Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member opposite for her sustained focus on housing and on tackling homelessness. It is a shared set of values in terms of the goals we are pursuing as a government.
I want to correct the record, though. When we released the national housing strategy, the UN rapporteur on housing made the following statement, which she issued to the world:
This is an important step that is in keeping with Canada's commitment to the right to housing contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the commitment Canada made in 1975 when it ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The rapporteur also said:
I am glad to see that the Government has now made a significant shift in its approach. It is finally moving toward a more inclusive understanding of human rights, recognizing all people as rights holders, including those who live in inadequate housing and those who are homeless.
The national housing strategy and our rights-based approach to housing stands distinct from the NDP position in two very important ways. The NDP position, which is simply to have a right to housing, does not necessarily provide a way to deliver the housing that is a right for a person. Declaring it a right will get people, perhaps, into a courthouse, but it will not get them into homes. It may introduce them to lawyers, but they need landlords. While it creates sort of a hope that they can prosecute their way into housing, the reality is that the UN convention talks about having a system of housing that people have a right to access. We have to do two things: create that rights-based approach, and create that system.
The national housing strategy is a $40-billion investment over the next 10 years that addresses the full continuum of housing needs. The member opposite says that we are not being ambitious enough in reducing chronic homelessness by only setting a target of a minimum of 50%. She is correct. Other jurisdictions, Victoria for example, with our $30-million investment, paired with the city's investment and the province's investment, will end homelessness within two years and be at effective zero.
We think there is much progress to be made, but we also know and understand that hidden homelessness is not documented properly in this country. Better data is needed. While we step in with a robust $40-billion program, and we house hundreds of thousands of Canadians across this country, lifting many out of poverty in the process, the reality is that new people will stream into the system, and we have to account for that in the way we make projections. We are doing that.
I want to contrast our $40-billion investment, which is being spent this year, right now. I was in British Columbia just a weekend ago, in Nanaimo, opening a housing project. We are opening them in Victoria. We are opening them in Vancouver. We are opening them in Toronto. We are opening them in Nova Scotia. It is an extraordinary renaissance that is happening across the country with the national housing strategy, and it comes as we start spending close to $4 billion a year on housing. We will do that over the next 10 years, increasing the funding as we grow the system.
I want to tell the House what the NDP position on homelessness was when we walked into the last election. This is not a new crisis, and nobody on this file thinks it just suddenly started in the last year or two. This is a 10-year program for a 20-year catastrophe that was in the making.
The NDP, in its approach, was only going to spend $10 million a year to solve homelessness. We are spending $200 million a year on the program that they were only going to spend $10 million on. That is an inadequate response by any measure. When it came to new, affordable housing construction, for the last three years of the mandate, based on its campaign platform, the NDP was going to spend zero, zero, and zero.
I would like to ask the member opposite, in response, how they would solve the housing crisis by not spending money and underinvesting in the sector. That was the NDP platform. That is what the NDP proposed: no housing system in which to achieve one's rights as a human in this Canadian system.