44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 5, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the concern I have is that every initiative across this level of government right now that is focused on increasing housing supply has no details on how increasing housing supply is actually going to lower prices or make housing affordable for Canadians. This line of thinking and these concerns have been raised by economists and many other schools of thought over the past several weeks. I share that concern.
If taxpayers are paying to increase housing supply, what guarantee is there, based on the government's program, that the supply will become more affordable for Canadians?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Calgary Nose Hill. I have worked with her for several years on various committees.
When it comes to housing, the biggest challenge we have in this country is supply. The second part is getting into the housing market the first time. I have seen our government build a national housing strategy and invest over $70 billion into it. We are now seeing the fruits of those labours. Particularly in my riding, I have seen 330 new affordable rental housing units being built across from my office. I have seen three announcements for rapid housing initiatives. I have also now seen ways that young people can save tax-free after this bill passes so they can buy their first homes.
These are on top of the $4-billion home accelerator fund that will help municipalities that are committed, because this is a multi-level approach. Those that are committed will get a carrot instead of a stick in order to build more houses and double the housing output this country needs to grow.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned a housing program that was in the budget. The budget does actually include a few interesting investments in housing.
The program that gives municipalities $4 billion to accelerate the construction of 100,000 housing units is actually very frightening for Quebec. The last time we went through this, when the national housing strategy was launched in 2017, it took three years of negotiations before a single penny was actually spent on it. There is no way around it. If the federal government decides to negotiate with the municipalities, it will have to go through Quebec City, because the feds do not deal directly with the municipalities. Quebec City and Ottawa will have to reach an agreement. It took three years last time. During that period, money was flowing to Toronto and Vancouver, and no money was being spent in Quebec.
Instead of planning to do this with the municipalities, would it not have been simpler to send the money directly to Quebec City, so that those who know what the needs are can reach an agreement with the municipalities?
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.
I want to focus my remarks today on the acceptability of the government's budget and the budget implementation bill in two key areas. Number one is affordability as the larger issue, but specifically housing affordability as well as energy affordability. Number two is addressing climate change.
In the first half, I want to talk about housing supply, which is a hard truth that I really do not think anyone in here wants to talk about. No government has been successful in addressing the supply-side issue in Canada. The number of houses that the government is purporting to be able to build and all the money that has been put into building houses by the government have actually seen housing prices increase by 30% in a very short period of time. It is sort of a perverse environment, where we are seeing housing prices increase and become more affordable. I am sitting here looking at some of the pages in the House of Commons and wondering how they are going to be able to buy a house. How are they going to be able to afford this?
What this budget does not address, and what nobody is addressing in the House, is that having “taxpayer-subsidized savings schemes to boost down payments”, and I am quoting from an article in The Line written by Jen Gerson, “will double first-time buyers' tax credits and create more buyers' incentives”. All this does is address the demand side of things. It does not actually address pricing. What this does is just say that we are okay with the existing prices and the unaffordability of housing in Canada, and that we are just expecting that first-time homebuyers in Canada will somehow try to take on that level of debt to buy a home in Canada.
That is just not on the table for a lot of people. Not only is it not on the table for first-time homebuyers, but it is also not on the table for somebody who has been in a 10-year marriage and has just divorced. How is either of those people going to get back into the housing market at this point in time?
The reality is that nobody in this place wants to see housing prices go down, so what we are left chasing here is policies that try to get people into the housing market at what is probably an overvalued housing bubble that has been fuelled by very questionable policies on interest rates and whatnot in the past.
What we have in this budget, and I am sure everybody is going to hate my saying this, is incentives to keep juicing demand, as opposed to actually looking at the supply side and the affordability issue. For that reason, I have serious questions, given the severity of the housing affordability crisis in Canada, about the government budget's ability to do that. It is a huge problem. What are we saying to young Canadians right now? We are telling them not to worry because we are trying to make it easier for them to save up, when they are already not being paid in the same way their parents were and they are facing huge levels of inflation and high levels of housing prices that have been unseen. That is crazy. Why is no one talking about this?
