SoVote

Mr. Ryan Williams (Bay of Quinte, CPC)

Dec/9/21 5:37:30 p.m.
Watch

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for a very spirited debate. It is just great that we are talking about housing as a whole. Now, I am not sure about Quebec, but in Toronto right now, to start and finish an apartment building is taking about 10 years. That is 10 years with the planning processes, and we are not even talking about the amount of time it takes to talk about it in the House. My question to the member is this: Does it not make sense in this motion that we would be taking the federal buildings that are available now, today, that are up, and talking about their various uses and making them into housing? Does that makes sense?

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Context: House Hansard - 14 - Dec/9/21

Mr. Ryan Williams (Bay of Quinte, CPC)

Dec/9/21 6:10:41 p.m.
Watch

Madam Speaker, I think it is high time that we started not just using the word “crisis” when it comes to talking about our housing. As Elvis said, we need “A little less conversation, a little more action”. We need to declare housing a crisis. We need to swing hammers and get homes built in this country. In my home riding of Bay of Quinte, housing is in an existential crisis that needs action. The lack of homes has resulted in sky-high costs for both housing and rental units. Only a massive increase of supply will fix the situation. We need to double new builds of homes in Canada right now, utilizing the private sector with government-assisted, affordable housing, utilizing existing housing inventory from the government, at 15%, and utilizing full collaboration among all levels of government. In Canada, it is the top issue right now, with a housing bubble that has absolutely been exacerbated by COVID-19 and the amount of cheap cash that entered this country's economy. What does the housing crisis mean for Canadians? It means more poverty, further out-of-reach affordable housing and a further out-of-reach ability for first-time homebuyers to afford a home in this country. It has also resulted in increased homelessness. My riding has double the homelessness rate in the last two years that it did in the four years prior. Mortgage payments now eat 45% of an average homeowner's income, which is already being eroded by massive inflation. Speaking of the inflationary tax, rental in Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax is up over 16% while paycheques are down over 3% because of inflation. When we talk about a crisis, we talk about citizens who are having trouble deciding whether to pay for rent, groceries, mortgages or medication, or having to take several jobs in order to afford a down payment for a first home. Take the case of Erica from my riding. Erica and her family have lived in the same home for six years over the time of the Liberal government. Now they are being forced to leave. Their landlord sold their home and the new owners want to renovate and flip the property for a profit. She wrote to me that they were paying $1,000 a month plus all utilities and are now being served an N11 and made to move by January 31. Both she and her husband work full-time, but cannot find affordable housing. The cheapest housing they could find was $2,000 a month plus utilities. What is the cause of this housing crisis? It is supply. Building supply is going to be the solution alongside some other key government programs, but supply is the key ingredient. Take the Golden Horseshoe in Ontario as an example. In five years, again with the Liberal government from 2016-2021, the region added 780,000 new residents but only 270,000 new homes. How much supply do we need in Canada? If we compare ourselves with other G7 nations, we are dead last in supply per capita. In fact, to meet the median of our friends in the G7, Italy, France, the U.K., Germany, Japan and the United States, we would need 1.8 million homes today, according to a study from Scotiabank on affordable housing. The government would like to say that it is making a dent in supply. The hon. Minister of Immigration stated in the House that the Liberal government has created, in six years, 100,000 units. I have done the math, and members can believe that I am correct. For the government building supply to meet the median household demand today in Canada, not including the increased immigration we need and that is coming as COVID ends, it would take 108 years. This is why I am using the word “crisis” to describe housing. What has been happening is not working to quell our housing prices and rental prices. It is creating more poverty and it is creating unaffordability. In this country, we have the land. What we do not have is supply. The reason for that is an ample amount of red tape, Nimbyism and lack of coordination of programs to ensure that we take this crisis as seriously as we can. To be clear, the government has never taken concerns seriously enough. According to home builders' associations, including home builders in my own Bay of Quinte, the government is just not engaging stakeholders in the trenches. Home builders who are more than capable of building homes are under-respected and under-represented at all levels of government. Here is the reality: The process of taking a parcel of land from concept to reality has become far too complex, expensive and slow. For a small subdivision, this is approaching 10 years. The financial risks and amounts are so significant that they are becoming available only to large corporations that have little to no interest in small regions of Canada. If they do it is too little, too late for a local response to meet housing needs. The layers of approval agencies and utility corporations without accountability are so great that even if we build the housing we need, it fits into the Liberal plan