Mr. Speaker, I remarked earlier today about it never being a bad day when the Parliament of Canada is focused on providing housing for Canadians in need and today has been a very good day for that indeed.
I want to quickly push away some of the mythology which has been presented to us by the opposite side that there is no new money in the housing system right now. Let me assure Canadians and Parliament that in our very first budget, not waiting for the $40-billion national housing strategy but in the first budget, we tripled the dollars being partnered with the provinces. The tripling of those dollars has had a huge impact. We also immediately doubled for the first time in the program's history the dollars going to the homeless partnership strategy. It went from $100 million to $200 million, which is a lot more than the $10 million the NDP promised to increase the fund by. It was a substantial increase. Those dollars are being spent year by year and day by day in communities right across this country.
The previous government was only spending $2.36 billion on housing, so when we inherited government, we immediately, with those commitments in the first budget, boosted spending to $5.8 billion. In the next year, last year, we spent $6.8 billion. Those are new dollars building real housing for real people and we are proud of that. That was referred to at the time as the down payment to get us to the national housing strategy.
This myth that the money comes after the next election is just wrong. We started spending the day we took office. We have invested in strong housing programs from coast to coast to coast. We have also renewed the social housing operating agreements, in particular, the federal co-ops. Those dollars are real. They are in real people's lives protecting affordable housing right across the country.
The $40 billion that we have now put into the first ever national housing strategy is an important investment and the NDP in today's motion asks us to front-end load half of that into this calendar year and then just let the next nine years drift off to God knows where. When we build 100 units of housing in Sarnia, when we build 100 units of housing in London, or in Abitibi, when we build 100 units in Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver, if we do that year after year after year, we go from having 100 new units to 200 new units to 300 new units. If we do not back-end load housing programs, inflation and the growth of the program itself effectively de-houses the people we housed in the first year by the end of a 10-year program.
Every expert we consulted with from every university, every housing sector, every government provider, every non-profit agency said that if we put money on the table for housing, do not front-end load it, and to make sure we come in with a substantial investment and then make it grow over time as the housing sector grows. That is what we have done with the $40-billion investment. We are very proud to have done it that way because that is what is called listening to experts as we develop new policy.
I would also like to talk about the new homeless partnership strategy now called reaching home. The Conservatives have criticized that we have moved away from simply doing housing first. I will tell members what housing first did for young people. They had to be homeless, on the street, with no support for six months before that program would help them. We took the most vulnerable youth in this country and said that we are not going to help them until they have lived on the street for six months, and the few that came back, came back with more complications, more damage done to them, and more hardship. The cost to fix those problems was off the charts. One of the most critical things we heard as we reprofiled that money was to stop forcing young people onto the streets before government would step up to help them.
The same situation was emerging for women. Women who were escaping violence were told to go anywhere but the government, to get housing money somehow, but do not come to the government for help until they had been on the street for six months because the government would not help with the housing first program unless they had lived on the street. For young women in particular, it literally pushed them into the sex trade on the street. The most dangerous, most precarious, most violent situations encountered by women in this country are a direct result of a housing policy that refused to help people unless they had been acutely homeless for six months. That was wrong, so we removed that. We allowed the program to move into prevention as opposed to response.
We have also allowed communities to make the decisions for themselves as to whether they provide services that keep people housed or rent supplements to house people who have fallen onto hard times. That blend as we start to house people needs to be flexible so that local communities can solve the problems in a local way.
We are very proud to have changed that policy, but communities across the country know that if we are going to deal with addiction issues, or violence against women issues, or mental health issues, or brain injury, or all the other dynamics that cause much of our homelessness, we have to house a person first before we deal with those other issues. If we force people onto the streets for six months, all of those issues compound and get worse and quite often multiply.
I also want to talk about the fact that we doubled that money in the first year. We took it from $100 million to just over $200 million. We have now locked that in with provincial and federal agreements over the next 10 years. That is good news.
If the NDP members want to know what their approach was, they can check their platform. Their promise was to increase spending on the homeless by $10 million. That would not have solved the problem in any one of the major cities, let alone the new centres we are extending funding to as a result of our $40-billion, 10-year program.
