Good morning, Mr. Chair.

According to the 2021 census, 1.6 million renter households in Canada were already spending more than the standard 30% of their incomes on housing, and 620,000 of them were spending more than 50%, clearly at the expense of their other essential needs. In Quebec, 373,000 renter households are in this situation, earning a modest annual median income of less than $24,000. Many have probably become homeless since then. The situation is probably far worse now since these numbers are based on 2020 incomes, temporarily inflated by special income support measures. Many households have also become invisible in the statistics since homeless persons and those with insecure migratory status aren't enumerated in the census.

Quebec and all the provinces are now experiencing a rental housing shortage, the most severe shortage in 15 years in Quebec and the most widespread the province has ever known.

In the circumstances, in the absence of mandatory rent control, rents are increasing even more quickly, discrimination is on the rise, and the rents of the scarce available apartments are higher.

The affordable housing stock is rapidly declining, and residential insecurity now afflicts increasing numbers of renter households.

Despite the acute shortage, it's impossible to attribute the causes of the crisis renters are experiencing to scarcity alone. High rents and their mismatch with the incomes of a large segment of renters are also signs of a crisis that undermines their ability to pay, which is an essential component of the right to decent housing.

The rental dwellings built in recent years, in many instances by real estate giants, have unfortunately contributed to this rising unaffordability. However, there are very few alternatives to these excessively expensive units, since the private sector owns 90% of the rental stock in Quebec, which is probably more similar to the Canadian situation.

In the circumstances, the shortage of social housing in the form of co‑operatives, non-profit housing organizations and public social housing contributes to the crisis.

In 2016, the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights acknowledged in a report released in Canada that the social housing shortage was one of the barriers to the gradual implementation of the right to housing in Canada.

This shortage of private-market housing has serious consequences and has clearly contributed to an increase in the number of homeless people in recent years.

For three decades, non-profit and collective-ownership social housing was the centrepiece of federal intervention on housing. The federal government's withdrawal since January 1, 1994 has definitely contributed to the current shortage across the country. It is estimated that, in Quebec alone, we would now have approximately 85,000 more social housing units if the federal government had continued to invest at the same pace as it did during the best years.

The federal government's withdrawal from maintenance of the existing social housing stock, which it had helped to finance, also undermined that collective property. In Quebec, for example, there is the problem associated with the maintenance of low-income housing, whereas social housing units have since been sold in certain provinces. The federal government returned eight years later, in 2002, not directly to social housing, but to so-called “affordable” housing, which also helped maintain a small percentage of social housing units in the rental stock in many provinces, including Quebec.

The federal “affordable” housing initiatives continued year after year for at least 15 years on a share of financing that was already inadequate at the outset. Social housing projects never returned to the level they had reached in the late 1980s.

Canada's national housing strategy, which was introduced in 2017, clearly hasn't helped finance a large number of social housing units intended for low and moderate-income families, as was the original objective, and for good reason: despite the strategy's objectives, those initiatives were poorly targeted, the vast majority of funding intended for housing was used to build apartments at costs that were far too high, and too few initiatives under the strategy were reserved for non-profit housing.

In short, even though our association is delighted that the November update, Canada's housing plan and the April 16 budget have finally restored funding to the non-profit sector, we still have a long way to go. There's still too little social housing funding in the pipeline.

It's essential that the trend be reversed. We have very clear demands to make of the government, and we would ask the committee to consider them to ensure that the billions of dollars that the federal government still needs to invest in housing is put to better use.

It's important that this funding really be used to offset the social housing shortage that, in Quebec and across Canada, is associated with the federal government's withdrawal and that it be used to combat the serious homelessness crisis afflicting the entire country.