Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I thank the Minister for his accolades and I also thank the Minister for his commitment to review the amount if fiscal priorities change so that he may be able to rebase it. I would look forward to that and I will be watching it. My second question today on the Budget Address concerns the need to address social housing. The new scheme that has been presented in the budget address is trying to put more people into homeownership. Over the past several months I have been bringing out concerns now that, indeed, we have almost saturated the marketplace with people who actually can afford to sustain a mortgage, but nowhere, Mr. Chairman, nowhere have we looked at addressing the need for new social housing. Now, I had addressed this concern in a letter to the Housing Minister
several months ago where I actually came up with, I thought, a good idea to look at the building of new social housing.
I am wondering now when the Minister put together his budget address, how come he did not tackle the issue of new social housing? I do not want to keep hearing that the federal government backed out of it four years ago. We are able to fund other things under the P3 Program. Is there a way, for example, that the Minister for Housing, the Minister of Finance, can say to a private developer we need 30 new social housing units, 2 or 3 bedroom apartments. We will be leasing these from you and doing the same type of deal that he is doing with the P3 for other corporate structures? There must be a way, Mr. Chairman, that we can get people in need into social housing. When we look at the need for housing, Mr. Todd just talked about, of those 4,500 that are needed, I understand that 80 percent of those houses are in the social program area. They are social housing. They are not private housing. What are we going to do about that? Yes, thank you, Mr. Miltenberger, the majority of them are in the east. I thank you for that Mr. Miltenberger. So, that is my question for the Minister, why did he not address it? Is he going to address it? With his fiscal abilities to come up with these wonderful ideas of tax credits, the Aurora Fund and all these other wonderful things, I am sure he could come up with an idea to build new social housing. Then, we can say he was a man.