Ahmed Hussen

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, I think the hon. member is absolutely on brand in attacking civil servants, which is what the Conservatives did when they were in government for almost nine years. I am not going to take that bait.

The hon. member knows or should know that no minister of the Crown has ever made a determination on the employee compensation by an independent Crown corporation. He knows that. He can play all the fake outrage he wants, but on this side of the House, we know that the independence of Crown corporations determines the compensation of their employees.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, it is embarrassing to listen to this kind of questioning, because the hon. member should know or knows that no minister of the Crown is responsible for the compensation determined by an independent Crown corporation.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, no minister of the Crown makes or has ever made decisions in terms of an independent Crown corporation's employee compensation system. The hon. member knows that or ought to know that.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, the hon. member must know or at least ought to know that CMHC, as a Crown corporation, makes decisions regarding mortgage insurance criteria and questions regarding compensation for its staff independently.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, it is called the federal lands initiative. We have had this program for a number of years. The hon. member has come around to the utility of this program, and I congratulate him for coming around to this idea, but he is a number of years late into this program.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, he is the one who is taking Canadians for fools, because he thinks he can vote against all the investments in affordable housing, including the federal lands initiative, which is doing exactly what he pretends to care about, and yet he comes back to this House and says that he cares about all these issues. The voting record shows that the member has voted, every single time, against investments in housing.

How does that make sense? The member votes against the very thing that he is advocating for, and then accuses the Liberal government of not doing anything. When I point out that hypocrisy, the member says that I am taking his party for fools. I am not, I am just pointing out the facts. The member could look at the record himself.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, what is interesting to learn from that question is that it is almost as if the party opposite is just discovering the notion of making federal lands and property available for affordable housing.

I have news to break to them, we have been doing this since the beginning of the national housing strategy in 2017. Conservatives have just come around to the idea now. Even then, the idea is a very half-baked plan.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, we have spent over $30 billion on housing investments, creating 118,000 new units and repairing almost 300,000 units of affordable housing.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, I have provided the hon. member with the current numbers based on all the investments that we have made. I have made those numbers clear, twice, in my answers.

What is rich is that this is the party that has voted no all along, to all those investments that have delivered all the units that I just mentioned.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2023]

Mr. Chair, first of all, all the amounts of money have not all been spent, because this is a 10-year plan. It is a long-term plan. It is a stable plan. It is a predictable plan.

The impacts are already there. We have seen almost half a million homes repaired or built, and almost two million Canadian households have been positively impacted by the national housing strategy.