Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for coming today and for your presentations.
I've always felt that co-op housing--I am biased--is probably one of the best ways of providing affordable housing in this country. I was very involved with defending federal co-op housing and maintaining it in federal hands, as some of you may recall, because I felt it was important that it stay under federal control and that the Government of Canada stay engaged in this issue of co-op housing, especially over time.
One of the reasons I feel that co-op housing--and the homelessness program that we now have, which the Liberal government of the time brought in, the program called SCPI--works is because it is done at the grassroots level. There's a buy-in from the people who are participating in it. So it's very successful for that reason.
I wanted to ask something. In my riding, there is an area called Main Square. It was built in 1976, and it was a mixed arrangement between Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the private sector, which happened to own the land and build. The arrangement was that some, not all, of the units would be subsidized, and the rest is mixed. It was administered by CMHC, but it wouldn't have to be, obviously. It could be administered in other ways. That's one way of looking at tripartite arrangements. More recently, the subsidies have been coming down because, as people leave their subsidized units, those units become commercial. Unfortunately, the decision sometime in the mid-nineties was that CMHC got out of actually subsidizing and was doing more mortgages and what have you.
My question to you is twofold.
That kind of arrangement, I think, is critical if we want to increase the numbers and make sure we have mixed housing as opposed to building ghettos, which we have done in the past, in my view, and which we are trying to get rid of, such as Regent Park. Have any of you had any meetings with CMHC? I think its mandate needs to change. CMHC should be very aggressively involved in the development of housing, not just be a mortgage company. That's one question.
The other concerns the short term. Through my former leader during the last election, we said we would subsidize the individual as opposed to the unit in order to ensure that we increase the number of units as quickly as possible while we're building more housing, because there just isn't enough, and nobody has time to wait for 10 years, which is what the wait list is now in Toronto.
Could you comment on that--subsidizing the individual as opposed to the unit?