Affordable housing, homelessness focus of Hamilton Centre debate
Federal election contenders for Hamilton Centre all agree the downtown riding has a housing emergency, but the would-be MPs differ on how to fix it - or who to blame.
The Green party's Avra Caroline Weinstein kick-started a back-and-forth exchange during the candidates' Cable 14 televised debate at the Westdale Theatre by asking what could be done for the city's pandemic-battered homeless residents.
We have a housing crisis," she said, pointing in particular to pandemic tent encampments. We have people who have four-storey condominium grocery carts wandering around."
Tory candidate Fabian Grenning suggested the Liberals have failed to keep past promises on homelessness.
The (Justin) Trudeau government had six years to get homelessness right," he said, later suggesting the NDP's Matthew Green also had time as both MP and city councillor to tackle the problem. It's still not right. Why?"
Green said the plight of homeless residents keeps me up at night." He said the NDP would build 500,000 new affordable housing units, adding the need for accessible rental or co-op housing is particularly acute in Hamilton's lower-city riding.
Green also noted successive Conservative and Liberal federal governments combined to largely get out of the subsidized housing business in the early 1990s. Today's federal Liberal government, he suggested, is bent on home ownership" rather than needed subsidized rentals.
Liberal candidate Margaret Bennett disputed that argument, pointing to recent spending on rapid" rental housing projects in Hamilton as well as $145 million to repair 6,000 social-housing units. She also said the party expects the city to plan new affordable housing along a federally funded light rail transit line through the riding.
We have done a lot ... to make up for 10 years of the (former) Conservative government exiting the housing game and doing nothing," she said.
Matthew Van Dongen is a Hamilton-based reporter covering transportation for The Spectator. Reach him via email: mvandongen@thespec.com