Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Routledge. I was very pleased to hear you speak French earlier. I'm not sure if you will be able to answer all my questions in French, but in any case at least you do speak it.

I would like to talk about the housing crisis. We know that housing is always the biggest household expense. If we help people with housing, we can help them live better and afford other things. For my part, I toured Quebec last year to get a feel for things and met people who help individuals with housing problems. It's really tough. Not a day goes by that we don't see encampments in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. The shocking thing is that we are often seeing them now in small municipalities in Quebec, in places where that had never been seen before.

I think it was Scotiabank that said we will need to build 5.8 million housing units by 2031. This is 2024, so that is seven years from now. In Quebec, we need about 1.2 million units, while the most units built in one year is 70,000. By 2031, we need to find some way to create an ecosystem, ideally with government support, to build three times the number of units that we have ever built. So it is a massive challenge.

It was the banks that conducted those studies. The figures are not from organizations advocating for social housing, but from the banks. They are the ones saying we have to build 5.8 million units.

And yet I have not heard a single politician to date say that we have to find a solution. We need a colossal plan, like a Marshall plan. Representatives of all organizations that build housing and of all orders of government need to sit down together to address this tremendous challenge.

Right now, there are people, families and single mothers living on the streets. Last year, a young pregnant woman gave birth in a tent, right downtown. That was very close to us, in Gatineau, Quebec. I don't know how we can accept that in a G7 country. I don't accept it, in any case.

What would the OSFI advise or what policies would it suggest to the government to achieve the target of 5.8 million units within seven years, or at least to get close to that?

Denis Trudel

$510,189.00