Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I second the motion. I am aware that we have had passed, this would be the fourth motion of this type concerning this area. The problems are huge. It’s not equitable as it currently stands. The rents in communities where there’s few public housing, pay a lot more of their gross income if they get jobs. Right now, as it stands, this motion recommends an equalization across the board of people that go to work, go into a certain size house, they pay a certain amount across the board. It doesn’t matter if you live in a community where there are 300 public housing units or you live in a community where there are 30. When you live in a community where there are 30, under the current system the cost of administration and the cost of maintenance and everything is distributed amongst the 30 units and it’s very high. Also in most of the smaller communities the price is very high. Fuel is high, power is also costly, water and sewer is costly, because everything is on smaller scale and it’s more remote.

This kind of equalizes it. This is where we should go. This is the direction we should go. This is a win-win for the people in the communities and for the government. It keeps people at work. It has people paying something.

Right now if an individual goes to work in a small community, there is potential for them to start paying $3,000 a month. Even if you have a real good job, that’s a little more than one cheque. That’s one cheque. Because even though you can sit here and say it’s only 30 percent of their gross income, well, income tax will take 30 percent too, and then there’s the cost of working. There’s the cost of daycare, if you have to have daycare when you go to work. There’s those additional costs that the government must look at and take into consideration, not just looking focused in on the shelter cost. They have to look at all the other factors that come into play here. And the people will pay something. Like, you know, better that than sitting at home drawing income support, having the government pay them for doing nothing.

So this is an opportunity to put people back to work, especially in communities where employment is very rare. A lot of these communities we’re talking about, the reason they’re non-market communities is because there’s not much employment. It’s very difficult to buy and sell a house. That’s a non-market community because there’s no employment, there’s no income. People can’t buy your house because they don’t have the money. This kind of sets things in the right direction and I hope that the government does employ this policy change.