44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 9, 2021 10:00AM
- Dec/9/21 10:29:57 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the NDP would like to propose an amendment for the member's consideration.
In the stipulation of providing federal lands available for residential development, one thing that needs to be made clear is that the residential development needs to be non-profit and co-operative housing in the permanent sense. It does not make sense, if the federal government is going to make land available to a developer, to build high-rise, high-priced, luxury condos, for example. We want to make sure that these lands are used for non-profit and co-operative, affordable housing permanently.
Would the member support this amendment?
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- Dec/9/21 11:08:59 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the reality is that Canada is actually losing more affordable housing and social housing than it is creating. During the campaign, the Liberal government only committed to 20,000 units of non-profit affordable housing to be built and created.
My question to the parliamentary secretary is this. Would she call on her own government to do what the NDP has been advocating for? That is to build 500,000 units of affordable, cooperative housing so that we can, in fact, give people who need housing and who are unhoused the opportunity to have a home?
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- Dec/9/21 11:38:31 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, is the member concerned at all about the fact that in the motion, it is not stipulated that when making federal lands available for residential development, they are to be for non-profit and social housing? Otherwise, that land could be made available for luxury condo developers, which I do not think is the purpose of what we are trying to do here.
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- Dec/9/21 11:56:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am delighted to enter into this debate. As members may know, housing is one of my deepest passions.
I got into electoral politics back in 1993. Why? Because the federal Liberal government cancelled the national affordable housing program at that time. I was working as a community legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside. I was absolutely devastated because I saw first-hand what it was like for individuals who could not get access to safe, secure affordable housing. I worked day and night to find people housing, sometimes inadequate housing.
That was back in 1993. Look at what is happening today. Things are even worse. I have never seen it so bad as it is now. During the election campaign, believe it or not, the Liberal candidate came after me and asked me what I had done in the last six years, having been elected as member of Parliament. I told the Liberal candidate to ask the Prime Minister, the leader of his party, what he had or had not done to deliver housing to those in greatest need.
Vancouver East had the largest homeless encampment in the country. For months this went on. From the summer to the fall to the winter, it persisted. I begged the Minister of Housing to come to my community and see for himself what was going on. I offered solutions day and night whenever I saw the minister. Sometimes it was at the airport, while we were waiting for our flight. Sometimes I would walk across the floor of the House. I wrote countless letters to the government. I even wrote a joint letter with Mayor Kennedy Stewart and the local MLA, the Hon. Melanie Mark, begging for the government to come to the table.
The provincial B.C. NDP government had said that it would match the funding from the federal government to address this crisis. Did the federal government come to the table? No, it did not, and yet the Liberals sit here today and talk about what a swell job they are doing with their national affordable housing initiative. Let us be clear about what is going on with the national affordable housing initiative. The reality is that initiative is not producing the housing needed most by those who are unhoused and by those who are living precariously with their housing conditions.
The co-investment fund that the parliamentary secretary talked about, yes, is a great program, with the exception that it is so riddled with red tape that it is almost impossible for non-profits to make applications. They literally have to hire consultants to get through the stack of pages and reams of questions. Worse than that, after they are able to answer all the questions and submit their applications, CMHC barely has the wherewithal to process them expeditiously, and we wonder why housing is not getting developed. We wonder why things are not changing on the streets.
With regard to the co-investment fund, I must also take a moment to say where the problems lie with smaller communities, rural communities and northern communities, communities that do not have the large infrastructure as my city does in an urban centre to make those complicated applications. They are left out in the cold. That is the reality of what is going on.
Prior to and during the campaign, the Liberals bragged about the largest program within the national housing strategy, the RCFI. The RCFI has constructed housing that is simply not affordable. Housing experts have looked into this program and have found that the developments are way above market, somewhere between 30% to 130% above market. This is the kind of housing they are building. How will that help the people on the ground?
One would think the government would want to bring in a program to support private developers in developing housing that is below market, but no, not this government, not the Liberals. The Liberals go on to say, “What a great job we are doing,” and they send out reams and reams of press releases making these announcements. Holy moly, I almost fell off my chair. In what universe, in what sane perception could one possibly accept the notion that housing builds 100% or more above market are acceptable? Even 30% above market is not acceptable.
In addition, there was a project in Quebec where the Liberals made the announcement but then reporters found out that the project was not even built. Money had not even flowed to it. The Liberals are not embarrassed about that at all, and they just send out those press releases bragging about it. My goodness, I do not know what planet people are from. In my universe, truth matters, and what matters even more is action, because people on the ground need that housing. It makes me want to weep.
