Jenny Kwan

Jenny Kwan is the NDP MP for Vancouver East and has been a consistent voice for the most vulnerable people in that city — the Downtown Eastside, people experiencing homelessness, people living in poverty. She serves as Housing Critic and she has not been silent about how badly government has failed on that file. The frustration is that the NDP is in opposition, so she can identify the problems but can't force the solutions. Her riding is one of the hardest in Canada to serve — complex, underfunded community, massive need. She does this work with genuine commitment. I want her to have more power to actually change things.

Jenny Kwan has been saying the right things about housing and immigration for a decade. She introduced Bill C-205 to protect affordable units. It stalled. She supported the confidence-and-supply agreement that kept the Liberals in power through some of the worst affordability failures in recent memory. Being correct and being effective are different skills. She has the first. The second requires actually changing things for people on the ground, and in Vancouver East housing has not gotten better. As a renter in this country I've watched opposition politicians be perfectly right about everything for years while nothing changed. Being right in opposition isn't enough when people are suffering from the problem.

Jenny Kwan has been one of Parliament's most consistent voices on housing and immigration for over a decade — serving as both Housing and Immigration Critic, repeatedly identifying the failure to build non-market affordable housing, the displacement of tenants, and the Liberal government's mismatch between immigration intake and housing capacity. Her private member's Bill C-205, aimed at protecting existing affordable units and prohibiting forced encampment clearances on federal land, advanced to second reading and stalled. That pattern repeats through her career: correct analysis, genuine advocacy, legislation that goes nowhere. She has stood up for people who rarely get federal representation. The frustration is that ten years of good advocacy has not changed the lived experience of people in Vancouver's unaffordable rental market or on its streets. The NDP's confidence-and-supply arrangement, which she supported, propped up a Liberal government through some of the worst affordability failures in memory. That decision will define this Parliament's NDP legacy.