44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 22, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to address the House about the measures the government is taking to make housing more affordable for Canadians.
Since 2015, our government has made housing a priority. Housing was at the heart of the last budget. Now, however, Canadians are increasingly feeling the effects of the increase in the cost of living. That is why we need to redouble our efforts and work together to develop an ambitious plan.
In 2017, we adopted the national housing strategy, the first of its kind in Canada’s history. This 10-year plan is supported by investments totalling more than $72 billion. The main objective of the national housing strategy is to create more housing for vulnerable Canadians, including seniors, women and children fleeing violence, indigenous people, veterans, people with disabilities, and people experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless.
The strategy has already been very successful. For example, last year in Quebec we announced $100 million to renovate low-cost housing, including 517 units that had been abandoned for years. We are continuing to adjust and broaden the strategy to keep up with the constantly changing situation. We are proposing new investments in a number of programs, as well as the extension and acceleration of financing for existing programs, which are helping the situation.
Although we are working hard to make Canadians’ lives more affordable, we recognize that many of them need immediate additional assistance. This is why we are proposing Bill C-31, which provides a one-time top-up to the Canada housing benefit, consisting of a single payment of $500 to approximately 1.8 million renters who are struggling to pay their rent. This one-time federal allowance will be available to Canadians with adjusted net incomes of less than $35,000 for families, or $20,000 for individuals, and who pay at least 30% of their income on housing.
In Hochelaga, 70% of the population consists of renters, with over 24% paying more than 30% of their income on rent. This payment will double the commitment we made in the 2022 budget. We will therefore be able to help twice as many Canadians as we initially promised. This one-time payment will be in addition to the Canada housing benefit, which is currently jointly funded and provided by the provinces and territories. The Canada housing benefit, launched in 2020, was developed jointly with the provinces and territories. With joint financing of $4 billion over eight years, it provides direct financial support to those who are struggling to pay rent.
Canadians have told us loud and clear that affordable housing is one of their major concerns, and we agree. The pandemic and its effects on the economy brought to light and exacerbated the precarious housing conditions in which many people live. One of the main causes of unaffordable housing in Canada is insufficient supply. Housing supply is not keeping up with demand. This problem was aggravated by the pandemic and, as we know, goes well beyond the borders of major cities, affecting small towns and rural communities as well. Creating more housing units will increase affordability for all Canadians. It is urgent that we build additional affordable housing units, especially for those experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless.
That is why the rapid housing initiative will be extended for a third time. Announced in the 2022 budget, the third round of the rapid housing initiative includes $1.5 billion over two years, starting in 2022-23, to create at least 4,500 new affordable housing units to meet urgent needs across the country. Thanks to the excellent participation of our municipal partners and others, the first two rounds of the program exceeded all expectations. Overall, the third round of the rapid housing initiative will fund the construction of 14,500 housing units for the most vulnerable Canadians.
It is also important to mention that the national housing co-investment fund, which brings together numerous partners to build affordable community housing for the most vulnerable Canadians, will receive $13.2 billion in funding. It is one of the main pillars of the strategy and the most important program of its kind in Canada's history.
The national housing co-investment fund addresses supply challenges in two significant ways. It helps to renovate aging affordable housing units in poor condition and to build housing units near public transit, workplaces, schools and other services families depend on. To date, the program has received more than $5.8 billion in loans and contributions. This funding will make it possible to provide stable and safe affordable housing to more than 117,000 Canadian households.
Federal programs like the national housing co-investment fund are important, but we are aware that we need to work in collaboration with others, including the provinces and territories, municipalities, and private and non-profit organizations in order to get results. That is why we want to support our municipal partners in their efforts to increase housing supply. We will be launching a fund to accelerate the construction of housing units. At the municipal level, there are often obstacles and delays at the project development stage. This fund will allow Canadian cities to act more quickly. We expect this initiative to increase the annual supply of housing units in the largest Canadian cities, with a target of 100,000 new units by 2025.
We are making significant progress in implementing our national housing strategy, but there is still much work to do and many obstacles to overcome. Our partners at every level of government and in every sector are committed to working with us to find solutions to improve Canadians' lives.
