Mike Sullivan

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, May 26th, 2014]

With regard to applications for Canadian citizenship by landed immigrants since 2006: what is the number of applications (by country of origin) and the average time of processing these applications, broken down by (i) federal riding, (ii) census metropolitan area (municipality), (iii) province?

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate my friend's comments. I used to work at CBC and I was the union rep there for 20 years. Every year of those 20 years, whether it was a Liberal or a Conservative government, some kind of cut happened to the CBC. Those cuts are now continuing and it is but a shadow of what it should be.

The CBC has lost its role in the world because it is no longer the provider of Radio-Canada International on shortwave out of New Brunswick. That was a wonderful facility. It will no longer have Hockey Night in Canada, which is part of what Canadians from coast to coast to coast have enjoyed for many long years. These are as a result of governments and, in particular, the Conservative government, which really mix what is needed by Canadians with their need to get re-elected. Their need to get re-elected is not a function to praise or not praise the journalists. The journalists cover stories as they unfold. The journalists do not take partisan positions.

Could the member comment on the notion that journalists are just doing their job?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I find it rich that the member is coming to us about what is going on in Ontario when $1.2 billion was spent to cancel a gas plant to solve a problem the Liberals had regaining three seats. That $1.2 billion would have gone a long way to help the impoverished folks in York West have access to adequate affordable housing. That money is just gone. It is gone to some construction company.

Ontario, under Liberal rule, has the single largest debt of any sub-national government in the world. It is the worst of any place in the world.

My question really is twofold. First, how can we stand here and listen to the Liberals proclaim that they are in favour of housing when they killed the housing program in the nineties? Second, will the member support my motion?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the Minister of State for Social Development.

I have two things to say. One, on the issue that we did not ask her questions at committee, we would welcome her return to the committee so we can do that. It is not a problem for us to schedule committee meetings so she can come back. I understand that the questions centred on temporary foreign workers. When we only have 12 minutes to ask questions and the temporary foreign worker program is such an enormous and timely problem, it is difficult to ask all the questions we would love to ask the minister. If she came back it would be wonderful.

The second point is on the $1.7 billion or the $2 billion they are spending currently on housing in some manner, some of which is inherited money from the existing programs or existing mortgage subsidies, as she calls them, although that is not what they really are. When Bill C-400 was presented, the Conservatives suggested that the size of the problem was $6.2 billion. If they are spending $2 billion and the size of the problem is in addition to that, so that the total problem is $8 billion, where would that $6.2 billion come from? Where is the Conservative strategy? Why are the Conservatives suggesting that this little drop in the bucket is enough?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, when I was in Fort McMurray some years ago, when the boom was on, and it is still on, housing was a huge problem. Representatives of the United Way met with me and told me just how difficult it was for individuals who were living on less than the enormous wages that were being paid in the oil patch to have a place to live. They told me about an individual who was making $18 an hour working at Tim Hortons, but all he could afford was to rent someone's couch for eight hours a day. He did not even have a place to hang his clothes. He rented a couch for $600 a month and could only have access to it between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day, because he worked the night shift at Tim Hortons.

That is the kind of housing crunch that exists even in boom places. The price of a home in Fort McMurray is upwards of $900,000. That is unaffordable. The rental crisis has gone crazy with it. The government has made no effort to address these issues.

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

We did not defeat the strategy, Mr. Speaker. We just defeated a corrupt government.

The Liberal government of 2005 agreed with Jack Layton that more money should be spent on housing, but it was the first time that had been done by the Liberal government, which was in a majority position for 13 years. All it did was cut social housing. The Liberals downloaded the entire responsibility onto the provinces, territories, and municipalities.

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I was not at that committee, so I cannot speak to what happened. I do know that to the many questions we have asked the government, we get glib answers. The government tells us that it is helping a bunch of people.

The problem is that we are not helping enough people. The problem is growing. It is getting worse every year. There were 60,000 people on the waiting list in Toronto when the Conservatives took office. There are now 90,000 people on the waiting list in Toronto. The Conservatives seem to ignore that. They seem to think it is not their problem.

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2014]

moved:

That the House recognize that Canadians are faced with a housing crunch of rising costs and growing waiting lists due to chronic underfunding of affordable housing from 1993 to the present, and call on the government to work with the provinces, territories, municipalities, and with First Nations, Inuit, and Metis, to immediately renew long-term social housing funding and reinvest in the development of affordable housing units.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to note that I will be sharing my time with the member for Hochelaga.

Canada's affordable housing crunch has been growing, and it has been growing for at least 21 years, since the Liberal government broke its promise and shunned federal responsibility for housing. Canada is the only G8 country in the world without a national housing strategy, thanks to the Liberals, who downloaded the responsibility for housing to the provinces.

Today, three million Canadians live in housing insecurity due to irresponsible housing policies from successive Liberal and Conservative governments. With a growing number of homeless people and long delays in obtaining access to safe and affordable housing, the government must stop ignoring the problem. The Conservatives' blatant disregard for social housing is creating a critical situation where the need for social housing is increasing at the same time as the quantity of affordable housing is declining.

In 1993, the federal Liberals took the position that they would not act on the task force that they had so gallantly put forward in 1990. In fact, it is a classic example of the Liberals indicating that they are going to go in one direction and actually going in the exact opposite direction. They took that task force, co-chaired by the esteemed Joe Fontana, and made the suggestion that the Conservatives, who were in power at the time, were cutting social housing and it should be stopped. In fact, they said that more money should have been spent on social housing and affordable housing. However, their first budget cut was $128 million from CMHC's budget, most of which was allocated to affordable housing programs. That was in 1995. In 1996, the Liberals downloaded the responsibility for social housing to the provinces and territories, effectively ending Canada's national affordable housing program.

