Finance committee  The cost of housing is significant in Montreal and almost everywhere in Canada, and the cost of land is a significant component of the cost of housing. The federal government, back 1999, announced a program to make available surplus federal lands for housing. But it's been used o

Finance committee  There's been a lot of review, both by government and by community organizations, and the verdict right across the board is that the programs have been extremely successful. They provide two purposes. One purpose is to try to assist homeless people in being a little bit more comfo

Finance committee  Not in the last decade, but if you go back 20 years, yes. In fact, we're asking to go back to the future, if you like, to go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when this represented about 1% of the federal budget, and it was in fact the amount of money the government was spending. And

Finance committee  Yes, I am referring to the SCPI program. In our communications with officials in the minister's office and in the Prime Minister's office, we've been told that they don't like that name because it was inherited from a previous government. So we've said that they can change the na

Finance committee  The best way to understand it is to get some handle on the scale of the national dimension of the problem. According to the government's own estimates, about 1.5 million Canadian households--that's not individuals but households--are in what's called “poor housing need”. That is

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Michael Shapcott. I work at the Wellesley Institute, a policy institute in downtown Toronto. I'm here today on behalf of the National Housing and Homelessness Network. Mr. Chair, if I could, what I'd love to do with my five minutes is take the m

Finance committee  In our view, there need to be some amendments in particular to extend and enhance the federal homeless program and the federal housing rehabilitation program. Those are the two biggest priorities that need to be addressed that aren't in Bill C-13.

Finance committee  The federal government's contribution is critically important—and has been so. The federal government has taken leadership on the issue of housing going back to the 1930s. I can quote former prime ministers: Prime Minister Pearson recognized the need for a federal role, and Prime

Finance committee  In my brief, I said about mortgage insurance that, one, it's good for the people who get it. It helps low-income Canadians get access to housing. Two, it's good for the Government of Canada. It generates a significant revenue pool. And three, that revenue pool can prudently be in

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. It's true that the charitable sector does good work. I mention a few at the risk of not mentioning others. There's Habitat for Humanity, for instance, that does good work. There are other groups in Alberta, such as the Calgary Homeless Foun

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear today. My name is Michael Shapcott. I'm a senior fellow at the Wellesley Institute, which is a research and policy institute. Our focus is on the social determinants of health, those factors that help people to become healthy an