Mr. Speaker, this is a non-partisan evening so I will compliment the government on the issue of hepatitis C. There is no doubt that that compensation was sorely long overdue. That tragedy is something that needed to be responded to many years before, so I certainly will say that the government acted appropriately there.
However, on the issue of housing, I am sorry but I simply cannot agree with the Parliamentary Secretary for the Minister of Health. I simply cannot agree.
The funding that was put forward by the government came out of the NDP budget from three years ago. Even at the time, when we forced the former Liberal government to provide some funding for housing, we knew that was only a first step in what was required in long term investments to re-establish social housing and a national housing program in this country. Some of that money has been taken by the current Conservative government and set aside.
It is very slowly flowing, but the reality is that it is far from what is required across this country to address a national tragedy, which is the growing homelessness in the streets of our city. There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians sleeping out tonight. We are not just talking about aboriginal victims of HIV-AIDS. We are talking about individuals in all corners of the country.
My grandmother used to tell me about the Great Depression. I could not imagine a country where there were thousands of people sleeping out in the streets. She used to tell me about the dirty thirties, and I thought, my goodness, it is wonderful that I am living in a country where we have resolved that problem. Yet now in 2008, it is right back to the same kind of horrible social conditions that people saw back in the 1930s.
I simply do not believe that the government is taking this issue seriously and making the massive investments that are required to provide social housing right across this country.