Debates of June 8th, 2021

Opposition Motion—Housing Policy

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is clear that the member only listened to the parts of my speech that he wanted to. If he is suggesting that I was only focusing on social housing, he missed 80% of what I said. I specifically said that successful projects are the ones where government works with developers to help subsidize units in larger buildings. That is my preferred model.

I will repeat what I said during my speech because he clearly did not hear it. When a building has 80 units in it, the government can help to subsidize some of those units to peg rents at below market value for various levels. In my opinion, that is an ideal model. I also really like the co-op model the NDP has been talking about, because it forces market rents and lower-than-market rent, and it is self-sustaining. We have many examples of it in Kingston.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Madam Speaker, we agree that we are in the midst of a pandemic and that that is Canadians' top priority, redundant as the phrase may be. If we had to choose a second priority, however, it might be housing, because there is a serious housing crisis. Today's debate has shown that this crisis exists in every region of Canada. That is especially true of my region of Abitibi—Témiscamingue and its urban and rural communities.

When it comes to building more social housing units, something members seem to be in favour of, one of the problems is the construction itself. Right now, the price of building materials is through the roof, and I do not get the feeling that the Liberals want to do anything to lower those prices. In such a situation, it is mathematically impossible to build affordable housing. How can we lower the price of materials in order to lower building costs and make these housing units more affordable?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I certainly do not have the exact answer to that question. If I had the answer to that question, perhaps I would be in the wrong line of work.

What we are seeing as the price of lumber goes up is creative investors and developers starting to look for other strategies and use other products. I am already seeing it myself. Maybe there is a role for the federal government to play in helping with the creation of other products that could be just as good or better than lumber in the case the member has made.

I certainly believe that there is a role for the federal government to play in making sure that we not only build affordable housing, but also, to the member's point, help keep the costs of building houses down so that people and developers can afford to build. In doing so, we can make sure that the price of houses, or rent in some cases, is feasible.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for South Surrey—White Rock.

We have a decision to make as to whether we want to be a property-owning democracy or a landed aristocracy. That might seem stark, and it is, but it is also true. It is 100% true if we look at the facts.

According to CMHC, for a house to be affordable it should not consume more than 30% of a family's income. Currently, in Canada, the average house would consume 50% of the average family's household income. In other words, the average house is two-thirds more expensive than the average family can presently afford. That is just the average. Across Canada, there are more extreme examples.

For example, in Toronto it takes 68% of the average family's income to own the average house. In Vancouver it is 79%, and that is 79% of pre-tax income, which means that it is mathematically impossible, not just difficult, for the average Vancouverite to own the average home. Why is that? It is because people do not have 79% of their pre-tax income left when the government is done with them. Even if they spent 100% of their post-tax income, it would not be enough. Even if they ate no food, bought no clothes and had zero recreation they would not have enough money, as average Vancouverites, to own the average home.

What is causing that? Why is it that Vancouver is the second-most expensive housing market in the world when we compare average income with average house price? Toronto is number five. Both of them are ahead of Manhattan, London, England, and San Francisco: places with more people, more money and much less land. Is it because we do not have enough land in Canada? We are the 10th-least population dense country in the world. There are more places where there is nobody than there are places where there is anybody in Canada. If we spread our population out equally across the land, there would be only one person standing on every three CFL-sized football fields. That is how much land we have in this country, yet somehow we have a housing shortage. Clearly, it is not because of a lack of land.

Could it be there is a booming economy that is driving up housing prices? Of course not. The GDP went down $120 billion last year and has not recovered.

What else is it? Is it COVID? COVID should have reduced housing prices. When CMHC testified at the finance committee at the beginning of COVID, it said that the pandemic would reduce housing prices by 14%. The Bank of Canada said it would be a disinflationary event, and it should have been. People were moving farther out into the country where per-square-foot costs are actually lower. Furthermore, their jobs were threatened so they would be less inclined to get approved for mortgages, and their earned wages were down, which means they would have less money with which to pay, which should have driven down housing prices. Instead, housing prices went up. They started going down in April 2020 before rocketing up 40% since that time.

What is the real cause? The answer is that the government is restricting supply and ballooning demand.

Let us start with supply. Here in Canada we have one of the slowest processes on Earth to get from buying land to building on it. In some jurisdictions this takes seven years. In Canada in general, it takes forever to get anything approved. In fact, out of 37 OECD nations, we are ranked number 36 for the time it takes to get a building permit for a warehouse, and it is not much different for housing.

