44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 22, 2023 01:00PM
- Mar/22/23 2:14:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years under the Prime Minister, the dream of home ownership has died. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment has doubled since 2015. The average monthly mortgage payment has more than doubled, from $1,400 to over $3,200.
Canadians are finding it impossible to save for a down payment or afford a mortgage. All of their hard-earned money is going to skyrocketing rent and groceries thanks to the Prime Minister's inflationary spending and taxes.
Young people are doing everything we asked them to do: going to school, getting a job and working hard. However, they still cannot afford to own a home. They deserve better.
Conservatives will bring homes Canadians can afford, cut taxes so that we can bring home more pay, sell unused federal buildings to convert to housing and remove the gatekeepers to build more homes. We know that the Liberals do not believe in the dream of home ownership, but Conservatives do.
When it comes to home ownership, it is time for the Prime Minister to move out of his taxpayer-funded home so that Canadians can move into theirs.
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- Mar/22/23 2:23:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we know that people across the country continue to face challenges in terms of finding affordable housing. That is why we launched the national housing strategy in 2017.
Last week, I was in Guelph, Ontario, to announce $4 billion in investments for municipalities across the country so they can build more housing faster and make housing affordable for Canadians.
We know it takes investment to meet Canadians' expectations, and that is exactly what we are doing.
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- Mar/22/23 2:24:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, of course, situations vary across the country, but we have stepped up with housing programs in big cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. We have also stepped up in smaller municipalities and rural areas across the country that need supports in housing.
Unlike the previous Conservative government, which did not feel the federal government had any role to play in housing, we stepped up in tangible, concrete ways to deliver more housing, to deliver rapid housing and to deliver programs that fight homelessness and programs that increase rental stocks. We will continue investing to support people, alongside our partners in the provinces and municipalities.
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- Mar/22/23 2:27:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is trying to talk about everything but the housing questions I asked. It is easy to understand why. When he took office, housing was affordable, and now it is impossibly expensive. In fact, it is much more expensive than around the rest of the world. Vancouver is now the third most overpriced housing market, and Toronto the 10th worst, in the world. They are worse than Manhattan, Singapore, London and countless other places with more people, more money and less land. In fact, the average house price last year in the United States was almost half less than it is here in Canada.
Why is housing so much more expensive here than elsewhere in the world?
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- Mar/22/23 2:28:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we have continually invested in programs and supports for Canadians, and have seen millions of families entering new homes and getting the supports they need. There are millions of refurbishments, with millions in supports right across the country.
It is interesting to contrast that with the Conservative record. In the last election campaign, the Conservative platform promise on housing was to give tax breaks to wealthy landlords. That was their approach on housing.
We contrasted with significant investments in delivering for first-time homebuyers, delivering for people facing homelessness and delivering for Canadian families to access better housing.
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- Mar/22/23 2:33:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the cost of living is on the rise. It is getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Affordable housing is especially hard to come by. Since this Prime Minister was elected, rents have doubled because the rules established by the Conservatives and the Liberals favour the ultrarich.
When is this Prime Minister going to stop favouring his rich friends and build more affordable housing for the average person?
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- Mar/22/23 2:33:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over the past eight years, we have made historic investments in housing to give Canadians access to more affordable housing.
In fact, that is why I was so pleased to be in Guelph, Ontario, last week to announce $4 billion in investments for municipalities across the country to build housing faster, particularly affordable housing.
We know there is still a lot of work to do, but with our housing accelerator fund, our rapid housing initiative, our homelessness strategy and our affordability plan, we will continue to be there for Canadians.
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- Mar/22/23 2:34:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I asked the Prime Minister why mortgage payments have doubled under his eight years, why rent payments have doubled under his eight years and why Canadian house prices are about 72% more expensive than their American counterparts, even though it has 10 times the population on even less land. He could not answer any of these question.
The answer, according to Scotiabank, is that “Canada has the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 residents of any G7 country. The number of housing units per 1,000 Canadians has been falling since 2016”, right when the Prime Minister took office.
Why has the Prime Minister continually given billions of dollars to municipal government gatekeepers but blocked the construction of Canadian homes?
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- Mar/22/23 2:35:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this goes to the heart of the disagreement on housing between the Leader of the Opposition and I. I recognize, as this government recognizes, that we need to work with municipalities to help them change zoning laws, to help them accelerate their permitting processes and to create more opportunities to build affordable homes for Canadians across the country, whereas he sits back and attacks them and proposes absolutely nothing.
We are stepping up with $4 billion to accelerate the supply of homes across this country. We will continue to invest and work with partners instead of picking fights with everyone and hoping that it all settles itself.
