Mr. Speaker, now more than ever we need a national housing strategy. I want to commend my colleague from Vancouver East for presenting Bill C-304, one which I hope will have speedy passage through this House so that we can finally realign our efforts at fighting homelessness with the actual needs of Canadians.
I am very proud to second this bill. I am honoured that the member for Vancouver East would ask me to be involved, since housing and homelessness is an issue that I am very passionate about.
As the housing and homelessness critic for the New Democratic Party, I have had the opportunity to speak several times on the housing situation in Canada, in speeches, in questions to the minister, and constantly I refer to the situation in Canada as a crisis. Canada is truly in a housing crisis.
In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee declared that housing was in a crisis situation. It made the following statement:
We call on all levels of government to declare homelessness a national disaster requiring emergency humanitarian relief. We urge that they immediately develop and implement a National Homelessness Relief and Prevention Strategy using disaster relief funds both to provide the homeless with immediate health protection and housing and to prevent further homelessness.
That was 11 years ago and the rallying cry is still echoing today. However, my question is, is anybody actually listening? Many Canadians still do not have access to adequate, secure or affordable housing.
Our international friends would be surprised to hear that we have a housing crisis in Canada, because in 1976 Canada signed on to the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights. This covenant guarantees everybody's right to an adequate standard of living, including food, clothing and housing. What this means is Canada has said out loud to the world that there is a right to housing in our country. Unfortunately, we have not lived up to those international obligations and Canada's once positive reputation has now been tarnished.
Right now, there are as many as 1.5 million families in Canada in precarious or unacceptable housing situations. Three hundred thousand people use our shelters every year. If asked, most Canadians would probably say we have a strong social safety net, with employment insurance, pensions, social assistance, and the like. The reality is that many of those programs do not actually meet the needs of Canadians. These programs have been continuously eroded by the actions, or inactions, of successive governments.
To give a snapshot illustration, in my community of Halifax, Community Action on Homelessness recently released a report card on homelessness for my area. One of the things it found was that the wage one would need to afford a one bedroom apartment is $14.23 an hour. That is the wage one would need for rent, bills and groceries. The minimum wage in my province is $8.10 an hour. It is obvious that it does not add up. A person on social assistance would need the equivalent of 144% of his or her personal allowance in order to afford even a bachelor apartment. It is just not right. Imagine how that person's situation would change if there actually were affordable housing that the person could access?
In my life before becoming a member of Parliament I worked as a community legal worker with Dalhousie Legal Aid Service. I worked a lot on the tenant rights project, where we would work with low-income individuals to try and keep them housed. We would help advocate at the residential tenancies board to try to keep them housed. It was slum housing. It was in poor repair. There was mould. There were overcrowded rooming houses. I had a client whose ceiling fell in on her. There were bedbugs. I was fighting to keep people in that housing. Imagine actually fighting to keep someone in a place where the ceiling has collapsed on her in the middle of the night.
This is why I ran federally. I wanted to be involved in creating a national housing strategy to create options for low- to middle-income Canadians to offer them just a little bit of dignity, because that is what this is about. It is about human dignity. Thankfully there are policy solutions that can be made right here in this House.
The best way to combat homelessness is, surprise, by housing people. I know, it is a bit out there.
I was reading recently about tent city, an area in Toronto where people were homeless and living in tents. At the culmination of the events down at tent city, a very concerted effort was made by the city to actually house a lot of these people.
A staggering number of those people who were housed, I think it is around 80%, are still housed. That shows us that it is not necessarily about these people being drug addicts or having mental health issues and that is why they are homeless, they are choosing to be homeless. The majority of the people from tent city are still housed. The answer to homelessness is to build housing. It is pretty radical.
To illustrate the point further, I will tell a brief story, again featuring an organization in Nova Scotia. Many people are familiar with the Elizabeth Fry Society. It works across Canada with women involved in the criminal justice system and it does great work. In Halifax, it found that regardless of how much advocacy it does, regardless of how much support it gives to women in need, the results were just not what it needed. It was really clear, as I am sure it is to most of us here, that we cannot help women whose lives are touched by crime, addiction or the associated risks of poverty if they do not have a safe place to stay and a roof over their heads.
The people in this group actually shifted direction slightly and decided to try to fill that need themselves. They opened up housing for women. It is called Holly House and it is located in Dartmouth, on the other side of the harbour to my riding. Having worked with this organization, I can say that creating affordable housing options has saved lives and it has increased the prosperity and well-being of the clients they serve and of my community.
Holly House gets it but so far the government does not. Perhaps, after hearing these very passionate interventions in this honourable House, maybe it will introduce its own bill for a national housing strategy. We can always hope.
I will acknowledge that there was some money in the budget for affordable housing, which is great, and I will not really criticize what was there. However, sadly, the money that was in the budget was specifically designed to be a one time only measure.
This might be fine if homelessness were a one time only problem. Maybe it is a two year phase that people suddenly find themselves in, but the crisis is real in this country, in our cities, in our rural communities and it is tragically higher among first nations.
To tackle a problem that is this large, we need bold and comprehensive plans. There needs to be coordination between the federal government and its responsibility for the well-being of Canadians, the provinces and their responsibility over housing in general, and the municipalities, first nations governments and friendship centres that provide the front line services in our communities.
The bill we are debating today seeks to re-align the government's approach to dealing with this issue by mandating a national strategy for a national problem. It takes our current patchwork of programs and it strengthens them, setting national standards and calling for investment in not for profit housing, housing for the homeless, housing for those with different needs and sustainable and environmentally constructed homes. It is about rights and it is about dignity.
For those who are not swayed by a human rights argument, let me put it in a little bit of a different way. Let me put it in economic terms. Operating emergency shelters in this country costs more than it would to simply build affordable housing, the foundation from which our most vulnerable people can build a meaningful life.
Earlier today I spoke with Sheri Lecker who is the executive director of Adsum for Women & Children. Adsum offers quite a few programs for women and children, including an emergency shelter and second stage housing, as well as long term housing for women.
Sherry explained to me that the per diem she receives from the province for a single person, a women or a child, to stay at the shelter is $86.80 per day. Let us contrast that to Adsum Court, which is long term housing for women that Adsum provides. It has 24 units and it is supportive housing. It is housing where people are there to support the women who are in this housing. The rent being charged is anywhere between $125 and $535 a month. It does not make a profit but it does come out even. I share this example to illustrate how simple it is. It is remarkably easy to solve this problem. We just need leadership at the federal level to do it.
In closing, with this bill we have an opportunity to make a real difference by implementing a plan to tackle this crisis. I would ask that all members of the House join me in support of the bill sponsored by the member for Vancouver East and join in this national project for a just and more prosperous Canada.
