44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/5/23 2:49:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, can anyone guess why Quebec is the only province that is matching the $900 million from Ottawa for housing? It is because Quebec is the only province in Canada that invests in housing. Quebeckers made the progressive choice to take care of housing themselves. Instead of holding Quebec up as an example, the federal government is withholding the $900 million Quebec is entitled to, in a classic dispute in which the federal government holds all the cards. Enough is enough.
The Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain, or FRAPRU, is in Ottawa today. The government has an opportunity to announce that the housing dispute is over. When will the government stop messing around and send us our $900 million?
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- Oct/5/23 2:49:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, if there is one thing we can agree on with our colleague and with Quebec, it is that addressing the housing issue is a matter of urgency. That is exactly what we are doing. Since 2015, we have agreed on many things with Quebec, and we will reach an agreement for Quebec.
The thing that is bothering the Bloc is that it is not at the negotiating table and never will be. On the other side, there are the Conservatives who want to take money away from the municipalities and who do not believe in the provinces.
On this side of the House, we will work on reaching an agreement on housing for Quebeckers.
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- Oct/5/23 2:54:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis caused by the Liberals and the Conservatives. It is unconscionable. Outside, tents are popping up faster than truly affordable housing. People are poorly housed, living with mould, but are unable to move because they have nowhere to go. People are suffering. The solutions, however, are no mystery.
Will the Liberals buy land to build housing that meets people's needs? Will they use public land for public housing? Will they build social housing, housing co-operatives and community housing?
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- Oct/5/23 2:55:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree entirely with the need my hon. colleague has flagged, which is to build more affordable housing. I agree that we should be using federally owned land to achieve that outcome. I agree that we should continue to make the investments under the national housing strategy, which is now responsible for the construction or repair of nearly half a million homes across this country.
I will be the first to acknowledge that over the course of the past number of decades, governments of both Liberal and Conservative persuasions did not do what was necessary to get the job done. We changed that in 2017. We will continue to make the investments necessary to ensure that everyone in Canada has a place to call home.
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Madam Speaker, I do not really agree with many of my colleague's statements on I think it was the Conservatives' building bureaucracies act and the lack of housing bill.
Calgary City Council voted in favour of the housing task force recommendations. Does the Conservative Party support Calgary's housing task force recommendations?
Do you support the Conservative housing critic's support of those recommendations or do your support your leader's and Conservative Party MPs' opposition of those housing task force recommendations? Could you please tell this House whether you support your housing critic or your Calgary MPs?
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Madam Speaker, I will let the member from the Calgary area know I do support our leader on this, because, and I will just repeat it again, it is the building homes not bureaucracy act. It is about getting houses built, not more red tape. It is about making sure we are able to provide more opportunity for young Canadians to actually get into a house of their own, and if they cannot, then let us make sure there is more housing stock out there.
My daughter lives in Calgary, by the way, and luckily they are homeowners, but it is getting more and more expensive for them as well. The question becomes whether the City of Calgary will be willing to work with our federal Conservative Party, when we become government, to make sure we are taking away all of the restrictions and all of the NIMBYs blocking the development of land in Calgary and we are creating more homes and more opportunities for people in Calgary to own their own homes.
If the City of Calgary has some great ideas, we are more than happy to work with it and provide it more infrastructure dollars to ensure that there is that opportunity to build more homes, to build more developments, and at the end of the day everyone is better off.
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Madam Speaker, regarding the concern around students who have inadequate or no housing options, I think we have to recognize that everyone should be advocating for more support for people who have inadequate housing options, students or otherwise. I am very proud that the government has doubled the investments in the Reaching Home program to address homelessness, and that we are going to continue to do more, as I outlined in my remarks, to build more stock that will help address the student housing challenges more broadly.
When it comes to seniors, I think we are aligned in our identification of the problem. Where we differ is that the policies we have advanced would actually yield a higher number of homes than the plan the Conservatives have put forward.
With respect to the GST, the most important point in my remarks is that we have to address very specific problems. The GST measure we put in place is designed not only to pass on savings to renters but also to build more supply, which, over time, will bring the rate down as more stock becomes available. I am happy to elaborate in future answers, given that I have run out of time.
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Madam Speaker, the Bloc Québécois will support Bill C‑56, but, as it has said, we need to go much further than the bill does.
Currently, when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC, manages a parcel of land, it must sell it at the going market price. To my understanding, the minister has the power to authorize the CMHC to give away the land or sell it at a lower price. Can the minister confirm that he has that power? Currently, there is a situation in Joliette for a social housing project on an enclosed parcel of land. The municipal assessment is not so bad, but the market value is $1 million and the project is blocked because of that.
Does the minister have the power to authorize the CMHC to sell the land at a lower price or give it away? Ultimately, that would free up social housing projects in Quebec.
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Mr. Speaker, I congratulate sincerely the hon. member on his election to the House.
