Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his commitment to adequate housing in Canada. I would like to correct some of the numbers he shared.
Since taking office, we have invested more than $7 billion in housing from coast to coast to coast. It is thanks to those investments that we have helped build more than 25,000 new housing units. We have repaired, renewed and renovated more than 165,000 additional housing units. That means that, in total, our investments have led to more than one million Canadians having a place to call home. This is much more than what my colleague suggested.
In my home town in Peterborough—Kawartha, where the vacancy rate for rental housing is 1.1%, over the past three and a half years 1,432 families have been able to find a safe and affordable roof over their heads. As Dr. Dawn Lavell-Harvard, an indigenous leader and a great woman in my community, said, housing is “more than just having a roof over your head”; it is a place to keep a family together. Our housing strategy is beginning to do just that.