This is highly problematic. I would just encourage members of all political stripes here. I wish we could have an actual conversation about ways to address some of the underlying problems with Canada's housing market. We have an entire generation of people who are aging, whose retirement is dependent upon paper gains in their real estate. They do not want to see their housing prices go down. That is their retirement. How are we addressing their retirement? We have told them, as a society, that this is a good thing. We have told them to depend on this, and now we are saying that housing is a problem.
Without addressing that issue, we are never going to fix this. This budget does not do that. We are just going to keep skating by while housing prices increase or until we have some sort of catastrophic failure, either of which is not good for the Canadian economy or for anybody in Canada who is trying to find a place to live.
The other issue I want to raise, which is near and dear to my heart as a member of Parliament in Calgary, particularly north central Calgary, is the inability of the government to match its so-called climate change solutions with incenting and providing low-cost, readily available low-carbon alternatives to high-carbon consumer products and practices. What I want to speak about specifically is the government's inability to both incent and provide alternatives, which it assumes are there with its policies, to the people I represent and how that impacts their lives and perversely makes achieving our climate change targets worse.
For example, in Calgary Centre North there are a large number of people who would love to take public transit to downtown Calgary, myself included. I prefer to take public transit. It lets me work more. I get stressed easily and do not like to drive when I do not have to. I would love to do that, but the reality is that for me to take a 20-minute bus ride from where I live in north central Calgary to downtown, it is 20 minutes at the best of times by bus, but sometimes it could be an hour or even two hours on a snow day. There is no light rail transit that goes from downtown Calgary to my part of the city, which has one of the highest levels of under-serviced potential transit ridership in western Canada, based on the ridership numbers I have seen. What that means for somebody like me is that I still have to gas up my car to get to meetings downtown. I am paying $100 or more for a tank of gas, but I am in a privileged position. What are people supposed to do if they are not making my income? They do not have the option of getting on a public transit line; they have to fill up their vehicle to go to work or get their kids to school.
Therefore, all the increase in carbon energy, which has been affected not just by the price on carbon but also by supply-side failures, means that people are paying more for carbon, not that they are using less of it. This is part of the problem with the inflationary pressure we are seeing in Canada.
The budget could have started to address some of these issues, for example in how the government is allocating transit funding, both from a capital development perspective and from an operating perspective. It is using a formula that is just not realistic, with respect to where the money is going. I believe it is 30% population-based and 70% based on existing transit ridership. What about parts of the country where there is no public transit? We would love to have public transit, but the government has not allocated transit funding there. That is the first problem, that we do not have the transit to use. It is not that we do not want to use it; it is that it is not there, so we are still filling up our tanks with gas.
The second problem is this. It is not just about funding allocation, but about how the federal government uses its convening role as a funding partner between the provincial governments and the municipalities to see transit projects built. The green line, the LRT project I was talking about earlier, has failed in Calgary. Although the funding was announced nearly 10 years ago now, virtually nothing has been built. The project has decreased in scope to a quarter and has ballooned in cost four or five times what was originally projected. That is a bad investment with respect to how this management works. The federal government should put boundaries around funding to make sure these developments actually get built. People cannot afford to keep having taxes increase, prices increase and lack of supply of goods, housing and energy increase, while not addressing those core, fundamental issues. From that perspective, this budget is a huge missed opportunity.
I wish I had an hour and a half to get into all of the issues around the amount of money that is spent, which puts Canada into debt, but just on those two issues alone, this budget is not addressing them. It spends so much and it disadvantages Canadians. I hope the government can get it right. Until then, it does not have my support.
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Madam Speaker, I think there are a lot of people in my riding who would get really mad at me if I started talking about private aircraft right now, because they can barely afford their cars.
