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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 65

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 5, 2022 10:00AM
  • May/5/22 12:01:47 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-19 
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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  • May/5/22 12:14:41 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-19 
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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  • May/5/22 1:15:14 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-19 
Madam Speaker, the budget contains $300 million this year, $600 million next year and $1.2 billion the year after, for a total ongoing commitment of $1.7 billion thereafter, to provide dental care to some 6.5 million Canadians: the children, seniors, people living with disabilities and low-income families with no dental insurance now. My hon. colleague talked about being unable to afford things. I was in the House when the Conservatives wanted to increase military spending in this country to 2% of GDP, which would add about $26 billion every year to our budget. Does he think that spending $1.7 billion to bring dental care to 6.5 million Canadians is less of a priority than spending $26 billion a year? Can he explain to us why he thinks we can afford the military but cannot afford dental care given those numbers?
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  • May/5/22 2:40:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have an email. Rachel and her partner have been renting their apartment, but are now expecting a baby. Like most Canadians, they want a home that has a bit more space. The problem is they cannot afford a home and have been outbid on every attempt. In the latest budget it says, “Don't worry, here's $500”. Five hundred dollars barely covers two weeks' rent in most places. The minister is completely out of touch, so should Canadians simply give up on home ownership while he is minister?
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