44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 2, 2023 10:00AM
- May/2/23 10:51:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member just made the comment of having “all hands on deck” in a crisis. What is missing, of course, over all these years with the housing crisis is the fact that both Liberal and Conservative governments have given a free pass to corporate landlords.
Real estate investment trusts walked away without paying their fair share of taxes to the tune of $1.7 billion for the seven largest REITs in Canada. Over the next four years, they will walk away with another $300 million. That is almost $2 billion that could be invested into housing, so why did the Conservatives give corporate landlords a free pass? Why did they not put people before profits?
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- May/2/23 11:33:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely correct in saying we have a housing crisis from coast to coast to coast, and that no matter what community one is part of, big or small, this crisis is significant.
The federal Liberal government cancelled the national affordable housing program back in 1993. As a result, Quebec and British Columbia are the only two provinces continuing to try to address the housing crisis. With that being said, the Liberals and Conservatives did nothing to address the crisis in tackling the profiteering of housing. We are now seeing escalating costs in housing for renters and home owners.
To the member's point about an acquisition fund, which is absolutely needed to support non-profits to get into the housing market, to buy up housing stock that comes onto the market, my question is this. Would he also support calling on the government to end the special tax treatment for corporate landlords so that they have to pay their fair share of taxes? We could take that money to invest it in housing.
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- May/2/23 12:08:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise to engage in this debate today about housing. In fact, I could talk about housing all day long.
The motion before us today is indeed an interesting one. In the Conservatives' approach, per usual, they focus only on issues where they could actually put out buzzwords to rev up the community about a situation. The solutions they provide often have tremendous gaps and, interestingly, they always miss when it comes to targeting the corporate sector. I wonder why the Conservatives always think the corporate sector will take care of things, that somehow things will magically be okay, including the situation with housing. If the market were going to take care of the housing crisis, or, in fact, if the market were not going to escalate the crisis, then we would not be in this situation today.
The reality is this: When we look at the housing crisis from coast to coast to coast, we do need government intervention. I am a strong proponent of that, saying that the federal government needs to show leadership. It does not matter who is in government. Whether it is the Liberals or the Conservatives, government needs to be there for people to ensure housing as a basic human right.
The reality is that the government has not been there. That is why we have the housing crisis we face today. The Liberals cancelled the national affordable housing program back in 1993. Our country lost more than half a million units of social and co-op housing that would otherwise have been built had the Liberals not cancelled the program.
Now, I have to say that the Conservatives also did not do their part. They were in government as well. They did not invest in housing as they needed to do. More to the point, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives invested in housing to meet the needs on the basis of housing being a basic human right. Not only that, but they allowed the market to go rampant in taking advantage of Canadians who need housing.
What happened after the federal Liberals cancelled the national affordable housing program? We started to see real estate investment trusts come into the market. They started to buy up housing stock in the community. Not only did they start to buy up the housing stock, but the government of the day also allowed them to walk away with a free pass to boot. They did not have to pay the corporate tax rate, even though, for all intents and purposes, they operate like a corporation.
As a result, the seven largest real estate investment trusts did not have to pay taxes at the corporate rate to the general revenues, to the tune of $1.2 billion. This tax should have been collected, and then the government could have reinvested that money into housing by creating an acquisition fund for non-profits, which the Liberals say they support. They should have funded it so that we could hold the housing stock. However, the Liberals did not do that.
It was not just the Liberals; the Conservatives did not do that either. They allowed this to go on and on. Now, the Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budget Officer just issued a report indicating that Canada will lose another $300 million over the next four years if we do not change the tax policy. The NDP has said on the public record that we need to stop fuelling the housing crisis. Corporate landlords need to pay their fair share, and real estate investment trusts need to pay the corporate tax rate. The money that we collect should be reinvested back into housing.
However, we do not see any of that language in this motion today. The Conservatives are saying that local governments should pre-emptively upzone a parcel of land for the development of housing. Now let us be clear: When they do that, what is happening is that the Conservatives are saying to the local government to just write developers a blank cheque. Every time a parcel of land is upzoned, that land value increases exponentially.
I am not saying we should not upzone land for further housing development, but my question is this: Why did the Conservatives not put in language to say that there needs to be a return back to the community? When we give value in land to the developers, there has to be a return back to the community to ensure that the increased value in land that they receive from the upzoning is actually going to the community in the form of community contributions, more social housing, day care spaces and green spaces, as examples. The Conservatives consistently and persistently give a free pass to the private sector; according to the New Democrats, that is wrong.
We also want to see “affordability” defined. What has happened over the years is that both the Liberals and the Conservatives have eroded the term “affordability” to the point where it is meaningless. In fact, if we talk to people in the non-profit sector, they think that when the government says “affordable housing”, it is a four-letter word. It does not actually amount to being affordable by any stretch of the imagination.
Once upon a time, core-need housing was deemed to be affordable when it was geared to income. That has now disappeared. It no longer exists. It exists only in theory, and that should stop. This motion should have incorporated language on affordability and defined it better.
We want to tie federal infrastructure dollars for municipalities to the number of new homes built, impose clawbacks on municipalities that delay new home construction, and ensure that there is federal funding for major transit projects to cities that pre-emptively upzone lands around transit infrastructure for higher-density housing.
The NDP is calling for amendments to this motion. We are calling for the Conservatives to accept three amendments. Specifically, we want to ensure that at least one-third of the new homes built meet core affordability needs and that at least one-third of the new homes are set, at a minimum, at 20% below market housing rent. We need to ensure that upzoning provides tangible benefits to local communities, including additional affordable housing, additional green spaces and child care spaces. We also need to ensure that the underutilized federal properties made available for housing to create new social co-ops and community housing guarantee the affordability of those units and that the value of the upzoning goes back to the community and not into the hands of the developers. That is what we need to do.
