Mr. Speaker, I would suggest the member go back and talk to housing activists from coast to coast to coast. The first thing they will tell her is the federal government is not pulling its weight on this.
I was briefly the housing critic for the NDP awhile ago and in that short time I had a stack of reports, over a foot high, from every corner of the country, from coast to coast to coast. The first recommendation in every one of those reports was the need for a national housing plan, a national housing strategy, that actually built homes for Canadians.
We do not have that now. We have some maintenance of old programs. We have the Conservatives still living off the avails of the NDP budget that we talked the Liberals into at the end of their term. They cancelled a corporate tax cut and put a billion dollars into affordable housing and homelessness programs. The Conservatives are still living off of that. They implemented it after the Liberals were defeated and they came into power. It is just not good enough.
We need a national housing program that builds homes for Canadians. Other G8 countries have that. Every community in the country that has looked at this has identified the primary failure for our communities and our country to address the housing and homelessness issue is because the federal government is not involved in a serious way. That needs to change.