Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to appear today. As someone who is trained as a historian, it's a particular pleasure to uncover with you the roots of Canada's current housing crisis.

The housing supply record from 2006 to 2015 was dire and set the stage for today's housing crisis. Overall housing completions hovered at the 180,000-per-year mark, whereas they were closer to 250,000 in the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, Canada's population grew by 60% from 1976 to 2016.

Purpose-built rental construction aimed at low- and moderate-income households, which was at 40,000 homes per year in the early 1970s, plummeted to near zero during the 2006-15 period. Non-market housing, including public, non-profit and co-operative housing, was over 35,000 homes per year in the 1980s, 20% of all completions, before being reduced to less than 1% of all completions from 2007 to 2015.

Rather than directly speak to the amount of funding and the number of units developed, I want to use my limited time to discuss three underlying problems that were at play during that period and, to some extent, predetermined current problems with the national housing strategy: first, the absence of shared definitions of affordable housing and income categories; second, the absence of federal evidence-based targets and sub-targets for non-market and affordable housing; and third, the inability to scale up some successful pilot projects of that period, such as At Home/Chez Soi and Beaver Barracks. To some extent, those problems have not been solved.

From 1944 to 1992, the federal government used a standard international definition of “affordable housing” that used a percentage of before-tax household income. This understanding of affordable housing was supplemented using income categories, which informed both needs assessments and housing policy.

Low-income households in the bottom income quintile—reliant on seniors or disability pensions or minimum wage—required some form of subsidy to meet their housing needs. Governments, both provincial and federal, responded by directly funding or constructing housing and by providing rent supplements, generally attached to non-market projects. They focused their programs on low- and moderate-income households, the latter representing early-career professionals. The latter might move on to market rental or ownership, allowing units to filter to the next household in need.

However, from the 1990s onward, a pernicious belief that the private sector could provide low-income housing if governments just stepped away from regulation led to a new definition of “affordability” linked to market rents. This might have made sense in 1990, when the average market rent was $672 per month, easily affordable to a moderate-income household, but by 2015, the average market rent had almost doubled to $1,208 per month and was far beyond moderate-income affordability, let alone low-income affordability.

The absence of affordable and adequate market rental and ownership housing means that households can't move on from non-market housing. The fact that new non-market housing wasn't getting built meant long waiting lists and eventually homelessness for those not served by non-market housing supply.

Second, there was the absence of supply targets and sub-targets. During World War II, the federal government knew that rental shortages in Canada's cities where the war effort was concentrated were leading to landlord profiteering. It responded by directly building 46,000 rental units in six years, from 1942 to 1948, as well as commissioning a report on post-war housing needs.

The Curtis report calculated a target that was based on accumulated needs, projected population growth and a desire for higher rental vacancies, much as is the case today. What's more, it called for a third of new homes to be public housing and another third to be rent-regulated, purpose-built rental housing for the middle class.

In 1972, a CMHC report recommended that 45% of new construction be non-market, including 20% public housing as well as scaling up community and co-operative housing by another 25% of total completions.

What this report and so many others had in common was starting from who needs what housing where and at what cost, and then the policy settings worked backwards from that point.

The creation of the core housing need measure by Statistics Canada in the late 1980s was intended to guide provincial government housing policy, but throughout the 1990s, provincial governments proved themselves to be incapable of addressing core housing need and homelessness.