of decades into the future. We need all levels of government to treat this as an issue to solve with the federal government leading the way. We need to utilize the creative entrepreneurial skills of Canadians to solve the problems. We have some great ideas from the Conservative Party that can be implemented right away. One from our platform during the unneeded election involved freeing up the private sector to work alongside the government to build one million homes in three years. Another is this motion, which frees up 15% of real estate or 37,000 federal real estate buildings for affordable housing. It is absolutely incredible. It stops the time we need to start construction and utilizes supply that is there right now. Implementing an immediate freeze of foreign home builders for two years is absolutely essential. We have heard support for that across the aisle. Yes, we have also heard universal support for not taxing primary residences. The Conservative plan is an appropriate federal government response to this situation. I am suggesting that we also call this a national crisis. We must recognize that in this crisis there are broader solutions that will require collaboration among all parties and across all levels of government. There are solutions that the federal government can help take a leadership position on, including cutting red tape to increase building starts and building housing units through city urban core intensification. One example includes having housing approvals take no more than 120 days. I mentioned earlier in the House that the average time to approve building an apartment building in Toronto is 10 years. We need to make sure we are starting to build and that we build now. We need a staging and development policy in each municipality that ensures there are always shovel-ready lots in a five-year slot. If they are not fillable, they should have the tools to insert more buildable lots. There should be no reason for every municipality to not have builds occurring in every season to meet the needs of supply for this crisis. We need to complete a housing needs assessment by the end of 2022 that works with, and develops newly recommended changes to, existing provincial legislation and municipal official plans. Too often we are seeing development come to councils with the public unaware of where housing is going or what kind of housing is needed to fix this crisis. This results in Nimbyism, or BANANA people: “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone”. It is terrible. We need a 25-year outlook on housing needs with clear communication to all who live there to convert Nimbyism into Yimbyism. There are examples around the planet where governments are working with developers, who are working with residents on creating more housing in their own backyards. They are saying yes. We need to work with the provinces, immigration and our local education institutions to attract and train the skilled tradespeople necessary to work in our housing industry and build new housing starts. We are missing tremendous numbers of skilled trades that pay incredible salaries in this country, and we need to make sure that we again start saying that skilled trades are great. People should get into the trades. We need to increase the necessary infrastructure that supports increased housing units in all sectors. This includes intensification developments, transit systems, water, sewer and treatment plants and green energy developments. It includes building walkable cities and neighbourhoods, and looking at regional urban growth to name a few things. We need to build a mix of housing units that represent our regional and local needs and demands, and we need to build up the downtowns in rural areas. We need intensification. Something that has worked for affordable housing in Toronto and Vancouver is inclusionary zoning, but we need to ensure that there are enough carrots versus sticks to ensure we have the right types of housing incentives that will attract developers to invest in the area. Affordable housing is defined as housing that costs 30% of income or 80% of market rent. Going back to our Conservative motion, when we take the existing inventory we can do that. To my NDP friends, that is possible. That is a reason to vote for this motion. There are measures that fit into all levels of government. The role I see the federal government having in a crisis is a leadership role in looking at emergency measures to build supply. The role I see Parliament taking is a leadership role to vote for good motions that produce housing and take a little bit of a bite out of this crisis. For rental and stand-alone housing for our citizens, and for newcomers to our country, as the second-largest country in the world we should not be in a housing crisis. The measures undertaken to try to beat COVID-19 saw a cash influx into the economy instead of efforts focused on building supply. One hundred thousand units in six years is not enough. It is disgraceful. For the money, the $29 billion touted as a success, alongside more than $400 billion, has been fuel on the fire of this housing crisis. We are in a situation that will not leave many Canadians untouched by this crisis.

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Context: House Hansard - 14 - Dec/9/21

Mr. Ryan Williams

Dec/9/21 6:21:53 p.m.
Watch

Madam Speaker, I am listening to a government that has the worst housing crisis this country has ever had. If we want to talk about government support, we are giving it that support tonight. We are talking about fixing that and, as with trade and the other failed promises this week, looking at made-in-Canada solutions. We want all parties to agree to go forward to fix this today. We need to swing hammers. We have to stop talking. We need less conversation and more action.

