44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, as a resident of Vancouver Island who cannot afford a home here, we rent and our rent has gone up. I am not going to say for one minute that I am one of the Canadians having a hard time of it. We all know what we make as MPs. However, what happened to the Vancouver housing market started with converting homes into investment properties.
I am not trying to blame everything on the previous Conservative government, so forgive me, but this did start under the Harper government with a $1-million investment fast track for getting residency in Canada. What we have is a lot of offshore money coming in to buy up million-dollar properties and leave them vacant. That began distorting our housing market in a big way, and we have seen rising home values, as we know.
People will say that is all right, because if they own their own home, that is what they cash in for their savings and retirement. A lot of people in my community who own their own home want to downsize and move somewhere else, but if they sell their home, they cannot find a place to live that is affordable in their retirement once they have divested their property. It is a complicated mess that all started when we stopped treating homes as homes and started treating them as investment properties.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her great speech.
I agree that eliminating the GST on rental housing construction is a small measure, too small to fix the current crisis. However, it is an NDP proposal, so I do want to defend it. The thing that has us concerned is that the Liberals went only halfway. They are eliminating the GST on housing construction, but with no guarantee that this will have an impact on the price of rent. There is a risk that this 5% rebate will end up in the pockets of the developer building the housing.
Does my colleague share that concern?
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Madam Speaker, the fact of the matter is that a one-time payment is not going to do anything to help people in the long term.
One of my constituents, Paula in Wallaceburg, writes, “Lianne, renters need apartments that working people can afford. I make $27 per hour and I have no benefits, and my rent, for a 400-square-foot one-bedroom unit, is currently $1,400 a month, plus electricity, and I have to pay for laundry. Rent needs to come down or I will have no retirement savings left.”
Jolene from Dover Centre writes, “Average, hard-working Canadianss like my husband and I, we have been forgotten”—
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Madam Speaker, part of the reason we cannot get houses built is because we cannot even get workers to work. A mom of a young adult told me that her son completed college and has a full-time job. He does training, travels as requested and has duties, but he cannot afford to live or rent near work. He lives at home; he drives over an hour each way, paying too much in gas to save for a mortgage or first and last on a rental. He looked into an electric vehicle and put down a deposit to purchase, but he cannot afford the higher insurance, not to mention the higher payments. He could not find any government rebates or incentives. His work, which he absolutely loves, as a very skilled and specialized—
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Madam Speaker, I am aware of a few things, including that the government has been in office for eight years and is only now being spurred on, kicking and screaming, by the opposition's plan, which has been tabled in this place, to implement something it promised to do in 2015. I know that in 2008, it did not cost $2,200 a month to rent a portion of a house in my riding. I know that in 2008, the mortgage payment on a typical home in Canada was not $3,600 a month. I spent 22 years in that industry. I know a bit about affordability and what people could qualify for then and now.
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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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