghast at some of those remarks.
I do want to address the bill because this is a critical issue. I want to assure the member that the Deputy Prime Minister takes the issue very seriously. His remarks may have been intended to say that some people were not aware of the fact that he was responsible for a number of crown corporations, including CMHC. Prior to the role that the Deputy Prime Minister was given by the Prime Minister, CMHC came under public works. Therefore there was a transfer and a recognition that more attention needed to paid to CMHC issues by the government and to the issue of a housing program.
I also want to talk a little about the deal that was signed in Quebec City last November. I think the mover of the bill pretty much said that it was not a bad first step but that it did not go far enough. I can assure members that the government has not taken the position that we have solved all the housing problems in this country because of that one agreement. However let us visit that agreement and talk about the framework and the importance of it.
Yes, it is $680 million and it is apportioned to the provinces around the country to match. The member is correct when she says that the only province so far to have matched dollar for dollar is the province of Quebec. I congratulate the province of Quebec for stepping forward and doing that. However other provinces have signed on.
We have four signed agreements, two of them territories, and we are very close on a number of other fronts. These may not be dollar for dollar but the framework has been set up to acknowledge the fact that the provincial governments are indeed responsible and should at least be held accountable for some portion of the responsibility of housing. This is not something that should be unilaterally solved through some kind of unilateral declaration in a bill that puts this into the charter of rights and says that some--