September 28, 2018 ~ SOOKE.
“I checked and not a single penny of funding from the government’s vaunted housing strategy has been spent in Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke,” said Randall Garrison, MP (Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke) this week.
The NDP used their first opposition day of the fall sitting in the House of Commons to “highlight the fact that measures announced by the Liberal government don’t address the urgency of the situation”. The motion calls for the government to immediately bring forward 50% of the funding attached to the government’s housing strategy.
Referring to his own riding: “People here are being squeezed out of the housing market and can’t afford to wait. Waiting until after the next election will be too late for many people who can’t afford for things to get worse.”
And while he said the “lack of affordable housing is directly tied to decades of successive funding cuts by Liberal and Conservative governments”, in Greater Victoria it was made particularly difficult by a reluctance amongst municipalities (other than Langford) to rezone land toward higher density in a timely fashion. And in BC overall, it took a while for the BC Liberal government to catch on to developing affordable housing in the last few years of their 16-year run.
The Liberal government says Canada’s first ever National Housing Strategy is a 10-year, $40-billion plan. About 1.7 million families still don’t have a home that meets their basic needs. To achieve this goal, the strategy will first focus on the most vulnerable Canadians, says the federal government at www.placetocallhome.ca
The plan’s first-focus includes women and children fleeing family violence, seniors, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, those dealing with mental health and addiction issues, veterans and young adults.
Over the next 10 years, the strategy will apparently cut chronic homelessness in half, remove 530,000 families from housing need, and invest in the construction of up to 100,000 new affordable homes.
Canada faces an unprecedented housing crisis with exploding house prices, rising rents, rental housing shortages, long wait-lists for non-market housing, and increasing homelessness.