Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Parkdale—High Park.
Mr. Speaker, I hope that we can return this debate to some serious footing. It has been punctuated by a Liberal stand-up routine and gratuitous political advertising this afternoon.
However, it is a very important issue and I am happy to rise today in support of the motion before us, calling upon us, as it does, to recognize a housing crunch of rising costs and growing waiting lists across this country owing to chronic underfunding of affordable housing.
I want to thank my colleagues, the member of Parliament for York South—Weston and the member for Hochelaga, for their work on this file and for bringing forward this motion for debate in the House today.
I do not know of any better way to establish the importance of housing than with reference to its almost universal, and I would except the Liberals and Conservatives from this, of course, recognition of housing as a human right.
I do not know of any better way to stir our collective desire to address our shortcomings on this issue than with reference to a history in which we proved ourselves, as Canadians, capable of doing so much more than the current government and its predecessor Liberal government are and were prepared to do.
Canada had, up until a couple of decades ago, a very proud story to tell about housing. One way to start into this story is with reference to John Humphrey, something of a Canadian hero. John Humphrey was responsible for the first draft of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. In that declaration, one can find, at article 25, reference to housing. It reads, in part:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
That reference to housing finds its way three decades later into the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Article 11 recognizes:
...the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions...
and so on.
However, if we fast forward to 2009, we have a UN special rapporteur lamenting our more recent history. He says this about Canada:
There has been a significant erosion of housing rights over the past two decades. Canada’s successful social housing programme, which created more than half a million homes starting in 1973, has been discontinued.
Here is the more recent and inglorious history that he is referring to in this quote. The last budget of the Mulroney Conservatives eliminated all federal funding for new social housing and froze spending on existing social housing. It was a move that cut housing investment by $660 million over four years.
The Liberal Party campaigned on a promise to reverse those cuts. Of course, it never did. In fact, only two years later, it slashed a further $128 million from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's budget, most of which was, at the time, allocated to affordable housing programs.
A year after that, in its 1996 budget, the Liberals walked away entirely from housing, downloading responsibility to provinces and territories. At the same, it is worth noting, they slashed transfers to those very same provinces and territories.
This is how Canada ends up with an ignominious distinction of being the only major industrialized country to not have a national housing strategy.
Just last year, the current Conservative government announced that it would not be renewing the long-term operating agreements that began in the 1970s that the UN rapporteur hailed in his 2009 report. Those agreements provide about $1.7 billion worth of housing subsidies to over 600,000 households in Canada. As that $1.7 billion dries up, mainly, over the next few years, it is anticipated that as many as 200,000 housing units will be lost due to the loss of operating funds or insufficient capital for much-needed renovations.
Now this may be considered a radical notion to both Liberals and Conservatives in this chamber, but there are simply circumstances in which markets do not work, when they simply do not emerge to meet demand, and so it is in housing.
According to the national household survey, about one-third of households in Toronto spend more than 30% of their income on housing. That is, by the standard definition of affordability, they cannot afford to live in their own homes. Taking into consideration just renters, that number rises dramatically. About 45% of renters in Toronto cannot afford their own homes.
While this definition of affordability is a very useful standard to use, it is important to note that nothing magic happens at that threshold. As pointed out in a very recent study, in March 2014, by Paradis, Wilson, and Logan at the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto, there is a continuum of inadequate housing, risk of homelessness, and visible homelessness among families living in Toronto's high-rise buildings. Housing is precarious for low-income families in Toronto's high-rises, and it is easy enough to slide up, but mainly down, that continuum. According to the study:
...inadequate housing and the risk of homelessness are almost universal among families with children living in high-rise rental apartments.... Almost 90% are facing major housing problems that may place them at risk of homelessness.... One family in three is facing severe or critical risk of homelessness.
Part of the problem is that there has been virtually no growth in new purpose-built rental housing in Toronto since 2006, according to “Toronto's Vital Signs Report 2013”, with just 1,800 units across the entire GTA and only 810 in the city of Toronto itself, this in a city that welcomes 100,000 new residents every year.
This is how we end up in Toronto with about 90,000 households on the waiting list for affordable housing. That unto itself is equivalent to the population of a large Canadian city, about the same size as Saskatoon or Regina. With fewer than 4,000 households from that list being housed every year, that list has grown. With only 650 new units of affordable housing presently under construction in Toronto, we have today what is quite rightly called in the motion a housing crisis.
I frame this issue, with reference to Canadian John Humphrey and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a matter of human rights. Health, happiness, security, and the opportunity for everyone to realize their potential through education all turn on housing—safe, healthy, affordable housing. This is a truth we have turned away from as a country through successive federal governments over two decades, but it is a truth that exists nonetheless.
I will take the last couple of minutes of my time to talk about the economics of housing.
This motion stands on more than just an ethical footing; it is good economics, too. To understand that, we need look no further than the Conservatives' own budget documentation, and I refer specifically to the data produced by the Department of Finance in support of the government's own economic action plan.
That data points to the very efficient stimulus or multiplier effect of housing investment, showing that for every dollar invested in housing measures, $1.50 of economic activity is created. Interestingly, that compares very favourably to the stimulus measures the current Conservative government prefers. Personal income tax measures have a multiplier of just a dollar over the same timeframe, while business tax measures work very poorly, adding just 30¢ to the economy for every public dollar expended or foregone.
I will finish with a salute to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the work it has been doing to bring this housing crisis into the public realm and to the attention of all Canadians. In its press release yesterday, it stated:
FCM supports the NDP's continued focus on fixing Canada's Housing Crunch.... The lack of adequate and affordable housing is one of the biggest issues facing Canadians across the country and is a threat to the social and economic growth of Canadian municipalities.
There is no finer an endorsement, and so I will close there.