Toronto's per-unit-of-housing cost of government is 50% higher than the average in United States municipalities. The charges alone consume almost a quarter of a million dollars in costs for every new unit of housing built in Toronto. The global cost of government for a new unit of housing in Vancouver is $600,000. That is just to pay the cost of government.

This, of course, keeps aristocratic, leafy neighbourhoods gentrified and keeps other people out. It makes the rich richer because they get to have an exclusive domain over these neighbourhoods, where no one else can build and get in. That is very good if someone already has a house as it increases their wealth, but those who are not yet in are shut out. It is as if there was a wall built around these neighbourhoods, where only the rich are allowed inside the wall and everyone else has to try to pay the gatekeeper to get in, but of course most cannot afford to do so. Therefore, the government restricts supply.

What does the government do with demand? It has pumped $356 billion of brand new, created currency into the financial system. The Bank of Canada began printing money in March of 2020, and from February of that year to February of this year the money supply grew by $354 billion. What was the size of the federal deficit? It was $354 billion, exactly the same number, so the printed money was to pay for the government's overspending.

What did that do to inflation? As we know, inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. As the supply of money goes up, prices rise with it, and this started with housing prices. In fact, from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, the money that went into the financial system and the mortgage system increased new mortgage borrowing by 41%. Does anyone know what the price increase was for housing between April of last year and April of this year? It was 42%. The newly created money jacked up mortgage borrowing by 41% and housing prices by 42%. Is it coincidence? Of course not. These are the simple laws of supply and demand, and they are working very well for the very rich.

For someone who owns a $10-million mansion, the increase in that person's home value, depending on which month to month is chosen, is somewhere between $3 million and $4 million. That is money that individual gets for doing absolutely nothing. For a working class person with the dream of buying a home, that dream just got more remote and more unlikely. Furthermore, landlords are about to raise people's rents because the cost of property has risen. He or she will use this, perhaps in some cases unavoidably so, to raise the rents of the people who live there. The wages of working-class people measured in the amount of real estate they can buy are down in value by 30% to 40% in just one year. Meanwhile, the wealth of the super rich is way up. Printing money raises the prices of the things that the poor must buy and that the rich already own. It is a colossal wealth transfer from the working wage earner to the wealthy asset owner.

What do we do? Sometimes the answers are actually simple: not easy, but simple. We should open up the country to construction so we build more homes and increase supply, and we should stop printing money in order to avoid pumping helium into prices. In other words, we should start building and stop printing. It is more about what the government should stop doing than what it should start doing. It should allow people to keep the value of their dollar, to buy things that are of worth with that dollar and build things that will make their lives better. That is how we restore our property-owning democracy. It is how we go back from today's aristocracy to what Canada should be, which is a meritocracy.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Carleton for his speech.

He gave a lot of statistics and showed that it is easier for people who have a lot of money to buy homes. Towards the end, he started proposing solutions.

According to item (b) from the motion, the first-time home buyer incentive was a failure. I would like to know whether my colleague has any solutions to propose to the young people who are having a hard time buying a home. In my day, it was relatively easy to buy a home. Today, my own children are unable to do so. The ability to buy a home is a problem for young people.

Does my colleague from Carleton have any solutions to propose to young people?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her very good question.

Young people are the primary victims of this system because they do not own property, so the increase in value does not benefit them. It is now harder than ever for them to buy a house, and their salary has less real value for buying a home.

Here is the solution. First, we must encourage the municipalities and the provinces to build more quickly at lower cost and with less red tape in order to increase the housing supply. Second, the Bank of Canada must stop printing money and start stabilizing our currency instead of devaluing it because it is issuing too much.

Protecting our money and allowing homes to be built quickly are two suggestions that would best resolve the problem.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families]

Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member for Carleton has spoken more about housing today than he did the entire time he was the minister responsible for CMHC, which is maybe a good thing. However, much of what he said makes absolutely no sense.

I would like the member opposite to answer a very serious question. When the Conservatives decided to go after income trusts in their first mandate, and Jim Flaherty undermined the Conservative commitment to not trust income trusts, the one thing he did not touch was the real estate income trusts, or REITs.