I would just say this. This aspect of the budget does not address the broader issue of income inequality, rising unaffordability in Canada and inflation. It is window dressing. The systemic issue of housing affordability that I addressed in my speech and the cost of energy are two very fundamental issues that the government has not addressed from a realistic perspective, and I think that is very unfortunate.
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Madam Speaker, the member talked about housing affordability. She said it was a huge problem and I agree with her. I think everyone would agree with her. However, I listened carefully and she offered absolutely no solutions. She just said we should talk about this.
I am wondering what her solution would be. Would she agree with the NDP that we need to get back into the affordable housing game through the federal government and build 500,000 units of affordable housing just to catch up to where previous governments have left us over the last 30 years?
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Madam Speaker, again, how do we do that? That is what needs to be asked. On what land do we do this and for how much? Who gets those units? There is a much greater supply issue than that. Will those units be allowed to be Airbnbs or sit vacant?
Those are the fundamental questions that no one wants to talk about, of any political stripe. If we do not get to the heart of those questions, we are never going to address the affordability crisis in housing in Canada.
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Madam Speaker, one of two things is happening, as this is the second or third time that Conservatives have moved amendments to amendments. Either somebody is not doing their homework in properly preparing their amendment before introducing it or Conservatives are intentionally adding more votes to our vote count in order to burn more time. I will let the public be the judge of that.
My question to the member respects his comments around housing, and that we are not doing anything about housing. All I heard him do, which was very similar to what I heard the previous speaker do, is complain, rather than offering some solutions.
I would like to hear what the member thinks we should be doing. I heard him be very critical about one program, and that he does not think it is going to be successful, but can he offer some ideas as to what we should be doing to deal with the housing crisis?
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague and friend from the riding of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, where they produce a lot of beautiful wine.
I will say this: We need to provide incentives to build and increase the supply of housing in Canada. We are going to be doing that, but we also need to restrain and lower the number of purchases being undertaken by foreigners. We need to have a plan for Canada's housing market to put Canadians first. That is what we are doing. We need to ensure middle-class Canadians and first-time homebuyers have the first opportunity to purchase homes here in the country where they live, work and pay taxes.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased that my colleague is interested in the housing issue, but it is the construction of homes that is the urgent issue. Supply and demand is a game. The problem is that the supply is inadequate, and this is causing prices to skyrocket. That is the case in major centres, but all too often we forget that this is also happening in the regions and rural areas.
Could my colleague take action to ensure that the funding does not all go to the Toronto region, as is often the case in the Canadian economy with government projects?
Could he take action to ensure that remote and rural regions get their share of the pie and ensure that supply increases in the regions?
We want to address the labour shortage, but the first problem is that people cannot find housing.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue for his question.
I will say this: Housing is an issue from coast to coast to coast. We will act in the interests of all Canadians, be it urban, rural or semi-urban. In whatever category and whatever city, we will work with all our municipal partners and all our provincial partners to ensure that housing gets built, to get shovels in the ground and to increase that supply, which we know we need to do. Supply has not kept up to the need for several years. We need to make those adjustments very quickly.
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Madam Speaker, my question to the member is really on the idea of non-market housing. In my riding, I look across the large region of North Island—Powell River and I am hearing again and again from people who have nowhere to live. I am talking to people with professional jobs: good, decent-paying jobs who are living in RVs because they simply can find nothing else to live in.
Our market is hot. People are buying up houses so rental units are gone, and they are gone quickly because people are selling them at an outrageous profit. We need non-market housing. We need it for low-income families. We need it for moderate-income families and also for folks who are making good incomes but cannot afford anything else because the rent costs are going up startlingly, as well.
Can the member talk about when the government is going to get serious about non-market housing so we can actually see people be able to afford to live, and young people able to afford houses in the future?
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Madam Speaker, on the affordable housing front, our government has put forward, since 2015, a $70-billion-plus national affordable housing program that deals with exactly what the member referenced and asked about, which includes housing for co-ops and housing for seniors, for lower-income Canadians and for vulnerable Canadians. We have done that.