When I listened to his description of the Conservatives' housing plan, it was clear that he has been reading a different document than I have. When I reviewed their plan, it was the most bizarre series of suggestions. It would literally raise taxes on home builders and cut funding for homebuilding. If the member is concerned about bureaucracy, the Conservatives are proposing a Kafkaesque, Byzantine process to identify which homes would qualify. They would cut out middle-class homes from their GST relief, and they were talking about hiring bureaucrats to run a snitch line on people who have Nimbyist attitudes, which is not defined anywhere in their plan.
My question to the hon. member is this: Why is he supporting a plan that would raise taxes on homebuilding, cut funding for homebuilding and actually, according to finance officials at committee the other day, result in fewer homes being constructed than we were already on pace to build?
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Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague on his first speech in the House. I have a very specific question for him. I hope he will be the type of colleague who answers questions in specific detail. That would be helpful.
The government is announcing a housing measure that consists of removing the GST on construction without any guarantee that it will be used for social or affordable housing. We are currently fighting to get the federal government to release the $900 million owed to Quebec, but the federal government stubbornly insists on imposing conditions on that money, even though housing is not within its jurisdiction.
Does my colleague agree with the Bloc Québécois position that the federal government should transfer this money as quickly as possible so that we can finally have social housing back home?
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the well wishes.
The challenge with the question is that it is, of course, best aimed at the government, but the reality is that the government has set up such poor relationships with our provincial leaders across the country that it comes as no surprise that there are ongoing battles over these sorts of challenges.
The challenge here is to ask what affordable housing is. I think we need to undertake our very best efforts to make sure we are providing all types of new housing builds to make sure that those who are currently homeless or living in housing poverty are able to upgrade their way of life. The easiest way we could do that is by lowering the cost of living for all them, allowing them to keep more of the money that they earn and take home more powerful paycheques so that they can live the high quality of life that all Canadians deserve.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to speak on behalf of the folks from Kitchener Centre with respect to Bill C-56, the signature measure of which would involve removing the GST from rental home construction.
I will start by saying very clearly that I certainly support this bill, as does my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands. It is an important and good measure. However, it is not nearly the kind of ambition we need to meet the moment we are in, and that is a very deep and protracted housing crisis.
Specifically, in my community, in the last three years alone, the number of people living unsheltered has more than tripled to over 1,000 people. Let us compare home prices. In our community, back in 2005, the average house price was around three times the average person's income. Today, it is over eight times. House prices have gone up 275% and wages have gone up 42%. It is pretty clear that wages are not keeping up.
We are also losing 15 units of affordable housing to rent evictions and the financialization of our housing for every one new affordable unit getting built. What that looks like, day to day, is that the shelter system in my community is overflowing. The week before we returned here, I showed up to a community meeting at an apartment building in downtown Kitchener. More than 40 people showed up on that night, invited by their councillor. I was there, as was bylaw enforcement.
We heard from folks there about the living conditions in their building, everything from cockroaches to bedbugs. The residents of that building were clear in telling us that they knew they did not have any other options. There was no recourse. There are insufficient recourses. We could talk about the Landlord and Tenant Board and the backlog there. However, the fact is that, because we have not building the kind of social housing we need in this country, people are left with no other options.
As I have heard from other colleagues here, I could talk about what I heard when I was knocking on doors this past summer. I spoke with a young man who is engaged. He is working in the trades, living at his parents' house. His fiancé is a teacher, and she is doing the same. They do not know when they will ever be able to afford a place of their own.
To help restore affordability, CMHC is telling us that we need to build 3.5 million more units than planned by 2030. If we are going to do that, we need to be looking at two sides of this. The first is significant transformational investments in housing. This has been done in this country before. Back in the 1970s, 40% of all building starts across the country had federal assistance. That went down to 8% by the 1980s, and today, no surprise, if we look at the total stock of social housing across the country, we are way at the back of the G7 at 3.5%.
Even a call as bold as saying, “Let us double the social housing stock” would only get us to 7%, which is only the middle of the peer average amongst G7 countries. To do that, though, we need to get serious about having CMHC get back into building housing the way that it used to. Many colleagues have been talking about an acquisition fund, which non-profits across the country have been calling for, a fund that would allow non-profits across the country to preserve what are currently affordable units to avoid losing them to the financialization of housing, and in so doing ensure that those might remain affordable over the long term.
In my community, for example, I spoke with a leader from a local non-profit organization. She was able to share with me, and sent me afterwards, 12 different properties that they have already identified. Should an acquisition fund, such as the one being called for by ACORN Canada and many others, be made available, they would be so keen to jump in and preserve those units. This is an organization that has operated in my community for decades, focused on ensuring that we preserve affordable housing, and it is ready to go. However, they are going to need the federal government to step in and ensure that the funds are there to help them preserve those units.
We could also talk about, for example, investments in the rapid housing initiative. It is a fantastic program. It is not that the government is not doing anything. The issue is that it was in budget 2022, and we have not heard anything since about the next round of rapid housing. We need to see sustained, permanent, ongoing funds that organizations across the country can count on.
