Madam Speaker, it is an honour today to rise in the House to speak to what is such an incredibly important issue, not just throughout my particular riding or Ontario but indeed in the entire country. We have heard various stories from people today about the pressing need for affordable housing.
Even before I was involved in municipal politics in the city of Kingston, my first entry into politics was as a sitting member of the affordable housing development committee in the city. This was at a time, in 2004-05, when new money had been coming along thanks to the newly elected Liberal government in Ontario. A decision was made, with the federal government, to invest in housing because of the need and how badly we needed to start moving in the direction of building more affordable housing.
We had the opportunity in my riding, and in my city in particular, to look at how that housing was going to be developed, the various strategies for building affordable housing, whether it was building social housing, investing in co-ops or looking at residential complexes that would have a certain portion of affordable housing and would reduce the rent on those units.
What I have come to learn over the years as a result of my involvement in affordable housing, particularly in the Kingston area, is that there will always be more work that needs to be done on this important issue. In my opinion, we will never hit a place where we can say that we have enough affordable housing and can stop building it. There will always be a need for affordable housing. We should always do more to improve the quality of people's lives.
In my opinion, housing as one of the first building blocks for an individual in terms of how that individual is going to contribute to society is absolutely essential. If people do not have access to housing, they are much less likely to succeed in so many other aspects of our society.
The discussion today is really about what this government is doing versus what we are perhaps being asked to do. I am proud of the direction our government has taken when it comes to affordable housing.
Since 2016, when our first budget was introduced, which started the discussion on the housing crisis and put resources toward solving the housing crisis, more than $5.7 billion has been spent since then on nearly one million families across Canada, as we have heard many times today. Since 2016, over $2 billion in federal funding has been provided to the province of Ontario specifically.
How is this government's approach to affordable housing different from some of the other options that have been presented? I would argue that the most important component of this was the decision to take some time and plan out exactly how this would be implemented.
Based on the motion before us, the NDP would rather just throw a bunch of money at something. From having worked, when I was mayor of Kingston and as a city councillor, with Kingston & Frontenac Housing Corporation and Town Homes Kingston on projects, I have learned that one cannot just throw money at organizations and ask them to build stuff.
For quite a while, there was very limited access to funding. These organizations do not have the capability or the capacity to take what is being proposed by the NDP and inject it without having a plan as to how they are going to do it. That is where the national affordable housing strategy becomes so important, because we plan out how we are going to spend that money and how we are going to effectively deploy the resources to the different components that contribute to affordable housing.
After making the announcement in budget 2016, funding for the national housing strategy started to roll out in 2017. Last year, this government unveiled $40 billion over a 10-year period. There has been a lot of criticism from the opposition about rolling it out over that time, but as I said, these particular plans take time to develop and implement. Twenty-five per cent of the investment will go toward projects for women and girls specifically.
When we talk about women escaping violence, pay equity situations and single mothers, my mother worked for the Kingston Interval House for a number of years when I was in high school. She became aware of some of the problems and situations women and girls were going through as a result of domestic violence and how that impacted their housing. It is so critically important that when we develop a plan like this, we ensure there are safeguards in particular to protect vulnerable segments of our communities.
I will talk about the national strategy, the 10-year plan and the rental construction financing of $3.75 billion to support construction of affordable rental housing low-cost loans. Through the Canada community housing initiative, we will invest and continue to fund the provinces for half a million units of social housing to help keep affordable housing and pay for repairs. This is so critically important.
Something the NDP is perhaps missing is how important it is to repair our housing stock. The member for New Westminster—Burnaby said yesterday that repairing housing was not housing people. Coming from a background where I have been exposed to these housing corporations, I could not disagree with him more. It is vitally important that we continue to maintain our stock of housing.
In Ontario, in the early 1990s, the NDP government of the day, and some of the current members of Parliament were in that cabinet, made a decision to only invest in building new housing and totally neglected the existing stock, because it looked great. The NDP members were able to talk about the numbers and how many houses they were building. Nobody really cared about maintenance and infrastructure repairs.
As a result, when Harris came along in Ontario, after the NDP government, he downloaded all that housing, which had not been maintained and properly looked after by the Ontario NDP, to the municipalities. Now it was their problem. As a result of that, we ran into a situation where municipalities were faced with the responsibility of repairing and bringing the housing stock back up to standard.
It is critical that we invest in repairing affordable housing at the same time as we are building new housing.
I know I am getting close to the end of my time, but I want to address this. I have heard NDP members on a number of occasions today talk about the political posturing of the Liberals, what we are doing to position ourselves, what we are saying and how numbers are being reused. Let us look at the motion itself.
The New Democrats had an opportunity on an opposition day to bring to the House a motion that, by and large, could contribute to Parliament and government policy. Instead, they brought forward a motion that starts off with “That, in the opinion of the House, the government is failing to adequately address Canada’s housing crisis...” They know, right off the bat, that there is no way this side of the House can support that. Then they go on with a whole list of demands with respect to what the government should do.
Who is playing politics? All the NDP is doing with the motion, and it is important that Canadians realize this, is purposely setting it up, knowing it will never pass. Therefore, in the election, the New Democrats can say they told the government to create half a million units of quality affordable housing, but it would not do it. Talking about politics, there is nothing more political than the motion that has been brought before the House today.