BC Housing Management Commission

Consider this, my friend.

In British Columbia, social housing is owned and operated by BC Housing, a provincial crown corporation.

In Saskatchewan, there's the Saskatchewan Housing Corporation.

In Nova Scotia, there's the Housing Nova Scotia.

Okay, so it's safe to say that downloading has created challenges for Ontario's municipalities, but I want to readjust our viewpoint for a minute here, just to put Ontario in a national context, because the comparison is pretty darn curious.

We've already walked through the social housing picture, the short version, of course, being in every other province, social housing is a provincial responsibility.

Crown Corporation, so BC Housing, Saskatchewan Housing Corporation, Housing Nova Scotia, Manitoba Housing, and the like, they own and operate this portfolio.

Ontario stands alone as a province that handed its entire social housing portfolio to municipalities on social assistance.

Um, I've been writing to the government, uh, from my BIA for the last eight years.

Uh, in fact, I sent a, a letter to the premier's office, uh, late last fall, uh, which I got sort of a, you know, precursory high-level response from BC Housing.

But I actually asked for some quest- I asked some really serious questions.

And one of the key questions to me was, what is housing saturation? What is low-barrier saturation? What is shelter space saturation within a community? How many units can exist within a square kilometer, within per thousand people, to actually allow us to plan out where these kinds of housing units can go? So that's the first question.

Council, my name is Sarah Webb, and I'm the Assistant Director of Corporate Planning and Strategic Partnerships here with our Community Safety and Well-Being Department.

Last month, council directed staff to reach out to BC Housing and CRD to get an update on the implementation of and communicate our support for accelerating the implementation of the federal HIFIS system.

Oh, maybe I mischaracterized what they actually asked for.

So we'll defer to Ms. Webb here.

Together all of these elements enable communities to match individuals in need to housing and support services.

Here in Victoria, the local backbone team is working on several items to ensure the Capital Region is ready, willing and able to support the HIFIS implementation when provincial rollout begins.

The initial phase of this program is focused on partners, sites and programs that are funded through BC Housing and or the Federal Reaching Homes Program.

Current activities include completing the regional system of mapping to identify all organizations, programs, and services and staff who may require HIFIS access, establishing local governance structures to support coordinated access and HIFIS rollout, and the CRD has now hired a HIFIS administrator position.

They say stipends for those elected officials should be abolished.

They also want BC Housing to take over Metro Vancouver's housing division and it says regional parks should be transferred to BC Parks or municipalities.

Senior military leaders from 29 Pacific Rim countries are gathered in Victoria for an annual conference on regional security and political issues.

But as Ben O'Hara-Byrne reports, tension between the U.S. and its allies, including Canada, is casting a shadow over the meetings.

So a lot of the builders said, no, I'm sorry, we don't want to do this anymore.

There's one development in Kelowna, the virtual one, which just recently closed, and it was backed by BC Housing.

So even a government-backed affordable housing, 176 units, was canceled because they felt it was just not feasible.

What is CMHC looking forward, looking out? What are they thinking?

Mm.

So now what happens, and since then, is we get a briefing, this group gets a briefing from Environment and Climate Change Canada, and then we look at, what are the risk factors? So if it was hot, but there was also a high risk to the population, it might reach that red level or extreme, uh, heat emergency, and that would trigger all kinds of different plans, um, in the province, from the emergency rooms to BC Housing to, uh, our system, et cetera.

So, so what are the other variables that get taken into account? Is it things like humidity and, and whether the temperature is reducing overnight, things like that?

Exactly.

Listen to this, a 20 story rental tower with 176 below market rental homes in downtown Kelowna has been outright canceled.

BC Housing was

behind the project

and with lowering rates, they have decided the project was a poor use of public money.