Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for bringing that question forward. I am someone who was fortunate enough to live in co-op housing. It provided safe, secure housing.
Back in the seventies and eighties, when he was talking about that era, over 10% of our housing stock was non-market housing. Most of it was co-op housing. Today, we are at 3%. In Europe, they are at 30%. Europe sees housing as something that is a right, that everybody deserves safe, secure and affordable housing.
Making sure we have non-market co-op housing ensures that people will have a safe, secure place to live. It works because we can have all different types of income levels living in a housing co-op, all different types of needs in a housing co-op. We can build them right across the country, like we did in the seventies and eighties.
Of the many people who I talked to who are privileged to live in co-op housing today, a lot of them graduated into the free market, and a lot of those who could not are still living there today. Therefore, we need to do everything we can to make sure that we provide safe, secure and affordable housing. The co-op model makes sense.
One thing I did not mention in my speech is that we desperately need the government to come to British Columbia and listen to people about the housing issue.