In conclusion, I urge all members of the House to work together to address the pressing need for housing. Above all, I urge them to immediately support the one-time top-up to the Canada housing benefit so that we can send out the $500 payment that so many Canadian renters need as soon as possible. I hope that 1.8 million Canadians will have access to these funds.
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Madam Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the debate today on Bill C-30.
I am in Winnipeg now. I was in Ottawa as recently as this morning. Earlier this week, for the first time in the 10 years I have lived here, a couple of seniors set up camp in Park Circle here in Transcona, which is where we have our cenotaph. The Main Street Project has since visited, and the seniors have moved on from the park. I can certainly appreciate the concerns residents had and why they may not want somebody living in the park across the street from their houses, but I could not find it in my heart to be angry, because they are a couple of seniors who no longer have a place to live.
We have heard stories like this, and we are hearing more of them. People are seeing the effects of higher prices, and particularly higher housing prices, on people in their communities. There are folks who are camping out in bus shelters because they have nowhere else to turn. We are in this really challenging moment, challenging to be sure for the Canadians who are experiencing this directly and do not have a place to sleep, as well as for those who are now seeing people living in their communities in ways they never imagined they would and wondering what that means, not only for those folks, but also for themselves and their safety, because we know when people are desperate it sometimes results in some unfortunate behaviour that has an affect on the wider community.
People are experiencing this in all sorts of ways. At the grocery store, there are folks putting things back on the shelves or changing what they buy in order to change some of their family's habits to conform better to the realities of budgeting in the inflationary period we are experiencing. Even though, from a public health point of view, we are moving further away from the peak pandemic point, the fact of the matter is that our economy is still very much affected by the pandemic. We have not come back yet. That is one of the reasons people need help.
Members, and Canadians who have been listening to the news, will know there has been a lot of debate in this place about this moment of inflation and what the causes are. There was a good article published by some economists recently that essentially said that the main forces of inflation are energy prices, housing prices and grocery prices. When we think about the role that energy, housing and food play in our lives, if those are the things going up in price, we can imagine people really feel that in their budget.
There is no real alternative. We cannot choose not to have a roof over our head. We can end up in a situation where we do not have a roof over our head, but nobody is choosing to live on the street as a first option. We cannot choose not to eat. We cannot choose not to heat our home in the winter months in Canada, if we are lucky enough to have one. That is why people are feeling the squeeze. It is because the costs of the things we cannot do without continue to rise.
There are those in this place, particularly the new leader of the Conservative Party, who would have everyone believe that somehow this is simply the fault of big-spending governments, and if government would just get out of the way the free market would step in to provide housing for the homeless, provide affordable food for those who need it and cannot pay for it, or provide energy at a fairer price. I would call on Canadians to think hard about that line and the bill of goods trying to be sold to them by this new leader of the Conservative Party.
We all know that the oil and gas companies have not had the best interests of consumers at heart for a long time. That is not a news flash. Anyone who has filled up their car to go out to the lake on a long weekend knows that oil and gas companies have been there to gouge Canadians with every possible excuse. There are also some really challenging reasons out there in the world right now. Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine is just one that has caused some real supply issues in the oil and gas sector. We can bet they used that as an excuse to raise their prices, not because the gas currently in the tanks at gas stations got any more expensive or they had to retroactively pay a premium for it, but because of speculation about future oil and gas markets.
Really, it is just an opportunity to make more money now, and we are seeing that in the bottom line of oil and gas companies that are logging record profits. This is not just record revenue, but record profit, which means what they are taking home and giving to their rich CEOs, investors and board members is much more than it has ever been.
They are making that money. That money is not falling from the sky. That money is not coming from nowhere either. That money is coming directly out of the pockets of Canadians who need to pay for gas at the pumps to get to work, do the things they need to do in their lives and heat their homes.
In other jurisdictions, we are seeing governments that are willing to act. We have seen it in the United Kingdom, where there is a windfall profit tax levied on oil and gas companies to take back some of the additional profit those companies are making in these difficult circumstances and to invest that back in people.
That is just one example of a jurisdiction that recognizes what is going on is not simply government largesse driving inflation. It recognizes that corporate greed is playing a real role in driving that as well. Those profits being logged are coming out of the pockets of citizens, and they can be taken back to be reinvested in citizens, as we must do if we are going to keep our communities safe, our neighbours housed and make sure kids have a proper breakfast and lunch when they go to school so they can learn what they need to learn to become productive members of society and to enrich their own lives in all the ways a good education will do.
