Mr. Speaker, the short answer is yes. We sit down with housing providers every day of every week and learn from them what challenges they may encounter in accessing funds through the national housing strategy. The good news is, because of the continual intake process and the continual granting process of this program, as we learn and hear from housing providers from coast to coast to coast, from rural communities, big cities, indigenous communities, remote communities and coastal communities, we are adapting the program to build the system as they build housing.
The results speak for themselves. The members of the party opposite often say that no money is coming until after the election. The reality is that we have already spent more than $5.7 billion, most of that new money, on the housing system. It was a down payment to get us moving toward the national housing strategy. Now that we are in the midst of the national housing strategy, there is more than $40 billion forecast over the next 10 years to build housing. The result is that it now exceeds 15,000, since we were given the updated numbers. However, 15,000 new units have been approved or are under construction and close to 150,000 units have been repaired.
The member from British Columbia who said that repairs do not matter is just fundamentally wrong. In the city that I represent, when we took office, we were losing housing faster than we were building it because repair dollars were not being invested. Repair dollars are as essential to the housing system as construction dollars are. In fact, I was in Burnaby just last week, where we announced a total rebuild of a co-op housing program that took the old plumbing out, replaced it with new plumbing, cleaned it of black mould and then replastered the insides of buildings and made them more airtight and therefore more energy efficient. That was one of the co-investment projects that was funded in British Columbia.
We are committed to a number of things. We are committed to building. We are committed to repairing. We are also committed to subsidizing housing. One of the things that the party opposite fails to understand, and its promise shows this when it makes numbers that are global in nature in the same way that Doug Ford in Ontario delivers slogans about housing, is that when the members just say they are going to build a lot of housing, if they are not also simultaneously talking about repairing it, and at the same time subsidizing it and at the same time providing subsidies for housing, they are not actually building a housing system. They are just building housing. If they just build housing and they do not subsidize it into affordability and do not support the people inside it to make sure they can be self-sufficient and they do not program maintenance and operating dollars into the program, they build housing but they do not support people living in housing.
Therefore, our program has been very progressively and properly funded to do all of those things: to support dollars for construction, to support dollars for repair, to support dollars for subsidies and to support dollars for the support of people. The new dollars are flowing as we speak.
I was in Burnaby to announce co-op programs. There were four of them. I was not in Barrie because the weather did not let me, but Barrie, Ontario, has been granted money. There are three projects in Woodstock. We just announced a project in Toronto last week. There are three programs that we announced in Saskatchewan just a month ago. More is being announced day by day. The system is growing.
The party opposite is right to focus on this as a critical issue for Canada. Good housing programs do not just house people who need the supports. They also create economies in the communities where these projects are presented and they also create platforms for the success of other government interventions around child poverty, veterans, making sure we fight climate change, and making sure that immigrants and refugees are settled properly in this country.
The national housing strategy is real. It is housing real people with real dollars now. The successes are just as real. We listen and change the program to make sure that everybody who applies gets help.