Why did the Conservatives pour jet fuel on the fire and allow the REITs to become the dominant player in the investment side of the real estate industry? What was the thinking behind not curtailing the power that REITs have and the impact they are now having on speculative house prices?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, first, that member has been in government for five years. If he wanted to ban REITs, he could have done it in that time. He has not. REITs are still legal: They are still a tax advantage. He has not changed a thing in that regard.

Second, there is no single person in all of Canada who is more responsible for the failings in housing than that member. Not only was he a city councillor in Toronto who prevented poor families from having homes by making it very difficult to get them built in the first place, but after that he came to the federal level to contribute to the same problem.

With him basically being the lead housing personality, both in Toronto and nationally, we now see 10,000 people homeless in Toronto and a waiting list for affordable housing of 300,000. A carpenter actually had to go out and voluntarily build huts in the middle of a public park in Toronto to save people's lives. That is the abysmal legacy of that particular member and he should be apologizing to all people in Canada.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Madam Speaker, when investors buy up rental housing, they deepen Canada's housing crisis by taking existing rental housing off the market or by increasing rent, making it unaffordable. According to housing policy expert Steve Pomeroy, between 2011 and 2016 Canada lost more than 320,000 units of affordable rental housing. This is more than double what the national housing strategy promises to create.

Do the Conservatives support what advocates are calling for? The first step in solving Canada's housing crisis must be to keep it from getting worse by limiting the ability of large capital funds, including REITs, to purchase distressed rental housing assets.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, the thing that is making the REITs more wealthy is the fact that the government is printing money and driving up the asset values they hold. If the member actually wants to help workers instead of capital owners, she should stop supporting printing money, protect the value of a dollar and protect the meaning of a wage, rather than do what the government is doing, which is ballooning asset values to the advantage of the corporations of which she speaks.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Bow River, Health; the hon. member for Dufferin—Caledon, Canadian Heritage; the hon. member for North Island—Powell River, Veterans Affairs.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, the reality in my riding of South Surrey—White Rock is that the dream of working hard, saving up, taking out a mortgage and buying a home to raise a family has become completely unrealistic. It has gone from challenging, but hopeful, to impossible.

A constituent of mine recently sent me a listing in White Rock. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms and was 1,600 square feet. It was a modest place to raise a family, built in the 1960s. It sold in December 2020 for just over $900,000. Now it is listed for more than $1.25 million. If it sells at asking, and most right now are selling over asking, that is a 23% increase in a matter of months.

How about the South Surrey home that was sold in February for $1 million and then listed again in April 2021 for $1.35 million? No, this is not an issue that arose overnight. I recently saw a small home listed in White Rock for $750,000. It sold in 2015 for less than half that. Housing prices should not double in a six-year period.

The average dwelling in my riding now costs about $900,000. In the Fraser Valley, average prices have risen 20% year over year, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. What are normal Canadians, who earn Canadian incomes and pay Canadian tax rates, to do? For first-time buyers, the dream of home ownership has become a nightmare.

The Liberals' latest answer is to increase the qualifying interest rate across Canada for insured mortgages. Now it will be even harder for Canadian families to qualify. According to James Laird, president of CanWise Financial and co-founder of Ratehub.ca, this will decrease the value of the mortgage a family could afford by roughly 5%. Then we add on the B.C. property purchase tax of 2% on the first $100,000, and 1% on every $100,000 after that. That money goes into the provincial general revenues and is simply lost to the buyer.

Will this increase in the qualifying rate for mortgages cool a red-hot housing market? We see no sign of that. Does it make first-time home ownership more feasible? Absolutely not. It is designed to make it harder to get a mortgage. What it does do, by diminishing buying power, is chill new developments. Developers are the first to realize they might not be able to sell as many units under the new mortgage rules. The rising cost of lumber does not help either.

What we really need to do is increase supply. It is economics 101. Price is largely determined by two things: supply and demand. Of all G7 nations, despite our vast geography and comparatively low population, Canada has the fewest housing units per capita. One way to increase supply is to slow the rampant speculative foreign buying that is distorting our housing supply and squeezing Canadian families right out of the market.

Data for 2019 from the Canadian housing statistics program showed more than 6% of properties in B.C. were owned, at least in part, by a non-resident of Canada. That number is even higher in Vancouver, rising to 11.6% of condominiums there. At first, the government was, and has been, dismissive of this issue, calling those who raised it xenophobic. B.C. workers simply are not able to live in Vancouver. It is seen by many now as a vacation destination.

