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Budget Leaves 1.5 Million Canadians in Housing Crisis
5:17 PM, February 26, 2008
Press Release From Canadian Housing and Renewal Association - No budget for Housing
Ottawa, – When Minister Jim Flaherty stood to deliver the Conservative Government’s 2008 budget today he left 1.5 million Canadians in desperate housing need on the outside looking in. These are the families living in housing they can’t afford, isn’t safe, isn’t healthy and is bursting at the seams due to overcrowding. The budget also ignored the desperate plight of 200,000 people experiencing homelessness.The Canadian Housing and Renewal Association’s (CHRA) President, Karen Charlton, points out that “It’s not good enough to say that we can’t afford it, we don’t have the room for this kind of spending, when this government has clearly chosen a tax cut agenda at the expense of the well-being of vulnerable children, immigrants, people on worker disability support, seniors who have worked their whole lives for this country, and others who through no fault of their own need some help to access affordable housing.”
The Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, along with other community housing stakeholders, recently released a report that shows that government spending on affordable housing declined steadily between the mid-1990’s and 2001 for a loss of $700 million in annual investment. Since 2002, the federal government has re-invested some of that loss, but it has fallen far short of what is needed to meet the demand that built up over the previous decade.
The report went on to demonstrate that if the federal government simply committed to maintain today’s investment level over the next twenty years, without investing a penny more than it does today, it would provide affordable housing developers with the stability they need to house thousands of Canadian families every year, and the number would increase over time.
“We handed the federal government a strategy that would have turned them from heels to heroes to thousands of Canadian households needing support without adding a penny to their expense line, at a time when they are tightening their belt, and somehow it was completely ignored”, says CHRA executive director Sharon Chisholm. “Given that this commitment would not require new spending, I continue to call on the federal government to take this critical step.”
CHRA has also brought to the government’s attention the fact that three existing federal programs that help the homeless and Canadians in need of affordable housing are set to expire in March 2009, and has urged their renewal.
More Information: www.chra-achru.ca
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