We do not hear outrage from the Conservative leader about that extra profit on the part of oil and gas companies. We do not hear him admonishing those companies for taking this moment as an opportunity to pad their pockets.
When we think about housing, which is another major driver of inflation right now, the new leader of the Conservative Party would have us believe that somehow this problem was created in the last two years. He would have us believe that somehow the liquidity the government made available to banks created it.
People talk about pandemic benefits and how they should have been wrapped up and how they drove inflation. People who normally might have made $4,000 or $5,000 a month were living on $2,000, and we are supposed to believe that was inflationary. That is ridiculous. I have said that many times in this place, and I will continue to say it.
If there is anything that actually caused inflationary pressure from the government's spending package, it would be these two things. One, and this one drives me nuts, is the wage subsidy program, which we know many companies benefited from and made extraordinary profits from at the same time. This is something that never ought to have happened. They should not have been allowed to take from the wage subsidy pot while they were logging huge profits, and there should have been a mechanism for paying some of that back if they were making extraordinary profits.
When we talk about an excess profit tax, this is part of what we are talking about. It is one of the reasons we think it is just and good to tax excess profits, because in some cases those excess profits were a function of public spending and went to rich CEOs, their buddies and investors, and it should not have. It never should have come out of the public purse for that purpose. That money was for companies to pass directly on to their employees to run their businesses as usual, and not to make extraordinary profits.
In some cases, that did happen. In many cases it happened, and that is good. It is something we called for and supported. What we did not support was it being abused, and from the beginning we said the government needed to have a mechanism to make sure it was not abused. There was no concern from the government to get that piece of the puzzle right, and there were really no proactive solutions proposed at the time by the Conservatives either to make that happen. There is certainly some frustration there.
Another place where there was a lot of public spending, and CERB and the wage subsidy public spending paled in comparison to what was spent on this, was the liquidity that was made available to major banks on day one.
That approach was also taken in the 2008 recession by the Conservative government. The Conservative government, on which, incidentally, the new leader of the Conservative Party sat at the cabinet table, also granted a huge amount of liquidity to banks. If that made investors feel more bold or made banks willing to lend more, there is a case to be made that it contributed to the acceleration of housing price increases, which was already off the chain long before the pandemic.
How did that happen? I know people do not always like a history lesson, but to really understand what happened, the fact is that it goes back to the mid-nineties when the Liberal government of the day cut the national housing strategy. It did not reduce it but got rid of it. That strategy was producing somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20,000 to 30,000 units of affordable or social housing every year, where rent was actually geared to income. That went on, and it meant that we did not get any more meaningful injections of affordable or social housing supply. It was left to the market. That is what happened in the nineties.
We hear the leader of the Conservative Party say to let the free market reign and people will having housing, as if there are a bunch of developers just waiting to give housing to people who cannot afford it. He says they are not going to do it now, but when the government gets out of the way, developers will discover their generosity. It is such a ridiculous story. I do not even know how people can listen to it, let alone how much it gets repeated, not just in this place but in the media, as if it is something that could possibly happen.
The only time we have made progress as a society in successfully housing people who do not have the money to pay market rates to own their own home has been when there have been ambitious, targeted, non-market strategies led by government. We have all benefited from those strategies. We have benefited by not having people live in our bus shelters. We have benefited by not having the effects of homelessness spill over into our emergency rooms and our prisons. We have benefited by not having to pay the cost of having people so destitute that they have nowhere else to turn. That is why it is so important that government gets back in the business of building housing.
This is not just about cities issuing permits to developers. There is such a need across an entire spectrum of types of housing that we absolutely need a plan and need non-market housing solutions. Whether those are co-ops, government owned and operated or rent-geared-to-income suites, we need to build far more housing.
Of course, it was not just in the nineties that this happened. The new leader of the Conservative Party was also part of the government that gave out operating grants. This was money the federal government gave to organizations that were running social housing so that people could pay rent that was a percentage of their income, usually between 25% and 30% of their income, whatever their income was. The federal government gave money to organizations that for 40 years successfully ran those operations and housed people who never could have afforded to live in rental housing at market rates. When this came up, the current leader of the Conservative Party was at the table when that government decided not to renew those operating grants.
