Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the committee for inviting me today.

I think the topic you are studying is important, not because we can change what we did in the past but because we can learn from the past to make sure that we don't repeat these errors in the future. The big error is the absolute lack of transparency in reporting out on what we have been doing with federal investments and the number of units that were created over the last two decades.

That data reveals that had we maintained the level of investment that we did between 1990 and 1994—before the termination of social housing programs, roughly 10% of completions in those years—we would have actually added another 330,000 units to our stock of non-market community housing in this country and gotten to a total of one million units.

I have shared with committee members a brief that has the bilingual data for these particular years. I'll come back to some specific recommendations about how I think we can improve transparency going forward.

Your committee asked three questions: How much federal investment did we make? How many non-market units of non-profit and co-op did we create? How many private sector rental units did we create? I have put together a detailed data piece that I've shared with you. This data was not easy to put together. I had to mine many sources, identifying areas where CMHC officials themselves didn't even know the data existed within their various files. I used to work there in the early 1980s and 1990s, so I knew where it was. It's not readily transparent, and it was a difficult task to put that together.

The bottom line is that, between 2001 and 2016, we created 41,000 new non-profit units, 10,596 co-operative housing units and just over 238,000 private rental units. That was done using a federal investment of $4.17 billion, much of which was actually through cost-shared programs. That was augmented by provincial cost-sharing in those programs as well. That money flowed directly to the non-profits and co-ops, not to private rental; that wasn't subsidized during that particular period.

In total, non-profit and co-op housing was about 2% of total completions, and the private rental sector was only 9% of the total completions of 2.7 million units over those years. Most of our housing was, in fact, directed to the home ownership sector. The fact that we undersupplied rental housing for those 20 years has had a significant impact in the current affordability crisis, where the lack of rental supply is now being exacerbated by high levels of immigration, with students and foreign workers who are renters contributing to the rental problem.

The funding sources for that $4.17 billion came from three places. A program called Investment in Affordable Housing, which started in 2001, provided about $125 million per year. That was augmented in the 2006 budget as a result of a negotiation between Paul Martin and Jack Layton, which created three affordable housing trusts totalling $1.4 billion that was flowed over the 2006 to 2008 period. Subsequently, during the economic recession or the global financial crisis recovery, Canada's economic action plan contributed $2 billion from 2009 to 2011, about $1 billion of which was directly to new supply. The $1 billion was for social housing retrofit. That's where those numbers actually come from.

As I mentioned, it was very difficult to put this data together. We just don't have good data sources. The CMHC used to produce—from 1955 to 2016—a very detailed statistical document that was of very much use to many researchers like myself to actually understand what was going on in terms of total housing starts, the mortgage market and insured lending, as well as public investment and social housing outcomes.

Since the programs were terminated in 1994—at the end of 1993—those tables have been diminished, and the publication has ceased completely. We really don't have good data going forward on this information—certainly not since 2016.

In terms of recommendations, in the old days—prior to 2002—as part of the CMHC's starts and completions survey, they had a box on the survey form that counted which units were funded under a National Housing Act program or affordable social housing. That stopped being collected, even though we continued to collect the data at every single start about whether it's rental, whether it's condo or whether it's home ownership. Simply adding a box back to what is now an iPad—that's where the enumerators collect that data—would allow us to have data on a monthly basis and be able to put it into our monthly housing statistics, along with information on rental and ownership housing.

As I mentioned, many of the programs in the past were funded under cost-shared programs with the provinces. Under the national housing strategy, that's also the case, but for a small part of the national housing strategy, only three particular programs—about 10% of total funding in the national housing strategy—are funded through bilateral agreements.

As part of this agreement, CMHC imposed a very onerous 12-sheet spreadsheet requirement for the provinces to report data for the purpose of claiming their cost-sharing amounts. There's an accountability framework around that, an action plan and a set of targets. That's 10% of the national housing strategy. CMHC does not apply that policy to itself. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It would be great if this committee directed CMHC to produce the same level of data collecting and accountability for the unilateral federal programs that is done for the provinces.

My final point would simply be to make sure that data is published in the kind of tables we used to have, so it's available to researchers, parliamentarians and taxpayers.

Thank you very much.