The parliamentary secretary for housing has said that Canada has become “a very safe market for foreign investment”, adding, “but...not a great market for Canadians looking for choices around housing”.

The latest Liberal budget, the first in over two years, promises to address foreign buying through a consultation on a tax that would apply to foreign buyers. The Surrey family of four forced into an endless cycle of renting because of a skyrocketing real estate market do not want consultation. They want affordable housing. They want to join the middle class. How many times have we heard this Prime Minister's phrase, “the middle class and those wanting to join it”? Seriously, we need a little less talk and a little more action, please.

How else can the government increase supply for prospective Canadian homeowners? It is through policies that encourage building more homes. The Liberal government needs to incentivize home construction and slash through the endless red tape. We need to make it easier to get shovels in the ground, and build. The complex web of bureaucracy that must be navigated to build in this country is extremely costly and time consuming.

The C.D. Howe Institute estimates that red tape and regulations add more than $600,000 on average to the cost of a new home in Vancouver. This is staggering. Sure, much of this is municipal and provincial, but we, in this federal legislature, have a role to play.

A highlight of my parliamentary career was being awarded the Golden Scissors Award from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in 2015, an award for slicing through red tape. The government needs to get its scissors out to start clipping away, and it needs to challenge its regional counterparts to do the same.

Enhancing transit is another key part of the equation. Better, faster transit that reaches further beyond existing boundaries would create a whole new world of possibility for residential real estate development, allowing more commuters to live in areas beyond the downtown cores.

In the Lower Mainland, we need SkyTrain expansions to Langley and South Surrey. We have been waiting far too long for the replacement of the George Massey tunnel, a key artery along Highway 99 that serves commuters from White Rock, Surrey, Delta and more. There were 85,000 commuters a day in 2019. With only four total lanes of traffic, that means constant congestion.

Plans for an expansion were first announced 15 years ago. It is past time to allocate the funds and work with local governments to get these projects done. Better transit infrastructure encourages growth, development and home ownership. Let us unlock this new supply.

The Liberals’ infrastructure plan simply is not working. Their Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was established to disburse $35 billion to infrastructure projects over 11 years, has completed a grand total of zero projects in four years. The independent Parliamentary Budget Officer recently said that the Infrastructure Bank is likely to fall short of its mandate, predicting only $15.9 billion of the $35 billion will be spent by 2028.

Speaking of over-promising and underperforming, the Liberals’ first-time home buyer incentive is also failing. The shared equity mortgage program offered first-time buyers 5% on existing homes and up to 10% on new constructions, resulting in lower monthly mortgage payments, but with the catch the government owns that 5% to 10% of the home, to be repaid to the government after 25 years or when the property is sold.

Let us say a family in White Rock decides to purchase that two-bed, two-bath I mentioned earlier at the $1.25-million price tag. Using this 5% incentive would effectively be a loan of $62,500. Wait a minute, I was carried away with the promise of this program for a moment. This family actually could not qualify for this program at all because the limits on the program are such that it is not available. In other words, it is completely unworkable in my riding all together. Despite the fact that such a program could result in usurious repayment rates, it is irrelevant in my riding anyway.

Canadians were told the shared equity mortgage program would help 20,000 Canadians buy a home in the first six months. Instead, it has served fewer than 6,000 over seven months. Again, the Liberals over-promised and under-delivered. Two years in, and there is less than one-tenth of the Liberals’ promised uptake.

Canadians are not using the program because it is a bad deal. Home ownership is critical to ensuring lasting prosperity and financial stability of the middle class. Conservatives know this. Let us address speculative foreign ownership, cut through the bureaucracy, encourage new builds, increase supply and make the dream of home ownership a reality.

I listened to the Liberals all day during this debate brag about spending $27 billion on housing, so why is the supply of new builds, rentals and upgrades still a crisis? I guess they have not actually been in charge for the last five and a half years. They talk more about former prime minister Harper than Conservatives do, and today, they even reached back 30 years to former prime minister Mulroney.

We are here in 2021 to address 2021 and future Canadian issues, not to gaze back into history. This is why my colleagues and I have put forth this motion today. We are tired of the inaction, the waste, the talking points and the rapid decline of affordable housing in this country, particularly in ridings like mine.

Why not put all that profligate spending into something Canadians actually care about, such as affordable rentals, home ownership and infrastructure to support both? We need a lot less talk and a lot more action.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families]

Madam Speaker, the Conservative motion would not spend one dollar on housing. The Conservative motion is a postcard of ideas that actually would not accomplish much of anything in any of the areas they want to speak about.

