Mr. McGEER:

I wish to say a few words on the provision made for slum clearance, which has been substantially qualified by the minister in his remarks this morning. Slum clearance is something everyone talks about but nobody does anything about, and the reason is that unless the municipadities are able to develop a programme of slum clearance and prosecute it, the situation remains without anybody being in a position to move on it with any effectiveness. Slum clearance is probably one of the finest examples of the danger of obsolescence fastening itself on to a community through the practice of always thinking of everything in terms of the investment of money. In slum clearance and in the futures of cities there is probably something more important than the individual dwelling houses. I think the more important thing is the environment and the surroundings of the dwelling houses themselves. We have moved along to a time when the number of hours that people work is comparatively small

Housing

compared with the number of hours that they have in the way of leisure time. You will hardly find in a Canadian city anything like adequate accommodation for the healthy cultural occupation of lqisure time.

I do not know how the figure of $20,000,000 was arrived at, but certainly that amount would not go very far in slum clearance throughout Canada. I should think that you would be able to spend much more than that in the city of Montreal alone. You could spend a good deal of it even in a young city like Vancouver which has not the obsolescence that the older cities have. There are whole areas in that young city that are outmoded to-day. As a matter of fact they were not properly built and they should be cleared away. In my opinion one effective method of slum clearance is to establish in the school areas not merely a school and playground, but a school with all the requirements of the social life of that school centre. Each school should be equipped not with one mediocre bit of ground for the children to play on, but with several divisions of playgrounds. It should have its gymnasium; it should have its stadium; it should have its swimming-pool; it should have its skating-rink, of course; it should have its theatre and its music centre; it should have its accommodation for music and for art, not merely for the children but each school centre in that section of the city should become as well as a centre of education, a centre for cultural entertainment for the whole community. What would it cost? How could it be paid for? It could be paid for in the same way that we pay for our highways, our parks, or those things that we must have in war time and in peace time that never reproduce a dollar of money dividends, but could produce enormously in the dividends of culture, better citizenship and better community life in a sounder, national economy. I know it is easy to say that we cannot afford these things. When the hon. member for Victoria, Ontario, suggests that the Soviet Union are adopting the same kind of monetary system that we are-

Mr. McGEER:

Or debts either.

Mr. McGEER:

Give me a chance and I will do so immediately.

Mr. McGEER:

There are no two impressions in what I said; i.t is only the kind of glasses through which the minister is looking that makes him think so.

Mr. McGEER:

They did it deliberately.