When I came to Ottawa this week, our flight was delayed because of the snow. It was around three o'clock in the morning, I cannot remember exactly now, but I was in a cab. As the cab drove up to my apartment, I saw that there was a homeless man outside at three o'clock in the morning in Ottawa, in the bitter cold. I said to the cab driver, “Oh my God. That is a homeless man at this hour on this night, on the street.” I walked up to him, and he did not even have a piece of cardboard on the ground to cover the sidewalk for him. I just cannot imagine that situation. It is not just in the Downtown Eastside that we have a homelessness crisis; we have it everywhere across the country. Please could the Liberal government stop talking about what a great job its members are doing and actually do the job and deliver the housing for the people in the greatest need?
To our Conservative friends, I will say that the motion in and of itself could be a good one, except that all the Conservatives are thinking about is supply and how to get that “gotcha” moment with the government.
The motion proposes to make federal lands available without any stipulation whatsoever to require that residential development be tied permanently to affordable, non-profit, social and co-operative housing. That is not acceptable. It is exactly how the Liberals get away with driving a truck through the loopholes with their arguments about what a great job they are doing, which is producing housing that is way above market and still saying they are producing affordable housing. We have to do better and we must do better, because people's lives depend on it.
I support the other aspects of the motion, such as the call to say to the government that we should never charge capital gains tax for people who are selling their primary home. I absolutely support that, no question. I also support the second component of the motion, which is to say that we need to ban foreign investment. We absolutely need to do that, and we need to do more than that. We need to stop the financialization of housing and stop treating housing as though it is a stock market. We need to deal with REITs and bring in measures to stop those kinds of investments, because all that does is drive up the cost of housing for those who need affordable rentals. I am not saying there is no place for market rentals; there is, but there needs to be some limit, and it cannot be at such a rate that people cannot live there.
I move that the motion be amended in paragraph (a) by adding, after the words “available for” the following: “permanently affordable non-profit and co-operative”; and by adding after the words “primary residences”, the following: “(d) commit dedicated funding in the December 14, 2021 fall economic statement toward the development of the urban, rural and northern indigenous housing strategy promised in 2017, including the creation of a fully funded 'by indigenous, for indigenous' national housing centre; and (e) build 500,000 additional new homes that people can afford, including co-operative housing.”
If the Conservatives would accept this amendment, it would be a fulsome amendment and we could make a difference. Let us do it.
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- Dec/9/21 12:08:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my thanks to the member for her kind words.
There are many, many factors impacting home ownership. There is no question that there is a hot housing market and that people cannot afford to get into owning a home. Some of those issues tie into people flipping land, such as the Liberal member for Vancouver Granville, who actually, prior to the election, would not even answer the question of when he was participating in flipping land to make a profit. How much money did he make? What impact did that have, for example, on the cost of housing and on people who wanted to get into the housing market?
Banning foreign ownership is also one step that can curb this, but it is not the only step. Addressing the issue of financialization of housing is a key factor within that. I wish the motion the Conservatives tabled would include that piece as well. If we want to have—
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- Dec/9/21 12:10:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is true that the amount of land that is available is not to the tune the Conservatives have suggested. Having said that, it does not mean to say there is no land available. What we should and could do, of course, is look and see what land is available and then make it available to the non-profit sector to develop affordable social and co-operative housing.
I am not here to get market luxury condos developed. That is not what I am interested in. That may be what the Conservatives are interested in, but I am not. That is why I moved the amendment to change the motion and include that stipulation.
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- Dec/9/21 12:12:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know New Democrats will always fight for safe, secure and affordable housing for all, and we strongly believe adequate housing is a fundamental basic right. That is why my colleague—
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- Dec/9/21 1:06:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member waxed eloquently about how his government was doing such a great job in addressing the housing crisis. I wonder if the member knows that the Parliamentary Budget Officer, just prior to the election, indicated that under the Liberals' watch Canada lost over 180,000 units of social housing because the federal government did not provide the necessary subsidies or renew their operating agreements in time to save those units. We are losing more units than we actually are creating to ensure that people without houses have access to safe, secure, affordable housing.
Does the member even realize that?
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- Dec/9/21 1:40:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I hope that the two members had some fun with their theatrics.
The reality, of course, is that there are a great many people across the country who need safe, secure, affordable housing: people who right now, at this moment, are homeless in the snow in the dead of winter.
I noted that, in this motion from the Conservatives, there was no mention whatsoever of the need for an urban, rural and northern “for indigenous, by indigenous” housing strategy. Indigenous people are overrepresented in the homeless population. They are 11 times more likely to use a shelter than non-indigenous people.
Do the Conservatives not care about indigenous people's need for housing? Why—
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- Dec/9/21 1:57:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member talks as though she really supports affordable housing and those who are homeless, but given the trajectory in which we are going with the government's national affordable housing initiative, we are not going to meet the targets. We will not end homelessness.
Given that perspective, would the member support what the NDP is calling for, which is the injection of 500,000 units of social and co-operative housing, so that we can in fact address the housing crisis in this country?
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