It is the same when it comes to co-op housing. I was one of the first to cheer when we saw $1.5 billion of new money invested in co-op housing in budget 2022. Unfortunately, none of those dollars have actually rolled out yet to build co-op housing. We need to see that money get spent, but we also need to see ongoing, year-over-year investments so that we can get back to where we used to be before the early 1990s, when we saw federal and provincial governments pull out of the really critical role they have to play in building affordable housing.
This crisis did not happen overnight. It is decades in the making. I appreciate how clearly the Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities has articulated that. He said very clearly multiple times that multiple parties at the federal level have led to this housing crisis. If that is his admission, we are going to need to see investments today reflect the reality of the crisis we are in.
The second thing we need is to be honest that homes should be places for people to live. They should not be commodities for investors to trade. That is what is different between folks who are looking to rent and buy homes today versus my parents in the 1980s. When they were looking to buy a home, they were competing with other people. Today, people in my community are competing with massive corporations, and that has been incentivized.
As members may know, I have spoken many times in this place about one example that I see as a bit of a litmus test. If we were honest about addressing the financialization of housing, we would not have tax exemptions for the largest corporate landlords in the country, but that is exactly what we have. Real estate investment trusts have almost exclusively been buying existing units, the reason being that it is more profitable for them to do so. One of the CEOs of these real estate investment trusts was in the news this past summer for saying exactly that, that it primarily buys existing units to get the best return possible. Why are they are tax exempt? What is the social value of that exemption?
If the government were serious about addressing the financialization of housing, why not take what the PBO has now told us and spend $300 million over the next five years? It is not going to solve the housing crisis, but it is pretty clear that, if we are going to address financialization, we would start by removing the incentives that corporate landlords are currently benefiting from, which only accelerate the financialization of housing. We would obviously move into things like ending the blind bidding process and increasing vacancy taxes. Right now, it is a 1% vacancy tax, which likely is not going to really influence the behaviour of a large corporate investor in the housing market. If we were to increase that, it might change. We also need to move towards more meaningful protections for tenants. If we are going to build this volume of housing, we need to also be doing it with the climate in mind.
We will continue to advocate for the federal government, when it is looking at the new building code in 2025, as I know it is, to accelerate that building code to ensure that provinces and territories can follow the federal government's lead in bringing more resiliency into the code and ensure we are building the kind of housing that is resilient to the climate crisis we are already in the midst of.
As I shared earlier, I am happy to support Bill C-56. I am glad to see this measure moving ahead, and I am looking forward to seeing the federal government step up far more quickly when it comes to addressing the housing crisis we are in.
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Mr. Speaker, a great deal of emphasis in the member's comments was on housing. This is the first time in generations, since 1993, which was when there were constitutional changes to the Charlottetown accord, and all political parties, with the exception of the Greens, wanted the provinces to play a role and marginalize Ottawa. Since 2016, when we first came to office, this government has invested hundreds of millions to billions of dollars into a housing strategy, support for non-profits such as Habitat for Humanity and the expansion of housing co-ops. Local and provincial governments want to co-operate in investing in non-profit housing.
My question to the member is fairly straightforward. Would he not acknowledge that Ottawa plays a very important role, but it is going to take a lot more than Ottawa alone to resolve the problem? Does he agree that we need municipalities, non-profit groups, many different stakeholders and the provinces to all get on board so we can tackle this issue in Canada today.
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Mr. Speaker, I will agree with the member for Winnipeg North on this point any day of the week: We need all levels of government to step up.
However, we also need to be honest. With respect to the investment the member mentioned for co-op housing, which is one that I mentioned in my speech, I am really glad. The fact is that there were zero dollars for co-op housing in budget 2023. In fact, it was not just co-op housing; there were zero new dollars for housing at all in budget 2023 if not for one line item on indigenous housing that is not going to be starting for a few years still. No level of government can take a year off from funding housing. If the Region of Waterloo did the same, it would have people lining up outside the doors. The federal government cannot either.
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Mr. Speaker, the member from the governing party just reminded us that the government has reinvested in housing. However, the federal government prefers the concept of affordable housing over that of social housing, which includes co-operatives. For us, the concept of affordable housing is vague, which means that the money earmarked for it is often not used to build affordable housing.
Would my hon. colleague care to comment?
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Joliette for his question, which is so important.
The definition of affordable housing differs from one government program to the next. If one definition of affordable housing applies to just 80% of the market, we are not really talking about affordable housing. We therefore need to push the government to establish a definition of affordable housing that is truly affordable.
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Mr. Speaker, we heard the hon. member speak about the housing crisis. I would like to suggest that what we have is a crisis of capitalism. We have the commodification of people's very existence, identified in the real estate investment trust that the member has highlighted. We have Vanguard, BlackRock and others. In my community, we have nine apartment buildings that are facing renovictions and demovictions.
To the people who are going to be meeting in Hamilton in about an hour, from those nine apartment buildings, what do you have to say about the crisis of capitalism and the impacts it has on housing?
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Mr. Speaker, I would say that housing is a human right and it deserves to be more than a preamble in a bill. It needs to be enshrined in legislation.
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