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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 251

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 20, 2023 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 251 - Nov/20/23
Mr. Daniel Blaikie
  • Nov/20/23 1:39:25 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-56 
Madam Speaker, I certainly very much appreciate that unprompted question. I spoke a bit already about the lack of criteria around the use of public lands in the opposition leader's bill. However, I wanted to come back to this notion he has that he is going to punish municipalities. We have had the opportunity to hear from a lot of representatives of municipalities presenting at the finance committee. They talk about the challenges that they are trying to overcome in order to facilitate building more housing in their own communities. I do not believe that they need to be browbeaten or punished financially in order to get that done. I would remind the Conservative leader that, when he talks about financially punishing municipalities that are not meeting his Ottawa-set target for housing starts, what he is really talking about doing is punishing the people in those municipalities. In a municipality where the leadership is acting in good faith to try to get more housing built, it has no interest in not getting that housing built in the community. There can be problems, and a lot of municipalities are trying to work through them. The Conservative leader is saying that, if they are already under-resourced and do not meet his benchmark, he is going to deprive them of even more resources, expecting them to meet the target with fewer resources when they are already clearly under-resourced to meet that challenge. That is not a strategy that would set municipalities up for success. All it would do is punish the people who live in the municipality when their government is struggling to figure out a convoluted permitting process and a bunch of other stuff. In some cases we have heard at the finance committee, it is about the underlying infrastructure, such as sewer pipes and other things like that, which have to be in place in order to increase density. For a municipality that already does not have the resources to do that, getting dinged because it did not meet the Conservative leader's Ottawa-set housing target is not something that is going to help it to do that into the future. Therefore, yes, we need to put an emphasis on outcomes; yes, there should be consequences for outcomes. However, just depriving municipalities of resources when they are already cash-strapped is not going to get the job done for Canadians.
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