Mr. Speaker, it is not really a question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. Regardless of how much we take out of it, it is full. I am not thirsty, so I will not take a sip of it right now.
The reality is that the national housing strategy, which is a $40-billion investment over the next 10 years, is a re-profiling of the investments we have set to make and we now have signed bilaterals with the provinces to lock it in and deliver it.
What the member opposite fails to understand and what his criticism continually highlights is that he actually has not read past budget documents. If he had, he would know that in 2016, we invested $5.73 billion in the housing system. We did that by doubling our transfers to the provinces and tripling our funding for homelessness. That $5.7 billion is not in this budget implementation plan because it was in the previous one. We are not going to do it every time just to make the member happy.
This $5.73 billion, I might add, is four times more than the party opposite promised in its last campaign, a party that thinks the housing crisis started yesterday, apparently. Its plan for a budget this year was to put zero dollars into affordable rental housing and only $10 million toward homelessness, whereas we have $100 million and $5.73 billion.
Could the member opposite please explain to me why he thinks last year's budget implementation budget should be debated today instead of the one in front of us?