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Context: House Hansard - 14 - Dec/9/21

Mr. Ryan Williams

Dec/9/21 6:23:40 p.m.
Watch

Madam Speaker, I could not agree more. We have to prioritize housing and start prioritizing action on housing. This motion, and it sounds like the member should be agreeing with it, gets units that are existing or standing in government coffers into the housing supply system. We need 1.8 million homes. We should be making sure we take as much land and as many buildings as we can to convert into all kinds of housing for everyone who needs it. If we do not take action, we are going to be in a heck of a mess in little time. We are already in it.

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Context: House Hansard - 14 - Dec/9/21

Mr. Ryan Williams

Dec/9/21 6:25:07 p.m.
Watch

Madam Speaker, absolutely. Cash is being handed out, and right now we see that people cannot make their mortgage payments or pay for groceries. They are having trouble with the next month's rent, and that is because of more cash. If the government's solution is more cash, what is going to happen three months from now? I will still be unable to feed my family because groceries will have gone up another $200. We need action. The best part about this plan for housing is this. If we can get tradespeople in to build units, we create jobs. What do jobs create? They create paycheques. That is what would fix this problem once and for all.

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Context: House Hansard - 14 - Dec/9/21

Mr. Ryan Williams (Bay of Quinte, CPC)

Dec/9/21 7:58:40 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, this is my first late show, and I am happy to have the opportunity to speak again on housing. At question period, I asked whether the government believed that the supply issue was serious and whether the lack of supply and supply inflation were causing the housing crisis. I come from a region that is very much like all the other regions across Canada seeing such a dire position on housing, and this comes down to our lack of supply. Where did our numbers come from? When we compare ourselves with other G7 nations, we are dead last in supply per capita, even though we are the country with the second-most amount of land on the planet. That means all of those countries, even the U.K., an island, have way more supply per capita than Canada does, a nation with an incredible amount of land. When it comes to what is happening, we have all seen it and have been talking about it all day. We have people who right now, because of the lack of supply, are having trouble deciding whether they can afford rent or groceries. We have individuals who have become homeless by no choice of their own. My region has seen double the homeless population at a time when we do not need that because we have so many other problems. We also have many people who cannot find affordable housing. When I talk to home builders in my region, those who are building homes, they say it is harder now than at any other time in their existence to build a home, and they are not finding support from the local government. We are now seeing it take up to two or three years before we even get subdivisions started in the ground. We have seen the conditions in Toronto, where from start to finish an apartment building now takes a decade. We have seen the conditions created when people want to put plans together and go into certain neighbourhoods. We get Nimbyism, or “not in my backyard”, because people are saying it is not something they desire. We are finding that it takes longer and longer in this country to build a home. Let us look at how many homes we need. To meet the average number of houses in the rest of the G7 countries, we need, right now, 1.8 million homes. We have been hearing all week from the government about the programming that is going into building homes. However, as confirmed by the Minister of Immigration this week in the House, the government only built 100,000 homes over six years, spending $29 billion. That is not enough. To build 1.8 million homes, we need to ensure that we are unleashing the innovation that comes from our home builders and that we are working with the provinces and municipalities to free up the red tape that is holding back our Canadian workers, our skilled trades and our municipalities from being able to put up enough homes to house not only the people we have here, but the backlog of immigrants whom we surely will have coming into this country. There is an opportunity to create jobs to make sure we have a lot of trade jobs and others that create paycheques for housing. This opportunity comes from unleashing innovation. Will the government commit to working on creating supply, with bills that include discussions on all sides with all governments, to fix our housing crisis?

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Context: House Hansard - 14 - Dec/9/21

Mr. Ryan Williams

Dec/9/21 8:06:07 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, the fact is that we still are battling through COVID, but we now have different problems than we did prior to COVID. They require an immediate response from the government to tackle housing and supply issues, and to work with all members of government across all agencies. As stated, we have people now not able to afford their homes. We have people now who are finding themselves homeless. The action we need now to swing hammers includes working with all levels of government, ensuring that we put enough resources in and that we start doing the work needed now; not just talking about it. We need less conversation and more action, ensuring that we have those homes built so that Canadians can then find a home for an affordable price. Can the minister confirm that the government will look at supply in order to fix this problem?

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