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- Mar/22/23 2:36:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, no, actually the disagreement is that under our government housing was affordable, but under this government it is eye-poppingly expensive. That is the disagreement.
Let us just look at the facts. Canada has the fewest houses per capita of any country in the G7, even though we have the most land to build on. Why? We rank 64th in the OECD in the time it takes to get a building permit. Government red tape adds as much as $650,000 to each house in some cities, and the Prime Minister has made it worse by giving gatekeepers that block building more money. Why?
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- Mar/22/23 2:36:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this goes to the heart of the announcement we made last week on the housing accelerator fund, which works directly with municipalities to accelerate the delivery and construction of affordable housing.
What the member opposite would have us believe is that doing nothing to address the housing crisis would have somehow made it better. He criticizes us for the investment of billions of dollars in housing over the past years. Just think, if things are expensive now, how much worse it would have been had we had a Conservative government that continued to cross its arms and cut services to Canadians for the past eight years.
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- Mar/22/23 2:37:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we do not have to imagine what prices would have been were I making the decisions, because when I was the housing minister, the average mortgage payment and the average rent payment were half of what they are now. We do not have to imagine that; it is called history.
The Prime Minister's solution is to continue to spend billions of dollars. He spent $89 billion on housing affordability to double mortgage payments, double rental costs and double the needed down payment. How did he spend so much to achieve so little?
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- Mar/22/23 2:38:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next thing the member opposite is going to complain about is that housing prices are higher today than they were in my father's time as prime minister.
We are going to continue to invest in Canadians and recognize that while we grow the economy, while we—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Mar/22/23 2:45:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has failed to make housing affordable, even after $89 billion, precious tax dollars, have been spent on that failure. I have suggested to him that we should link the number of dollars a big city gets to the number of houses it allows to be built, in order to incentivize more building. He does not like that idea. He does not like results.
Here is another idea: We build transit stations with federal money. In the most successful transit and housing jurisdictions on earth, there are apartments next to those stations.
Will the Prime Minister require that every federally funded transit station have high-density apartments so that our seniors and young people can live right next to the bus or train?
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- Mar/22/23 2:47:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the difference is that, like housing, we actually got it built. What I am proposing is not to dream about housing around transit, but to actually require every single federally funded transit station be pre-approved for high-density housing so our young people and our seniors can live right next to the bus and train.
He does not like that idea, but how about this one? He has 37,000 buildings, many of them largely empty, big, ugly buildings. Why does he not sell off 15% of them so we can convert those into affordable housing for our young people?
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- Mar/22/23 2:48:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals' very first infrastructure project was to install a doorknob in the Prime Minister's Office when they took office.
Speaking of housing—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Mar/22/23 2:49:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am sorry, but sometimes I even crack myself up here.
The Prime Minister is presiding over a 37,000-building empire with these big, ugly, largely empty buildings. Why does he not sell off 15%, which is 6,000 buildings, so we can convert them into affordable housing for our young people so they can actually have a roof over their head and a place to call home?
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- Mar/22/23 2:50:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, once again, this is an idea we are already moving forward with, looking at federal properties and how we can convert them either through the rapid housing process or by working with municipalities to deliver more affordable housing.
I am very pleased to see the member opposite moving off his recommendation on buying Bitcoin as a way of avoiding inflation, and actually putting forward concrete ideas. It is great to have a real debate over ideas. I wish he had paid attention to the ideas we have so he can maybe propose different ones or perhaps better ones.
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- Mar/22/23 2:50:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the only ideas the Prime Minister has put forward on housing are to double the rent, double the mortgage costs and double the down payments on the backs of hard-working Canadians who are paying more tax than ever.
On April 1, he wants to raise the cost of housing even more by increasing the cost of home heating, a monthly expense that goes with owning a home. This is at a time when seniors are already choosing, making the heartbreaking decision, between eating and heating. He wants to triple the carbon tax.
Will he cancel his plan to raise taxes on our seniors, our workers and our farmers and get his hands out of their pockets?
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- Mar/22/23 8:55:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. Obviously, I will let the Conservative Party explain its reasons.
To answer the question on inflation, there are a number of elements. We can think, in particular, of social housing, which should be better funded. In the budget being tabled by the minister next Tuesday, we hope to see significant funding allocated to social housing to ensure change, even if only at this level.
To come back to the excise tax, I hope that my colleague will be able to speak with his cabinet colleagues. We would like to have the same model for microdistilleries as for microbreweries, namely a progressive excise tax to allow small players to enter the market and compete with the giants.
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