Mr. Speaker, I would like to refer to the comments of my hon. colleague on the Liberal bench about the affordable housing.
How does he feel about promises made in the past? I was frustrated to see that the original budget had no allowance in it for affordable housing. However all of a sudden in this new-found NDP budget, there is funding for affordable housing.
It is worthwhile pointing out that the promise made by the Liberal election red book 2000 was to build up to 120,000 units of affordable housing at a cost of $680 million. An additional $320 million was included in the 2003 budget. As a previous member said, there was also $1.53 billion of homeless funding. One would expect homeless funding would be to help the homeless. How do we help the homeless best? We come up with some homes for the homeless. That is $2.1 billion that has transpired over the last four years.
I have a release from the Minister of Labour and Housing where he claims that to date the government has built 16,000 units. If we do the math on $2.1 billion, we come up with $130,000 per unit of affordable housing that has been provided.
What good does it do to throw good money after bad, throw another $1.5 billion into affordable housing when it has not produced what it was supposed to produce? Why does the government not do the homework on the amount of money, develop some proper plans that will produce housing and will produce the affordable housing that Canadians want?