Mr. Chair, I am humbled to be able to join in this debate tonight and know that it is a very important debate for many of the constituents of Scarborough—Rouge River. As my colleague from York South—Weston mentioned, about 300,000 Canadians of Filipino descent are in the greater Toronto area, and about 10,000 of them are in Scarborough—Rouge River. My heart goes out to all my constituents who have family members and friends living in the Philippines, as do I. Know that I have many friends and people who have become like family for me living in the Philippines and are dealing with the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, as we call it, or Yolanda, as they call it in the Philippines.
This typhoon has displaced more people than the tsunami of the Indian Ocean and Hurricane Katrina put together. More than 500,000 homes have been completely destroyed by this typhoon, and we know that at least 13 million people have been affected throughout the Philippines.
I am very grateful and want to, first and foremost, thank every single person who has taken immediate action to make sure that we are doing what we can as civil society members to support our friends and family and our global colleagues, our global citizens in the Philippines, who have been affected by this natural disaster.
I want to share with members an email I received from Lory Grace Bautista, who is a constituent who lives in Scarborough. She was very nervous and very concerned about what was happening and how her family in Aklan province, on the Panay island were. She was worried that the Panay island was not getting as much support in the Panay region as many of the other people were. She was very grateful that our government had deployed the DART team and is very grateful for the support we are seeing here in Canada from everywhere. She was really hoping that we would extend our operations to Aklan province and other provinces, such as Antique and Capiz.
I am happy to let Ms. Bautista know that our DART team has been sent to the Panay island. It is very good to know that I can write back to Ms. Bautista to tell her that we have been able to do what she is asking and what many other people have been asking.
My colleague mentioned the fundraiser he is going to. Just a week ago, I met with MANET, the Ministerial Association of North-East Toronto. This is an association that brings many congregations of different faiths together. We sat there, around a table, to figure out how we could work together to do our own community fundraising to send money back to the Philippines to help with the aid efforts everybody around the world is doing.
I was in conversation with Migrante Canada, as well, about the work it is doing nationally here in Canada to raise money, and I want to thank everybody who is doing that.
I also need to thank our government for the quick response we have seen with the monetary commitment, the initial commitment of $5 million and the further commitment of matching funds. I am a fan of giving credit where credit is due. With the donations from Canadians, the matching to date is at $15 million. That is fantastic news, because that is money that is very much needed on the ground in the Philippines.
I am a very big fan of DART and personally know the benefits of DART. I want to thank each and every single member of the DART team for the work they do and thank our members, our Prime Minister, and our ministers, whoever was involved in making that quick decision to send the DART team out. We know that the sooner DART is on the ground, the positive response from the communities becomes exponentially better.