Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the question with regard to rent increases, this is a project that has been implemented for a number of years that was a phase-in approach. They were looking at implementing it in 1995. They were supposed to phase it in over a four-year period, so it doesn't have a big impact on the tenants who are in social housing. It was a system that was supposed to make it fairer and easier for those tenants to realize this is what the increase was. What happened was in 1997 the phase-in was put on hold and now we are bringing it back to conclude the last two years of the phase-in. We have phase one, phase two, and in two years we are looking at completing that. The idea was instead of giving a total 100 percent increase in year one was to spread that out over four years, so you will see a 30 percent increase in the first year, another 30 percent increase in the second year, then a 30 percent increase in the third year and a 10 percent increase for the last phase-in in the fourth year.
The whole idea was to have a system in place to allow tenants to be aware that social housing is there to assist social clients and also to make people aware that we do have other objectives out there. The Member states that people are going to be impacted. A large number of these tenants will not see any increase. Sixty-four percent of the tenants will not see an increase. The other 15 percent, which takes it up to 75 percent, will see a $100 increase. The idea is to have a fair system. This is social housing for social clients. We need to ensure those other people who will be in the higher brackets get into homeownership programs to ensure that they are able to maintain their units for programs to help people get into homeownership. If you are paying that high a rent, it's important that we look at that.
This is just the conclusion of a program, which stopped two years ago and we are now trying to implement the conclusion of the four-year phase-in. It's not 30 percent in one shot, it has been phased in over four years. We are only implementing the third year of a four-year phase. Thank you.