Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the work he has done on this very important issue.
From people in my riding, I know this is something that comes up quite frequently. One of the first experiences I had was meeting with a woman who bought a van, because with her health issues she could not afford both rent and medication. She said to me that she was doing the best that she could, but she was really worried it was going to get cold.
I come from Vancouver Island in B.C. A lot of people like to joke about how warm it is where I am, but if someone is living in a van because they cannot afford rent and medication, it can get pretty damn cold. Excuse my language.
I appreciate that making sure we implement this program really well makes sense, but there are a lot of models we could look at. We could continue to study and study and study, and I want to be very clear that this is what it says. The bill does not talk a lot about implementation; it talks about the study.
We have done a lot of studies in this place. This has been a promise, and people get tired of waiting. At some point we have to say that it is not going to be perfect right away but that we are going to get to the action part of this, and we are going to make it really clear.
The member is saying a year, so we are going to wait here and see if it happens. Unfortunately, that promise has been made many times. We will watch and we will wait, and hopefully it will happen, because a lot of people are having to make terrible choices, such as living in a van.