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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 42

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 21, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 42 - Mar/21/22
Mr. Eric Duncan (Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, CPC)
  • Mar/21/22 6:46:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise tonight to follow up on my question period topic from a few weeks ago on the issue of housing and the crisis our country finds itself in. Having only 35 seconds to ask a question in question period is not the easiest to summarize a major national issue. I hope this 10-minute back and forth tonight will be a bit more helpful. I hear repeatedly across my riding, whether in the city of Cornwall, the united counties of SDG or in Akwesasne, from a number of people who are struggling when it comes to housing and, equally as important, the rental market in our region. I know our region is not unique. Frankly, it is a national crisis we find ourselves in today. As opposition MPs, we are not on the government side. I wish we were, and I aspire to get there some day. One of the things I want to address is that part of our job as the opposition is to propose ideas, and I have a few that I will suggest later. It is also to scrutinize and ask tough questions about what the government has proposed. In this case it is to address housing, to present some facts and figures of the reality of what has happened in the past few years, and to bring a local context here to the floor of the House of Commons. Sadly, I can do that, again between Cornwall, SDG and Akwesasne, because the stats and figures paint a very bleak picture when it comes to housing affordability for Canadians. The Cornwall and District Real Estate Board and its president, Troy Vaillancourt, recently gave the February statistics of where the housing situation was in our region. The average price of homes sold in February 2022 was a record $434,000. That was up 28.5% from last February. If we go back five years, housing prices in Cornwall and area have doubled since that time. Active listing supply is a major challenge on this problem. Active listings were down 65% below the five-year average, and 81% below the 10-year average for the month of February. As we talk about this, we are likely going to hear, in the response from my colleague across the way, the Liberals trying to tout their national housing plan. It is a 10-year plan that was introduced in 2017. Simple math would tell us that it is halfway through. We are going to hear a sunny ways picture of the billions here and the billions there that they are spending to help the housing market. Five years in, I would encourage the Liberals to pull back on that plan because it is clearly not working. If the plan is to make housing more affordable and to get younger people to realize their dream of home ownership, it is absolutely not working. In my region, housing prices have doubled in five years. Rent is skyrocketing. If we talk to local real estate agents or the Canadian Real Estate Association, it is scheduled to get no better. We need a change of course. I asked the government about this printing money and adding to debt. Even its shared equity program is absolutely flawed, and we need to make sure that it never comes back again. All that giving new homeowners interest-free money to buy new houses is doing is raising prices further. More and more people are realizing they can borrow more interest-free loans, and it is making the market even worse. I will ask the government a question again in my comments, and in my rebuttal I will give some ideas. Will the government acknowledge that its housing plan has been a failure five years in? What could it do differently to finally make home ownership more affordable and make renting more affordable in this country?
654 words
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