Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to affordable housing, which is such an important topic, and the impacts, and what various levels of government can do to contribute to affordable housing throughout Canada.
It is most important to identify at the outset that, in my opinion, affordable housing is so much more than just social housing. I heard NDP members today talk about social housing as being a need and a requirement, and indeed to some degree it is. However, quite frankly, affordable housing spans the spectrum from helping people with home ownership right to rent geared to income, and basically everything in between. When we look at affordable housing, we need to make sure that policies we bring forward and what we do have an impact throughout that spectrum. If we try to focus on just one end of the spectrum, we are not going to have an impact. If we try to focus on just home ownership, as this motion appears to do, I do not think we are going to have a decent impact on what it means to Canadians, and in particular to those who are struggling right now, to find housing.
I really enjoy discussions on affordable housing. It is near and dear to me personally. My introduction to politics, long before I was even on city council or mayor of Kingston, was being a representative on the affordable housing development committee that the City of Kingston set up to distribute funds to various affordable housing projects throughout Kingston back in, I believe, 2004-05. That initiative was brought forward by the Liberal Government of Ontario at that time. It wanted and saw the need to build affordable housing.
One thing we discovered early on is that when it comes to affordable housing, the best type of housing one can build is mixed integrated housing. There is always the temptation when building affordable housing to build as much as possible to house as many people as possible. This was a very popular way of doing things in the sixties, seventies and even into the eighties for that matter, when the federal government and provincial governments were involved in building housing complexes. However, the unfortunate reality, as we discovered, is that quite often when we do this, we do not end up with good housing. We end up with, unfortunately, the stigmatization of ghettoized housing. We are not helping those living in this situation, and certainly are not helping the stereotypes associated with low-income renters, when everybody is put together in one area. When we start to integrate people into various settings, we expose those who are on affordable housing assistance to those who are not, and we get a certain degree of appreciation and respect for the situation people might be in.
The model we really enjoyed deploying in Kingston said that if a developer was going to build an 80-unit apartment building, why do we not move in and fund 20% of the units in it? We used the provincial government's money at the time. As a requirement for assisting in the development of a certain number of those units, the rent had to be capped to a certain percentage of the CMHC rent for Kingston at the time. The more money someone received, the lower the rent had to be. If someone received $20,000 per unit, perhaps they were capped at 80% of market rent, or if someone received $50,000 per unit, perhaps they were capped at 50% of CMHC market rent. Then, of course, the developer had to commit to that for a certain period of time.
This removed the taxpayer's burden of being responsible for the physical infrastructure and put that on the developer. It also ensured that rent geared to income was available, so that by going through the various housing lists that exist in Ontario, people were allocated spots. What was the most important part about it? By ensuring that only 20 units scattered throughout an 80-unit building were affordable housing units, we did not create the ghettos, so to speak, that were very popular for previous governments back in the sixties and seventies to build, as I indicated. I have always said that the best type of affordable housing is housing that people do not know is affordable, because it blends into the community so well that people do not realize their neighbours might be the recipients of housing initiative funding, in particular for affordable housing.
I know we have been bringing up commitments from the previous Conservative government a lot. The minister certainly did in question period. There have been some discussions and arguments about how they do not really matter because they were from six or seven years ago. However, I think this is important because it gives a pretty good indication, at least in my opinion, of where we would go if we returned to a day when a Conservative government is in power. We would revert to a lot of those previous policies.