Mr. Speaker, I support Motion No. 147 without hesitation.
I want to thank my NDP colleague from Saskatoon West for giving us the opportunity today to talk about a troubling situation across Canada that I noticed when I was travelling as part of my right to housing tour.
It is incredible, but true. In Pelican Narrows, northern Saskatchewan, at 30 degrees below zero, I met people who literally had no shelter: a man who was rightly discouraged, frustrated, and very angry; a mother with her young child; and an older man with a walker. All that at 30 degrees below zero, in a remote region where there is not enough housing for everyone, and where some homes are condemned because they are not in good enough condition to be lived in.
I want to commend my colleague on this private member's motion and offer her my full support so that, as the new NDP housing critic, she may carry on the work that our predecessors and I began in order to advance the cause of under-housed and homeless people in Canada.
As I have been saying for a long time, it is high time that Canada took the necessary steps to end homelessness, which is unacceptable in a country as rich as ours. It is not right that a country that has the wealth that we do is not doing more to put an end to homelessness.
The motion of my colleague from Saskatoon West is very much in keeping with this position. The purpose of that motion is to appoint a special House of Commons committee to conduct hearings on the matter of homelessness in Canada and propose a plan to prevent and ultimately end homelessness. The committee would be expected to report to the House no later than 12 months after the adoption of this motion.
One of the things that stood out to me the most in my quest to determine the extent of the housing and homelessness crisis in Canada was that a number of groups are disproportionately affected by homelessness. They include indigenous people, women, seniors, youth, veterans, and members of the LGBTQ community.
Fortunately, communities have already begun to develop their own tailored approaches to fighting and ending homelessness locally. For example, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Fort McMurray participated in Alberta's 7 cities project to end homelessness and are making progress. Edmonton and Calgary are also part of the program and have implemented plans to end homelessness.
What all of these municipalities have in common is that they have chosen a novel approach. Rather than simply manage the problem, they are working toward the much more ambitious goal of eradicating it.
Other communities, such as Montreal, Winnipeg, and Saskatoon, have also come up with plans to prevent and end homelessness, because that should be the main objective: ending homelessness. The first step toward doing that is to adopt a plan with clear, measurable goals.
Even so, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to ending homelessness in this country. Plans to achieve that goal in a given community will vary from one region to the next, as they already do. As I said, some communities have already implemented plans that work.
In order to achieve our ultimate goal, the federal government needs to clearly define its role and adopt its own national plan. It is simply a matter of being serious about our desire to eradicate this scourge and recognizing the vital role the federal government must play in supporting efforts at the local level.
Creating a national plan to prevent and end homelessness would be the first step. That is precisely the purpose of this motion.
The government released some details of its national housing strategy a few months ago. For example, it has set a target of reducing chronic homelessness by 50%. We think that we need to be much more ambitious and aim to completely eradicate homelessness as quickly as possible. To achieve that, I repeat, we need a plan. We have to assess the needs, give communities enough flexibility to determine the best methods, and support them by giving them the means to achieve their goals.
We can no longer focus on simply managing the situation, as though we accept that it exists and we assume that it always will. We need to tackle it, prevent it, and ultimately completely eradicate it. Even one homeless person is one too many. We are talking about human beings—men, women, and children.
For those who like numbers, we can also talk about the numbers. Beyond the humanitarian reasons, there are also economic reasons for eradicating homelessness, because there is a cost associated with it.
It costs the government and the Canadian economy more to accept homelessness as a problem without a solution than to collectively invest the money it would take to put an end to it. It is estimated that our current response to homelessness, which consists almost exclusively of providing emergency services, costs the Canadian economy and taxpayers approximately $7 billion a year in direct and indirect costs. That is a huge amount. Just imagine the stock of social housing that could be built with these billions of dollars.
The direct costs of homelessness include amounts spent on emergency services, such as shelters and direct services to homeless people, while indirect costs include the costs associated with increased use of health care services, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system.
It is estimated that the monthly costs for housing a homeless person are $10,900 for a hospital bed, $4,333 for provincial jail, and $1,932 for a shelter bed, but only $701 for a rent supplement and $199.92 for social housing.
Since people who live on the streets are much more likely to go to the hospital or to be involved with our criminal justice system, we collectively have a vested interest in solving this problem at the source.
As we in the NDP often say, budgets are about choices. Canadian researchers have conclusively shown that we could save a lot of money by making the right choices.
By the most conservative estimate, 235,000 people experience homelessness in a given year in Canada.
According to a 2014 joint study by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, the gradual withdrawal of the federal government's investment in social housing is one of the main causes of this situation.
For a long time now, I have been calling on the federal government to start by investing significantly in social housing, which has been shown to be the cheapest option for taxpayers to fight homelessness. I cited the supporting figures a few moments ago.
With my colleague's motion that we are debating today, we are reaching out to all parliamentarians so we can work together to implement a serious plan to end homelessness.
To do that, parliamentarians need to be put in touch with people who know this situation well because they live it every day or because they witness it through their work, such as communities, homeless outreach workers, non-profit organizations, academics, indigenous groups, and people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. These are people who can pool their knowledge and best practices and find and apply effective solutions that are tailored to local needs. It is important to have a plan that is flexible enough to respond to the very different situations we see across the country.
The situation in northern Saskatchewan that I described earlier is completely different from the situation of my former colleague Roger, who become homeless in the middle of Montreal.
The government must step up and show that Parliament is determined to take action to prevent and put an end to homelessness in Canada. Although I have some concerns and there are many questions that remain, I recognize that the Liberals have shown openness and goodwill by creating a national housing strategy.
With Motion No. 147, the government has an unprecedented opportunity to put its money where its mouth is by allowing other parliamentarians to collaborate on developing a national plan to end homelessness. Creating a special committee would send a clear message to Canadians that the national housing strategy is the first step in a major pan-Canadian initiative.
We are not the only ones saying so. The Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, or CHRA, one of the main national organizations that represents the interests of the social, affordable, and non-profit housing sector in Canada, supports the motion. CHRA believes that with a new national housing strategy forthcoming, it is imperative that the federal government and federal decision-makers maintain a focus on addressing the scourge of homelessness, and put in place a mechanism that can identify the tools, policies, and programs that will provide access to safe and affordable housing for all people living in Canada.
CHRA believes that a special committee on homelessness would provide such a mechanism. This motion from the member for Saskatoon West is essentially giving this government an empty net. It would be far too sad if the government were to miss this shot.
