Madam Speaker, I am delighted to enter into this debate. As members may know, housing is one of my deepest passions.
I got into electoral politics back in 1993. Why? Because the federal Liberal government cancelled the national affordable housing program at that time. I was working as a community legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside. I was absolutely devastated because I saw first-hand what it was like for individuals who could not get access to safe, secure affordable housing. I worked day and night to find people housing, sometimes inadequate housing.
That was back in 1993. Look at what is happening today. Things are even worse. I have never seen it so bad as it is now. During the election campaign, believe it or not, the Liberal candidate came after me and asked me what I had done in the last six years, having been elected as member of Parliament. I told the Liberal candidate to ask the Prime Minister, the leader of his party, what he had or had not done to deliver housing to those in greatest need.
Vancouver East had the largest homeless encampment in the country. For months this went on. From the summer to the fall to the winter, it persisted. I begged the Minister of Housing to come to my community and see for himself what was going on. I offered solutions day and night whenever I saw the minister. Sometimes it was at the airport, while we were waiting for our flight. Sometimes I would walk across the floor of the House. I wrote countless letters to the government. I even wrote a joint letter with Mayor Kennedy Stewart and the local MLA, the Hon. Melanie Mark, begging for the government to come to the table.
The provincial B.C. NDP government had said that it would match the funding from the federal government to address this crisis. Did the federal government come to the table? No, it did not, and yet the Liberals sit here today and talk about what a swell job they are doing with their national affordable housing initiative. Let us be clear about what is going on with the national affordable housing initiative. The reality is that initiative is not producing the housing needed most by those who are unhoused and by those who are living precariously with their housing conditions.
The co-investment fund that the parliamentary secretary talked about, yes, is a great program, with the exception that it is so riddled with red tape that it is almost impossible for non-profits to make applications. They literally have to hire consultants to get through the stack of pages and reams of questions. Worse than that, after they are able to answer all the questions and submit their applications, CMHC barely has the wherewithal to process them expeditiously, and we wonder why housing is not getting developed. We wonder why things are not changing on the streets.
With regard to the co-investment fund, I must also take a moment to say where the problems lie with smaller communities, rural communities and northern communities, communities that do not have the large infrastructure as my city does in an urban centre to make those complicated applications. They are left out in the cold. That is the reality of what is going on.
Prior to and during the campaign, the Liberals bragged about the largest program within the national housing strategy, the RCFI. The RCFI has constructed housing that is simply not affordable. Housing experts have looked into this program and have found that the developments are way above market, somewhere between 30% to 130% above market. This is the kind of housing they are building. How will that help the people on the ground?
One would think the government would want to bring in a program to support private developers in developing housing that is below market, but no, not this government, not the Liberals. The Liberals go on to say, “What a great job we are doing,” and they send out reams and reams of press releases making these announcements. Holy moly, I almost fell off my chair. In what universe, in what sane perception could one possibly accept the notion that housing builds 100% or more above market are acceptable? Even 30% above market is not acceptable.
In addition, there was a project in Quebec where the Liberals made the announcement but then reporters found out that the project was not even built. Money had not even flowed to it. The Liberals are not embarrassed about that at all, and they just send out those press releases bragging about it. My goodness, I do not know what planet people are from. In my universe, truth matters, and what matters even more is action, because people on the ground need that housing. It makes me want to weep.
When I came to Ottawa this week, our flight was delayed because of the snow. It was around three o'clock in the morning, I cannot remember exactly now, but I was in a cab. As the cab drove up to my apartment, I saw that there was a homeless man outside at three o'clock in the morning in Ottawa, in the bitter cold. I said to the cab driver, “Oh my God. That is a homeless man at this hour on this night, on the street.” I walked up to him, and he did not even have a piece of cardboard on the ground to cover the sidewalk for him. I just cannot imagine that situation. It is not just in the Downtown Eastside that we have a homelessness crisis; we have it everywhere across the country. Please could the Liberal government stop talking about what a great job its members are doing and actually do the job and deliver the housing for the people in the greatest need?
To our Conservative friends, I will say that the motion in and of itself could be a good one, except that all the Conservatives are thinking about is supply and how to get that “gotcha” moment with the government.
The motion proposes to make federal lands available without any stipulation whatsoever to require that residential development be tied permanently to affordable, non-profit, social and co-operative housing. That is not acceptable. It is exactly how the Liberals get away with driving a truck through the loopholes with their arguments about what a great job they are doing, which is producing housing that is way above market and still saying they are producing affordable housing. We have to do better and we must do better, because people's lives depend on it.
I support the other aspects of the motion, such as the call to say to the government that we should never charge capital gains tax for people who are selling their primary home. I absolutely support that, no question. I also support the second component of the motion, which is to say that we need to ban foreign investment. We absolutely need to do that, and we need to do more than that. We need to stop the financialization of housing and stop treating housing as though it is a stock market. We need to deal with REITs and bring in measures to stop those kinds of investments, because all that does is drive up the cost of housing for those who need affordable rentals. I am not saying there is no place for market rentals; there is, but there needs to be some limit, and it cannot be at such a rate that people cannot live there.
I move that the motion be amended in paragraph (a) by adding, after the words “available for” the following: “permanently affordable non-profit and co-operative”; and by adding after the words “primary residences”, the following: “(d) commit dedicated funding in the December 14, 2021 fall economic statement toward the development of the urban, rural and northern indigenous housing strategy promised in 2017, including the creation of a fully funded 'by indigenous, for indigenous' national housing centre; and (e) build 500,000 additional new homes that people can afford, including co-operative housing.”
If the Conservatives would accept this amendment, it would be a fulsome amendment and we could make a difference. Let us do it.