Mr. Speaker, I am glad to report that for many Canadians, the wait is over. The 14,000 new housing units are a start. I agree, we need to do much more. The national housing strategy, with the co-investment fund and other investments, is poised to do just that.
The challenge we have is that it took us 25 years to build the crisis. Our party was part of the problem, in the early nineties, when we made significant cuts to the housing program.
People like Claudette Bradshaw invested her time and energy in changing course and delivering the homelessness partnering strategy program from this side of Parliament. There were people like John Godfrey, who resuscitated and reinitiated federal investments in housing, and Bill Graham, who refused to let the operating agreements expire in cities like Toronto, in particular for co-ops. All these Liberal members also helped start to rebuild the system. Quite clearly, by the time I stood for the by-election, the work was not nearly as complete as it should have been.
This government took office and invested $5.8 billion immediately. Those dollars are the dollars producing houses in places like B.C. now. We have now reprofiled the dollars to make them more effective, over the next 10 years, with a $40-billion investment and good, strong bilaterals. I am proud to say that British Columbia was one of the first provinces to sign a bilateral, and that means 10 years of runway for housing to be constructed in that province, and that will turn things around, hopefully. If not, we have—