I hope that the Conservatives will support these amendments and that the language of the amendments fits what is required in this House.
I move that the motion be amended as follows: “(a) in paragraph (a) by adding after the words ‘new homes built’ the words ‘to ensure at least 1/3 of the new homes built meet core affordability needs of Canadians, that at least 1/3 is set at minimum 20% below market housing rent’; (b) by adding the following paragraph after paragraph (b): ‘ensuring that this “up-zoning” provides tangible benefits to local communities, including in the form of additional affordable housing, additional green spaces, and child care spaces, so that “up-zoning” does not just benefit developers’; and (c) in paragraph (c) by replacing the words ‘housing while guaranteeing’ with the words ‘social, co-operative, or community housing to guarantee.’”
That is the motion that I would like to move in order to amend the Conservative motion; it can ensure that we are clear in what we are talking about, that “affordability” is clearly defined and that there is a return back to the community when we upzone land so that the benefit is not just a blank cheque for the developer; rather, it is a community benefit going back to the people.
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- May/2/23 12:21:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the motion talks about housing and not industrial land. There is another whole debate I would love to get into about industrial land, but for the purpose of this discussion, what we need to focus on is the housing crisis.
I call on the Liberal government to do the right thing and show leadership by investing in social housing back to the level when the government was doing it in the seventies and the eighties. The other thing I say to the government is to stop the corporate sector from fuelling the housing crisis, stop the special treatment that real estate investment trusts get and make them pay their fair share. The government should make them pay the corporate tax rate and reinvest that money to non-profits into an acquisition fund.
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- May/2/23 12:23:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what I am saying, and the member knows this, is that real estate investment trusts should pay their fair share of taxes. They should not be given special tax treatment and not pay the corporate tax rate. They should be paying the corporate tax rate. Canadians are losing close to $2 billion in taxes that should have been collected and could have been invested into housing.
No wonder the Conservatives would oppose my amendment, because they always want to benefit the corporate sector and not make them pay their fair share. When I say to make them pay their fair share, in what terms? It is for that investment to go back into the community. By saying no to my amendment, the Conservatives are saying that they do not want to ensure, by giving land value with the upzoning, the return is returned to the community in the form of more social housing, green space, child care and other community benefits. That is wrong.
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- May/2/23 12:25:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I absolutely agree with the member that we need the federal government's leadership in investing in housing.
That is why the NDP calls for the government to build at least 500,000 units of social housing, co-op housing or community housing, because the community deserves housing and housing is a basic human right.
As long as the approach by the Liberal government or the Conservatives is being taken, we will always have a housing crisis.
Real investment needs to be made and it needs to be done now.
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- May/2/23 4:09:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, part of the immigration problem is that the government has decided to continue to use temporary foreign workers to address our skilled labour shortage, including in the construction sector. What the government should do is regularize people so they have the status to come to Canada, and ensure that those who are already in Canada have full status.
Would the member support the regularization of those without status or those with temporary status who are already in Canada so they can fully contribute to every aspect of Canada's development?
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- May/2/23 4:10:10 p.m.
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Many of them do because they don't have a pathway.
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- May/2/23 5:12:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have to say what we need is for the federal government to show the kind of leadership that is necessary. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has been calling for a national acquisition fund for a couple of years. The government has been talking about this and consulting about this. NGOs in the community have been calling for this. The NDP has been calling for this. However, it was not in budget 2023.
Will he support the NDP's call for the government to charge landlords for the financialization of homes, such as real estate investment trusts, for them to pay their fair share of corporate taxes, and take those resources and invest them in an acquisition fund for non-profits?
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- May/2/23 8:07:16 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, I believe that in her heart, the member really wants to move the issues forward.
Most recently, with the Coalition on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in B.C., in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, our community has been talking about this issue. In fact, it was in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where the first memorial march was led back in the day, so many years ago, when I was a community legal advocate. Fewer than 20 people showed up for that march, and now we see it across the country.
That being said, here are some of the issues people raised at that meeting. They are calling for the red dress alert to be implemented, of course, but beyond that they also want to see a national summit led and organized by indigenous women, and they want to see the continued conversation about a missing persons database. These are some of the things that need to be done, and they need to be done now. In addition, the coalition has been calling for government support to fund community people who are out there looking for missing loved ones. So often, they are just doing that work all on their own without any support anywhere.
My question for the member is this: Will the government undertake to ensure that the ideas and strategies coming from indigenous organizations, like the Coalition on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in B.C., and family members are supported? Will it actually fund those initiatives and implement them?
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- May/2/23 8:46:33 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, one of the issues the member raised was about indigenous children who have been brought into care, and far too many of them have. In fact, in my home community of Vancouver East, our community call this the modern-day residential school where indigenous children have been taken into care. What is worse is that when they come out of care, they have zero support whatsoever, and many of them do not have access to housing. In fact, in British Columbia, 15% of the homeless population are youth. This is not acceptable.
In the the “Calls for Justice” report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, there were 231 calls for justice, and housing was mentioned in that report numerous times.
My question to the member is this: Should we not now have a dedicated approach on a for indigenous, by indigenous housing strategy that targets indigenous youth, particularly those who are coming out of care and those who are from the LGBTQ2+ community as well?
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- May/2/23 10:19:48 p.m.
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Madam Chair, one issue is of particular concern for indigenous peoples. The minister talked about education as a key component in supporting opportunities. In British Columbia, one of the first acts of the former minister of advanced education, Melanie Mark, was to ensure that children in care and coming out of care would have access to free education in British Columbia.
If the minister really believes in supporting indigenous, Métis and Inuit peoples to thrive, would she call publicly for the government to fund an educational program for all indigenous peoples across the country who are coming out of care?
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