Madam Speaker, my colleague has correctly identified the list of the challenges the national housing strategy is addressing. What she has failed to do is understand how it is being addressed. For example, on the issue of doing nothing for renters, there is a $4-billion program that is cost-shared with the provinces to provide the new Canada housing benefit. It is active in Ontario. We are concerned that some provinces, B.C., for example, have not rolled it out, but there are now rent supplements to support people and prevent homelessness.
In respect to the numbers the member quotes about the housing completions, she is just wrong. I do not know where she is getting her numbers from. I know she asked a very narrow question to the Parliamentary Budget Office, but what she failed to understand is that the national housing strategy also delivers housing with provinces through housing accords, which are now signed with all provinces and territories across the country.
In fact, when we take a look at the achievements of the national housing strategy, what we see is that those units are being built. What I think she is referring to are the completed units as opposed to the ones under construction. While I can see there have been some challenges with COVID, again, her numbers are wrong.
Today's announcement adds another 3,000 units of housing to the housing portfolios of municipalities and, in particular, non-profits across the country. Those 3,000 units are the first installment, which comes prior to a budget announcement that is going to add the second, third and fourth installments. We are committed to ending chronic homelessness.
When the member says that nothing is being done on the urban, rural and northern housing initiative, she is again only partially right. She is describing the problem but not talking about the solution. In fact, there has been a $225-million increase to urban indigenous housing programs across this country since we took office.
We also have increased eligibility, so every single indigenous housing provider has access to the co-investment fund and to the community housing fund. The repairs, construction, acquisition, delivery and subsidizing are being done through a $55-billion national housing strategy, which as I said, was increased today by $1 billion to create 3,000 units of housing immediately to help cities deal with the COVID dynamic.
In terms of the challenges, the hon. member keeps talking about a housing program that was cancelled 30 years ago. I have a 20-year-old daughter who was born, went to school and graduated since then. If the member opposite would like to build a time machine and go back in time, she would see me on the front lines protesting the cuts that were made in the early nineties. They were a huge problem. In fact, Paul Martin told me himself that it was the single biggest mistake he ever made in politics.
I do not defend those cuts. Those cuts were wrong, but what I did do, unlike members of the NDP, is join a party that actually was committed to investing in housing, delivering new housing, repairing existing housing, subsidizing existing housing, saving the lapsed co-op agreements, stepping up on the issue of urban, rural and indigenous housing, as well as stepping up on reserves, the provinces and the cities, and directing dollars to the front lines through the reaching home program.
To give an example of how different the NDP approach was to ours, that member ran in 2015 on a campaign to promise $60 million total over four years to end homelessness. We doubled the reaching home program to $102 million in our first year. We have now locked it in for 10 years. This year, because of COVID, we increased the funding to the reaching home program. The total we will be spending on front-line services directly in cities just like Vancouver East is close to $500 million in one year. That is 10 times more than that party has ever promised for reaching home, so if the member opposite would like to build a time machine and go back in time, she is perfectly suited to do that. She will see a much younger version of me, as I said, protesting those cuts.
The difference between the member's party members and ours is that while they are building time machines we are building housing in every single province. We are repairing housing in every single province. We are subsidizing residences in every single province. We have a housing accord with every single province and territory, and now we are moving to comprehensively address the deficit in urban, rural and northern housing because, as she said, it is shameful. I will also add that I have never seen a campaign plank in their platform that ever spoke to that issue.