Mr. Speaker, I would encourage my colleague to reach out to the member for Markham—Stouffville. As a provincial minister in Ontario, she built a basic income pilot project in Hamilton, only to see the Conservatives destroy it, despite the fact it was showing great promise. Before it was allowed to report out fully and had its work destroyed by the Ford government, one of the early findings was that it actually encouraged people to work and that people actually saw a way to use social benefit to improve their standing in their own lives.

I agree with her that the time has come for concerted action, and I hope she would reach out and discuss the findings of that report, because the member in our caucus is a wealth of information, as is the minister from the treasury board. It is his life's work, as a professor in Laval. His thoughts on it are absolutely phenomenal.

The issue is that basic income alone will not solve problems. Basic income alone does not create a housing system that someone can afford just because they have the rent money. We have to design systems for basic income to work within. Housing in particular is one of the key drivers of poverty. It is one of the key drivers of health outcomes, and of the justice of which she speaks. Without the housing system in place, and without intentionally building affordable housing, if we put all the money into basic income and do not spread it through those other systems, access to child care, access to health care, access to housing and access to this country's wealth are limited for far too many people.

While we have to achieve on income reform, we also have to build systems around it to make that income reform work better, work harder and deliver real results to those people.

I look forward to our conversations.

Adam Vaughan

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