Mr. Speaker, I want to speak today about the public rental housing subsidy and some of the difficulties that we have had since it’s been transferred from the Housing Corporation to Education, Culture and Employment. I guess I
could be considered lucky, because I wasn’t here in April of 2005 when that responsibility was transferred to the Department of ECE. But I’ve been hearing about that impact for almost two years now, even before I started work in this building.
The issues of my constituents are with service or, more correctly, lack of service in most cases. Instead of the promised one-stop shop, public housing clients now must visit two offices instead of one. There is a lack of coordination between the local housing office and the income support office, and dealing with two agencies thoroughly confuses my constituents. They tell me there’s no consideration or management of the whole person or problem. Income support tends to only consider what falls under their umbrella and/or their policies. They seem unable to look outside the box, so to speak. So housing concerns are ignored; concerns which are often the cause of the income support issue. Income support offices are rigid in their application of policies. Clients report an attitude of “my way or the highway” rather than “what’s the problem and how do we find a solution to your problem”.
The stated goal of this change in 2005 was harmonization, the famous one-stop shopping reason. We have failed miserably in achieving this goal. In November 2006 this House debated a similar motion. The concerns about the impact of the transfer and the complaints voiced then are still the same today. I’d like to give a couple of quotes from November 1, 2006, Hansard record: “Tenants are having to wait three weeks to have their assessments done;” “It has not added any more benefits to the beneficiaries of the program;” and, thirdly, “What we’re struggling with here clearly are implementation problems.”
Today, over two years later, the same issues still exist and, despite the efforts of the Housing Corporation and Education, Culture and Employment to effect improvements, things are only marginally improved. Change is not always better and in this case it has been proven to be worse than the original. I believe we need to admit that a mistake was made and we need to use a time travel machine to take us back to early 2005, a time when we had a public housing rental subsidy system that worked, and we need to stay in that 2005 space for this program to operate the way it should.