Madam Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition really likes his slogans, and he is very effective at taking an issue and confusing it so Canadians cannot really see what the objectives are.
The Leader of the Opposition will say that the housing accelerator fund is a program that has never produced any housing. If we go back and look at everything they have said in the House, we see that 19 of the Conservative members at times have been very critical of the program, yet they themselves have written letters to the Minister of Housing asking for money for their communities through the program because, although the Leader of the Opposition sits there and talks about how the fund has never built any housing, they know that the $30 million, the amount that is coming to Kingston, is not meant to physically build houses but instead is there to unlock other housing developments.
As an example, the City of Kingston has historically, over time, maybe through provincial legislation and maybe through zoning efforts on its own, developed cumbersome processes to develop housing. Maybe the development charges are too high. Maybe permit fees are too high. Maybe there is too much red tape. The federal government says it is going to give the City of Kingston $30 million, and it has to be aimed only at how city officials remove their red tape and how they figure out ways to encourage more housing to be built faster in their city.
The funniest part about this is that it is something that the Leader of the Opposition himself was talking about a couple of years ago. At the same time that we introduced the program, before it had been voted on in the budget, he was actually saying that we took his idea. However, the Leader of the Opposition suddenly decided he was going to confuse the issue for Canadians so they do not know what is really going on here; he was just going to say, “The money going to the cities is not building housing.”
The money that is going to the cities is intended to encourage them and to find ways to reduce red tape and build faster so we can get more housing built. The federal government fully knows that there is no way we as society and as the government can build the amount of housing that is required, and nor do we want to. The government's job is not to build housing, except in certain circumstances where we are working with organizations, to build affordable housing, for example.
Therefore I find it really rich to hear Conservatives get up and talk about the failure of the government and of the housing accelerator fund, when behind the Leader of the Opposition's back, 19 Conservative members have been secretly writing letters to the Minister of Housing, saying that their mayor or their council really needs some of the housing accelerator fund because they know that it is going to help them build faster, that the program is going to work and that their communities need the money too.
There is an idea that the Leader of the Opposition says was his idea. He then starts slamming it as being completely ineffective, once we also agree and bring forward our very similar idea. Then while the Leader of the Opposition is doing that and while they are getting up in the House talking down the housing accelerator fund and saying it is an absolute failure, Conservatives are sending secret letters to the Minister of Housing saying, “Can we please get some of that money, because we know it's effective?”
Then the Leader of the Opposition finds out that the letters have been sent and he tells his MPs that they are no longer allowed to send letters to the government asking for help for their communities. Let us just think about that for a moment. The member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan is no longer allowed to write to the government to ask the government to help his community.
Those are the people who elected him to come here. They are the people who gave him the mandate to represent them here, and the leader of his party is barring him from the ability to be able to advocate on their behalf, once he found out that many of the Conservative MPs were doing it behind his back.
Let us think about that for a second. Once a week, Conservative MPs have to go into a room and listen to their leader tell them what they are going to do: “Here is my three-word slogan for the week and everyone has to start saying it.” Then behind his back, they say to hold on a second; maybe this guy has it wrong and this is a good program. Then they write a letter to the Minister of Housing.