The member opposite talks about the desire to build transit. The way capital budgets are constructed at the municipal level is that the development charges are the driver of the capital programs. In other words, when we add new housing, there is a cost involved in delivering the roads, the transit, the schools and the libraries. Everything in the city that a house requires to be functional is leveraged off of those development charges, yet what the Conservatives are proposing is not only to gut that system, but to also cut the funding that is the federal contribution to transit.

How do we build a subway with nothing but tax cuts and budget cuts?

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, last time I looked, the Liberals were the ones forming the government. They have been in charge for five and a half years, and they are the ones who put forward a budget, not us.

We are saying that they have not spent enough time and attention in that budget on affordable housing in Canada. It is a crisis. It is a problem. It is what people really care about. They should please pay attention. We need more action and less talk.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Madam Speaker, we agree on the fact that the housing problem is very much one of supply and demand. One of the problems with the supply has to do with the fact that many homes are either being used for Airbnb or being bought and left empty by foreign speculators. If not for these new trends, we might be able to house every Quebecker and Canadian properly. It would also be more affordable.

What tangible measures can we take to fill the existing housing units in this country?

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, part of what we can do, as I said in my speech, is end the consultation and actually take action on foreign ownership and vacant housing, and on how it is used. However, more so, we need to increase supply. As I mentioned, we have the lowest housing unit per capita rate in the G7. That is shameful.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to be debating housing here today. It is a crisis in my riding and across this country. The NDP is happy to support this motion because it is a motion that says all the right things. It is like the Conservatives are taking a leaf out of the Liberal book by saying good things without having anything here that they have to live up to in an election, for instance.

The member talks about how important it is to increase the supply of subsidized and low-cost housing. What are the details? Would she agree with the NDP that we need to create 500,000 housing units that are affordable just to catch up with the 30 years of lost time when the Conservative and Liberal governments did nothing to create affordable housing in Canada?

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is always good to talk with other members of Parliament from British Columbia. The only place where housing is less accessible than the Lower Mainland in B.C. is the Okanagan, where the member is from. It is a beautiful place to live, but a lot of people simply cannot afford to live there.

Yes, we agree that there needs to be more spending, more targeted spending and more detail put into how we help get past this crisis. We cannot just talk about there being one.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, like my friend from South Okanagan—West Kootenay, I do not find much in this motion to which to object, but I also think that, when facing the housing crisis, we need to recognize that there are some undercurrents here that are not easy fixes. There are a lot of ways we can look at the acute crisis of homelessness for people who need a roof over their head and market housing.

Would the member agree with Professor William Rees at UBC, who said that the biggest problem we faced was when we stopped having the affordability of houses in each community based on what that community earned and it became a global commodities market for speculative investment?

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, I agree with my colleague. This is something that has run away in Canada. It is something we need to take hold of and deal with. We should not have the places where Canadians work just be vacation destinations for people from around the world.

We need to have it tied to our incomes, because we are Canadians, earning money in Canada and paying taxes by Canadian law. That should mean something in terms of affordability of housing.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Humber River—Black Creek.

I am very pleased to be participating in the debate and to speak about our government's efforts to fight homelessness. I am certain that all my colleagues agree that safe housing is vital for the well-being of Canadians and their families. We understand that affordable housing plays an important role in the fight against poverty and homelessness, two issues that require more than just an improvised solution. That is why we are not managing the homelessness issue on an ad hoc basis. Instead, we are developing long-term solutions to prevent and reduce these challenges.

Resolving the problem of affordable housing is of the utmost importance to Canadians. For many of us, it is easy to take our homes for granted. We sometimes forget all too readily that some Canadians are not in the same situation as we are and live in fear of losing their homes.

Poverty has significant repercussions for all aspects of our society. It tends to affect seniors, members of first nations, veterans, children of single mothers or mothers fleeing violence and people who cannot find work in their field even if they have a college or university degree. Some of these people are experiencing homelessness just because their economic, family or social situation has put them at a disadvantage since birth.

The fact is that we had to act swiftly because millions of Canadians were living in poverty and sometimes had trouble getting enough food and finding affordable housing. That is why, in 2017, the Government of Canada announced a $2.2-billion investment over 10 years through the national housing strategy. This investment will extend and expand federal homelessness programs.

