Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member opposite for bringing the voice of people with lived experience to the floor. It is important to hear those voices and to make sure our housing programs respond directly to their needs.
I would also like to thank him for identifying one of the big problems with fighting homelessness, which is that those people with capacity who live in overcrowded houses are not necessarily counted as part of the chronically homeless, because they are not in shelters or on the streets. When we build new housing, those are the people most likely to access the new housing, because they have such extraordinary capacity to survive. We need to support them, but we also need to take that into account as we try to model or rightsize the housing.
The member opposite said there is no money being spent in his riding by the federal government. Let me assure him that when we tripled transfers to the provinces in our first budget, the B.C. government was one of the first governments, as a Liberal government, to sign on to that. However, let me be even more precise: The NDP government in B.C. has been the most aggressive at delivering housing dollars, and 50% of those housing dollars are federally funded.
Kennedy Stewart, a former member of this House, is now the mayor of Vancouver. When I met with him this week, he said that when he was on the other side of the House, he used to criticize Liberals, but, he said, we are doing extraordinary work. He said B.C. thanks us because without the federal government's partnership with the provincial government, none of what is being built would be possible.
In your riding, $8.9 million has been invested, and those dollars have supported the construction of seniors housing, have supported the subsidies, and we promise to do more and do better because we have a good partner in that province.