Madam Speaker, my colleague spoke about both housing and seniors. It is impossible to talk about poverty among seniors without also talking about housing.
Housing is a huge issue in my riding. Some 2,000 people are on a wait list for low-income housing.
My colleague is familiar with the rapid housing initiative because I believe we already talked about it at a Zoom meeting. The federal government launched this program two years ago during the pandemic. It is not a bad program for creating social housing, but it is unfortunately very underfunded. The program had a budget of just $1 billion, but it received applications for projects totalling $4 billion.
Given that the federal government's existing affordability programs are creating so-called affordable units costing $2,000 a month in Montreal, does my colleague agree that this makes absolutely no sense? Should the federal government not be investing more in social housing?