Madam Chair, the chief economist is not happy with the way things are going right now. He does not think that the government is going about this strategy the right way. I am not sure what we are talking about here.
Let us talk about another gentleman, Steve Pomeroy, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. He says:
With the new housing strategy, fewer than 16,000 housing units are going to be built and 64,000 are going to be lost, which means that for every one built, four are lost. We're still losing units a lot faster than we're creating new ones.
Those are not my words. Then there is Marie-Josée Houle, the federally appointed federal housing advocate, who said that “the situation has become so bad that, today, no one can deny there is a housing crisis”.
In one of the documents it released a few weeks ago, the National Housing Council, the organization responsible for overseeing this major national strategy, said that 115,000 housing units have been built or renovated since the strategy was launched, but that 550,000 affordable housing units have been lost in the past seven years. According to these figures, we are moving backwards, not forwards.
I would like my colleague to tell me whether anyone was remotely concerned about the loss of these 550,000 affordable housing units when the Liberals came to power in 2015. They likely cost about $750 a month to rent in Montreal.
Where are the 550,000 affordable housing units that have been lost?