In my riding, for example, we actually completed a rental housing unit with 240 units that was done in partnership with York Region and the City of Vaughan. We are making strides on that front, and the $70-billion-plus national housing strategy for affordable housing is bearing fruit.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for his insightful thoughts around co-op housing and the experience he has had. That is a very important thing for us to hear in the House.
The question I would have is around the funding of all this. We know that the government has a burgeoning amount of deficit and debt that is accumulating for generations as we go forward. I look at my own personal situation, with three children and two grandchildren, and somebody is going to have to pay for this. I guess the question is this: Does the member opposite have a major concern with that? What is the plan going forward, and how does he think we are going to actually fund all of these wonderful examples that he has given today?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague opposite for his engagement on the health committee that we are on together.
On the topic, I will pick two expenses that the member highlighted, things that he highlighted as expenses rather than opportunities. When we build housing for Canadians that is truly affordable, we give them access to the economy. We give their children opportunities to play sports, to learn new things and to engage, and it actually ends the cycle of poverty. I cannot think of a better investment in Canada's future than ensuring that we end the cycle of poverty.
Oftentimes in this House we speak about poverty reduction. I am more of a fan of poverty elimination. I do not think that in 2022 there needs to be poverty in Canada. It is not an inevitability, and we need to provide transitional housing or housing at a low cost. We have a $15 minimum wage in Canada, and that is not a wage that supports the ownership of a home, so there need to be solutions.
There are other programs, like early learning and child care, that actually pay for themselves in the sense that they get people back to work. When people go back to work, that is a revenue prospect for the federal government. As a young person, I have ultimate confidence in making sure that this country is viable going forward.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Milton for his performance in the soccer game last night against the interns. He kept us in the game, as did the Minister of Justice in goal.
I want to give the member an opportunity to talk more about co-op housing. It is something the NDP has been pressing for for years and years. It is nice to see the government finally coming back to this. What do we need to do in the future to have more of this?
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Madam Speaker, budget 2022 commits $1.5 billion over the coming years, which will build 6,000 new co-op units. That is more co-op units than this country or any province has built in decades, and that is a turning point, as Tim Ross, executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada, has said.
This is a turning point for Canada. I appreciate that the member opposite and the NDP have been pushing for this for so long. I am glad they did, and I am glad we are here now with a solution for Canadians going forward. More people will be able to afford where they live and be able to engage in our economy.
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Madam Speaker, my friend from the Bloc is absolutely right. Housing is a major concern for indigenous people, first nations and those who are off reserve specifically, which I think his question referred to. There is a major problem with access to affordable housing.
There are some solutions we can talk about, such as incentivizing municipalities to speed up the process and costs associated with accessing building permits. In many cases, obtaining a building permit, whether it is for a private investor trying to build rental housing or for the government itself, and trying to access funds from provincial and federal governments to build housing on a municipal level can be quite time-consuming and costly. That all factors into the price, so when we are talking about affordable housing, we need to reduce the barriers and red tape.
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- May/5/22 2:32:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls inquiry cited housing and homelessness over 200 times in its final report. Indigenous women are not inherently vulnerable. This is a result of colonization. Access to safe, secure and affordable housing can play a key role in stopping this genocide, yet the Liberals have consistently failed to ensure there is a dedicated housing strategy for indigenous women, girls and two-spirited people.
Will the Prime Minister take immediate action to correct this gross oversight, or will he allow this ongoing genocide to continue?
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- May/5/22 2:33:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be able to start by recognizing that today is Red Dress Day, and on this day we mourn and honour missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and LGBTQ2+ people.
I also want to say to the member opposite that our government absolutely agrees with her that housing is an essential part of the problem and needs to be an essential part of the solution. That is why housing was a core focus of the budget we tabled last month, including, absolutely, investing in indigenous housing.
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