In the last seven or more years now, unfortunately, the current Liberal government, despite running on a promise to do something about this, never really did. We have seen these affordable units come up, and the people who have been managing buildings for 40 years say they cannot manage on the model that they used to because they do not have the operating grants anymore. That is how they could offer rent at below market rates. Market rates are meant to cover costs and have some profit margin. If we want to have deeply affordable units that are actually geared to people's income, that money has to come from somewhere and it came from those operating grants.
The Conservative government of the day, with the member for Carleton sitting at the table, decided that it would not renew those operating grants, so these buildings are not sustainable now. They are going out on the market, and big developers are snatching them up, renovating the suites and evicting the tenants who were there before because they are jacking up the rent. That is how we end up with people camping out in bus shelters and setting up camp in parks. I beseech Canadians who are outraged to see that to carry their outrage past being mad about the problem.
That is what the new leader of the Conservative Party is selling. He is selling a lot of rage, and some of it is justified. I am mad about a lot of things, but we are not going to fix those things unless we focus on the solutions, and not try to pretend that every problem somehow comes from government when there are clearly a whole lot of actors in the economy with real power and real self-interested motives. They are not those we can trust to fix the problem, because they are deliberately blind to part of the problem.
Inflation is a great example, because as studies out there show, about 25% of the current inflation is actually attributable to increased profits. Price gouging is going on. It is a real thing. We would not know it listening to the member for Carleton. We would not know it listening to the government, which also, incidentally, is not acting the way it should. That is why we have been pushing it to take the tax on excess profits it has announced for banks and insurance companies and apply that to oil and gas companies, big box stores and others that profited hugely during the pandemic and continue to make record profits despite the hardship that so many Canadians are facing.
Doubling the GST tax credit is a way to try to get help to some of the people who really need it the most. We are talking about 12 million Canadians. That is a lot of people who receive the GST tax credit. They are going to see some kind of relief to help with these increases in costs. However, it is not going to be enough on its own, and it should have come a lot sooner.
This is something the New Democrats have been calling for, and for well over six months as inflation began to really take hold and we saw that it was not going to go away. We wanted a way to get help to people and also wanted a way to get help to people that would not drive more inflation. The problem, again, with the new Conservative leader is that any time we talk about having a plan to help people, he says it is just going to drive up inflation, and that is not true. There are certain ways the government could try to help and end up driving up inflation, but when we are serious about it and look at what is actually going on in the economy and at what the potential solutions are, there are ways. Doubling the GST tax credit is one of those ways.
This is why the New Democrats believed that was an important immediate step the government could take. Over six months later, here we are and the Liberals have finally seen reason and accepted that there is a need for action. However, as usual, it is a little slow, just as it was too slow for many seniors who were seeing their GIS clawed back. They had the audacity to accept the government at its word and apply to the CERB program they qualified for when they lost their jobs during the pandemic and needed the supplementary income. They then saw their incomes clawed back the following year.
We could see it from July 2020. It was coming like a slow train wreck. The government knew about it and did not act on it, and I think it knew as early as May 2021. Members will forgive me if I am wrong, as it was a little while ago and a lot of water has passed under the bridge, but I believe that to be the case. It was not until this year that they finally implemented a solution for that. Of course, we know that unfortunately some seniors took their lives in the meantime because they could not see a future for themselves and could not contemplate pitching a tent in a park and living there in the winter in Winnipeg in January.
This is a government that I think has been far too slow to act when it comes to helping people. However, there are solutions if we are intentional and if we do not rule out the very real and positive role that the public sector can play not just in times of need, but in structuring our economy so that we do not find ourselves in these kinds of crises, whether it is the housing crisis or other ones.
Employment insurance is something I love to talk about. Perhaps I will get a chance to do so during questions and answers. The government is reverting to the old EI system, even though that was always a disaster. The new system has been working better, although it is not great, but that is another place where the planning has not been put in place. Instead, we have actually gotten a lot of what the member for Carleton calls for, which is a hands-off attitude from the government and pretty well letting the market reign when it comes to these things. That is part of how we got here and that is why we need a different approach. This is a small down payment. Let us get it done quickly.
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