Canada is the only major industrialized country to not have a national housing strategy.

The Liberals also slashed transfers to the provinces and territories at the same time that they expected them to take on responsibility for this all important program for social and affordable housing. In 1999, the Liberals announced a bit of money for homelessness programs, but as Michael Shapcott of the Wellesly Institute said, “The federal homelessness funding will make homeless more comfortable, but it won't make them any less homeless”.

Some more money was added in 2002 and 2004, but those agreements and that money did not have any accountability programs. Therefore, the accountability issue regarding the housing money that was being spent meant that although Ontario claimed to have created 46,000 units, after research of the audit was done, only 63 homes had actually been built. There was no accountability for whatever was being spent by the federal government.

In 2005, when the Liberals proposed giving huge tax breaks to corporations, Jack Layton and his NDP colleagues helped to rewrite that budget and divert $4.6 billion in corporate giveaways to important priorities, like affordable housing, training and public transit. It included $1.6 billion for affordable housing construction, including aboriginal housing. This was the first time any real commitment to affordable housing had been made in well over a decade.

Then the Liberals were defeated due to corruption before the funding was fully implemented, but the Conservatives implemented most of that funding. Although the Conservatives voted against it at one point, we still have some of that funding in our supply.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives, for their part, have now announced they will not be renewing the long-term social housing operating agreements or continuing to invest that funding in affordable housing. Essentially, they see this as a budget line item that they can strike out of the budget, and take $1.7 billion out of affordable housing in our country. That $1.7 billion is currently earmarked for assistance to individuals to meet their rent obligations. When that money disappears, those individuals will effectively become homeless. The Conservatives do not seem to care that those individuals will become homeless as a result of their actions.

About 620,000 households were supported by that $1.7 billion, and as many as 200,000 housing units will be lost due to the loss of operating funds or insufficient capital for much-needed renovations.

Despite what the minister said earlier, these are not all mortgage subsidies. Some of these buildings are leased from other organizations, and when the subsidies end, so ends the rental accommodation support that has been going to seniors and other individuals who really need the support.

An example of this lack of strategy is no more evident than in my home city of Toronto, and in particular in my riding of York South—Weston, where as a result of the lack of investment in social housing over more than two decades, and as a result of the fact that when the federal government downloaded the social housing units to the City of Toronto, they inherited a three-quarters of a billion-dollar fix-it bill for those units. That fix-it bill is now being paid for by the City of Toronto by selling social housing units. They do not have the capital to fix these units, and the government is not forthcoming with money, so it is having to get rid of social housing units to be able to meet the demands for the repairs that are necessary in these units. It is like eating our own seed potatoes, as is said in the Maritimes.

The city of Toronto is a great example of what the lack of funding for social housing construction really means. There has been virtually no new social housing constructed in the city of Toronto in the past 20 years. As more and more people find it impossible to afford the ever-growing rents and the ever-growing cost of buying a home in Toronto, they are faced with the prospect of seeking social assistance and seeking to be in Toronto community housing buildings. The wait-list has over 90,000 applications on it. That is 170,000 people who are looking for accommodation and support. There are only 90,000 units in the first place, so there are as many people on the wait-list as there are units. The wait-lists in some circumstances are 10 and 12 years long.

Individuals have to survive somehow, and they survive by moving into overcrowded units, by moving into units that are poorly maintained, and by moving into units they cannot afford. There are individuals in my riding who are paying 70% and 80% of their income for shelter, because the minimum wage in Ontario is so low. It is $10.25. If people who make minimum wage on a full-time basis have to pay rent at today's market rates in Toronto for a two-bedroom apartment, it is 70% of their earnings, and for a three-bedroom apartment, it is 90%. The 90% figure is completely unaffordable. People could not eat or possibly raise a family spending 90% of their income on housing, yet that is what people face when they are on a waiting list for supported housing that cannot possibly be met. It will be 10 or more years before they ever reach the top of that waiting list.

There was a recent study by the University of Toronto, partly in my riding, that determined that 90% of the individuals who currently live in apartment blocks in Toronto that were built between the fifties and the eighties face homelessness in some measure. One-third of those people, which is thousands upon thousands of people, have a critical risk of homelessness. Those individuals could be homeless almost immediately.

What does “homeless” mean to people like that? It means finding a shelter, but there are no shelters. It means finding a friend, relative, or neighbour they can bunk with for as long as it takes to find another place to live, but that means they are now in overcrowded housing. That means they are now in housing that is not designed to support as many people as are expected to live in it.

That is another example of why this is a crisis. It is a national crisis. It is not limited to Toronto. All over Canada we have a growing need for affordable housing that we are just unable to meet.

Today the Federation of Canadian Municipalities said it supports the motion and our continued focus on fixing Canada's housing crunch. The president, Claude Dauphin, said he supports my motion and supports our moving forward to ease the burden by immediately renewing long-term social housing funding, reinvesting in the development of affordable housing units, and reinforcing the role of municipalities as key stakeholders in the process.

[Housing, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are still suffering from the Liberals' devastating cuts to federal housing supports in the 1990s, and people are tired of paying for government inaction.

Just yesterday, the president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities endorsed my motion to renew social housing funding.

Will the minister do the same, support my motion, and do what the Liberals failed to do: finally put an end to this housing crisis?

[Housing, May 14th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, across Canada, municipalities are struggling to meet demand for affordable housing. Canadians are still suffering from—