In 2019, we launched Reaching Home, Canada's homelessness strategy. This program supports the objectives of the national housing strategy, aiming to help those Canadians most at risk to maintain safe, stable and affordable housing, and to eliminate chronic homelessness across Canada. Reaching Home is a community funding program that supports urban, indigenous, rural and remote communities to help them meet local needs in the fight against homelessness.

In the first six months, the program invested in 1,200 projects across Canada. It was broadened in 2020. Our government collaborated with the communities to develop and implement community projects and plans based on science that aimed for real results. This results-based approach keeps decision-making at the local level and gives communities more flexibility to respond to local priorities, including preventing homelessness, and offer programs designed to meet the needs of specific populations, like young people, indigenous peoples, and women and children who are fleeing violence.

Now, let us talk about our most recent investments in the Reaching Home strategy. Budget 2021 proposes to allocate an additional $567 million to this strategy over two years, beginning in 2022-23. This amount will complement the investment of over $299 million in this strategy that our government announced in the 2020 fall economic statement. It also complements an investment of over $400 million in additional federal funding, the purpose of which was to support the homeless services sector's response during COVID-19 in order to prevent homelessness.

The COVID-19 pandemic put a lot of pressure on Canada's homeless services sector, which had to transform its way of delivering services to prevent outbreaks among the homeless and those at risk of becoming homeless.

Our government therefore plans to allocate additional funding to the Reaching Home strategy for two more years, as of 2022-23. The goal is to help communities to continue to safely serve the homeless and prevent homelessness among at-risk Canadians until the pandemic begins to wane. I would like to add that, given the progress that we have made in our commitment to do more, the government announced that it wants to eliminate chronic homelessness in Canada.

I would now like to briefly outline some other investments our government has made to support housing and affordable housing. First of all, budget 2021 proposes to provide an additional $2.5 billion over seven years to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation beginning in 2021 and 2022. This includes $1.5 billion for the rapid housing initiative, $600 million over seven years to renew and expand the affordable housing innovation fund, $315 million over seven years through the Canada housing benefit, to increase direct financial assistance for low-income women and children fleeing violence, and $118 million over seven years through the federal community housing initiative, to support community housing providers.

Budget 2021 also proposes to advance and reallocate $1.3 billion, on a cash basis, of previously announced funding. This includes $750 million under the national housing co-investment fund to accelerate the creation of 3,400 new units and the repair of 13,700 units, $250 million under the national housing co-investment fund to support construction, repair, and operating costs, and $300 million from the rental construction financing initiative, which will be allocated to support the conversion of vacant commercial property into housing, which will also help a great deal.

I think it is clear that our government continues to do what is necessary to address homelessness. We are clearly demonstrating that we are developing and implementing long-term solutions to prevent and end chronic homelessness in Canada, once and for all.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, we have heard the hon. member recount at length all of the symptoms of the financialization of the housing market.

Perhaps my colleague, the hon. member for Vancouver East, asked the most important question today, which is on the commodification and financialization of rental housing. She stated that Canada is losing more affordable housing than is being created, and this business model of REITs and other large capital funds relies on acquiring lower rental properties that allow them to maximize profits for shareholders, including through rent evictions.

Will the hon. member and the government take action to limit the ability of REITs and large capital funds to purchase rental units, and create a housing acquisition fund for the non-profit sector, as was called for by the former UN housing rapporteur Leilani Farha, the FCM and the recovery for all campaign?

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Madam Speaker, it is a concern. There is no question. With all our investments, we are moving forward with many new and renovated affordable housing units for seniors, but we must find a way not to lose those that already exist, because of investors and whatnot. It is a very important approach. We must make sure that we are working in parallel to make more affordable housing available for all Canadians.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. As I was saying earlier, the housing crisis is also being felt in the Gaspé. However, we recently got some good news. Two housing projects for people in need will be able to move forward, including in Chandler and in my riding in Saint-Alexis-de-Matapédia.

However, the organization that can help move these projects forward is the Société d'habitation du Québec. I wonder if my colleague agrees that in this crisis the role of the federal government is truly to transfer the money without condition to Quebec and the provinces, who have jurisdiction in the matter.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for that very important question. Each of our regions is facing housing challenges, a serious issue that we must work on in close co-operation with the provincial and municipal governments.

I would like my colleague to know that the Union des municipalités du Québec favourably welcomes the direction we are taking to solidify our investments in housing, infrastructure and economic development.