Part of that program is the co-investment fund. This is one of the most innovative new proposals to come from a federal government in a generation. These dollars do not require matching grants from the provinces. We now have provinces—we heard about Saskatchewan—pulling out of the housing sector, literally pushing seniors on to the street by cancelling rent supplements. The new co-investment fund is not a program that flows to provincial capitals. The federal government will work directly with housing providers anywhere in Canada, including rural Canada, northern Canada, coastal communities, major urban centres, and small towns to realize housing projects that they bring forward. We work with municipalities in particular to deliver these programs.
This $13-billion is already building programs from coast to coast to coast. I spent my summer opening those programs. In fact, every time a member opposite stood up and said there is no housing in his or her riding, we listed the new housing that is being delivered as a result of the doubling and tripling of the funds that we have put on the table already as we move toward the $40-billion mark.
The other component to this is the Canada housing benefit. Previous governments used to attach subsidies to addresses and bricks and mortar. We have changed the approach in the Canada housing program. We have put the money into the hands of provinces, which deal directly with individuals. They are most likely to have the intimate relationship with those people to assess what their housing needs are and what the rental needs are.
The Canada housing benefit is now tied to people. If someone is living in a big town and a job is available across the city, the person can actually move the subsidy closer to the job and cut the transit time to make the new salary he or she is getting even more effective in supporting his or her life. If someone is living in a small town and wants to move to a larger town, or lives in a large city but wants to move home to take care of his or her parents but lives in public housing and sees an impediment to that, the subsidy can travel with the person. This gives people with low income the flexibility and the choice and agency in their lives.
We think this is an extraordinarily important investment. It starts in a year, because the provinces have asked for time to deliver the programs. However, that investment is substantial. It does force provinces to match, which is good, because if Saskatchewan pulls out, we are going to be making sure they move back into that sector.
The whole program is framed with an approach to housing called the right to housing framework. It is a human rights framework that effectively frames the program and requires Parliament to be held accountable if there are sectors of the population not being housed. We heard rural communities are having trouble getting funding. We know that certain populations do not get the housing they need. Veterans are an example in some parts of the country. People with significant disabilities are another problem in other parts of the country. We have targeted programs for some of those groups now, but as new groups emerge and the systemic failures in the system are presented to us through the housing advocate's office and the people with lived experience council we are putting together, we have a way of remedying those situations systematically to make sure we realize in a progressive fashion the right to housing.
No UN covenant, no UN official, and the UN rapporteur quite certainly have ever said the right to housing should be a charter right and so one prosecutes legally as an individual through a federal piece of legislation. What the UN talks about, what the UN rapporteur talks about, what our legislation is aimed at achieving is making sure we have a systemic approach to create a housing strategy and a housing response across the country to make sure there is a systemic way of measuring and assessing its strengths and weaknesses and a systemic method of remedying those failures when we see them, so we do not fail Canadians ever again.
The right to housing legislation will be presented to the House as soon as we have finished with the drafting of the presentation. We have done consultations all year on that.
Finally, on indigenous housing, we will not achieve reconciliation, we will not address and reduce significantly the poverty, we will not end the housing crisis in the country without four forms of indigenous housing. We have to have first nations housing on reserve strengthened substantially, and there are investments above and beyond the $40 billion to achieve that. We also have to meet with the Métis. The House heard in my questions today that there is a $500-million program with the Métis to achieve just that. We also have to sit down with the Inuit and specifically address through their council how they want housing built for their communities.
There are additional investments, close to $2.5 billion in last year's budget, that add to the $40 billion already committed. However, we absolutely, fundamentally must deliver an urban indigenous housing strategy. In Ontario, 80% of indigenous peoples live in urban centres. If we do not have an indigenous housing strategy for urban indigenous populations, we will never solve the housing crisis. We will never achieve true reconciliation. We will never solve the problems that colonialism, racism, and history have delivered to Parliament. On that file, I submit my unwavering commitment not to rest my voice until that urban indigenous housing program is funded equally to the rest of Canada's programs. In the interim, we have made every one of the programs I just described available to indigenous housing providers.
Previous governments said that one could only go through INAC to get indigenous money. The program that the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith talked about, which was a brilliant program, was funded through the innovation fund. These are additional dollars added to our indigenous housing commitments. We do not disqualify indigenous housing providers from a regular program, which is part of the way we are re-profiling dollars to ensure we house every Canadian and give them safe, affordable housing as part of a human rights approach to making our country fairer.