SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Apr/18/24 11:31:01 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is the same housing minister who lost track of one million immigrants when he was the immigration minister. This is the same housing minister who unleashed absolute out-of-control chaos in our immigration system, not according to me but according to his Liberal successor and the Prime Minister, so the member opposite should stop using that source. If you want to know, Madam Speaker, how many affordable homes were built when I was the minister, we completed 92,782 apartments, and the average rent was $973. Can anyone tell me where we can find $973 per month rent after nine years of the Liberals?

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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Apr/18/24 11:33:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, there will be no conditions. There will be results. I will simply tell the municipalities that they will be paid for the number of homes built. That is not interference. That is results. The Bloc Québécois agrees that the government should make housing transfers. We simply disagree on the formula. The Bloc Québécois is proposing that money just be injected in building up local bureaucracies. I am proposing to pay the municipalities for the number of homes that they allow to be built. They can do that in several ways: fast-tracking permits, selling land, using any strategy that works for them. What we want to fund is the result. For its part, the Bloc Québécois wants to fund bureaucracy, especially the federal bureaucracy that it voted for in order to finance the spending of this Prime Minister's centralist government.

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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Mark Gerretsen

Apr/18/24 1:50:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the good news for the member is that I will be asking to unanimously table something as well. The whip and the people in the Conservative lobby better send some people in now, and tell them to say no. I am giving them a heads-up. The member for Winnipeg North specifically rose on a point of order to call to the attention of the Chair that the Leader of the Opposition was misleading the House. Then the Leader of the Opposition stood up and said the following, basically what we just heard a Conservative member say. He said, “from the Statistics Canada website, which shows that 92,782 apartment units were built.” The Leader of the Opposition acknowledged the fact, when he stood up again later, that he was not actually talking about the affordable homes his government built, he was talking about the total number of apartment starts, all but six that came from private development. I would probably say that the private sector was building these homes in spite of the previous government, not in line with it objectives. That is a reality of what is going on. Here is the irony behind all of it. The Leader of the Opposition was the housing minister from February until October 2015. I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Let us say that he was the housing minister for all of 2015. The reason why we know, and where we are getting the number six from when we keep saying that he only built six affordable homes, is from an OPQ. For the people in the gallery and at home, an OPQ is an Order Paper question that can be tabled by a member to get a response from the government. The OP question, and this was under the previous government, was about the number of units built in 2015. The response was only a total of six. Six total affordable housing units were built in 2015. With the consent of the House, I would respectfully request to table this so the public can see the Order Paper question I am referencing.

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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Mark Gerretsen

Apr/18/24 1:58:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I outlined this very clearly. We had an example earlier today, during this budget deliberation, when the member for Carleton, the Leader of the Opposition, specifically tried to mislead the House. He said, “If [the member] wants to know how many affordable homes were built when I was the minister, we completed 92,782 apartments.” He did not do that. Those were housing starts throughout the entire country, housing starts that were built by developers in spite of his government, not with his government's policies.

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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Majid Jowhari (Richmond Hill, Lib.)

Apr/18/24 4:18:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, at the outset, I would like to inform the House that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Ottawa Centre. I am proud to rise as the member of Parliament for Richmond Hill to speak to the urgent action in budget 2024 that would help Canada build the homes needed to restore fairness for every generation. Last week, our government released Canada's ambitious plan to build homes by the millions, to support renters and to lower the costs of home ownership so that no hard-working Canadians have to spend more than 30% of their incomes on housing costs. With budget 2024 and with Canada's housing plan, we are going to do whatever is necessary to put money on the table to build more affordable housing, to create the market conditions necessary to get more homes built and to change the way that cities build homes. We will restore the promise of a Canada for everyone once again. Over the next part of my speech, I am going to focus on four major areas: building more homes faster, supporting home ownership and renters, building homes on public lands and building the infrastructure communities need to build more homes. I will first speak about building more homes faster. We know higher interest rate environments have made it difficult to build homes. That is why we are proposing significant action in budget 2024 to boost the housing supply and to remove the areas that often slow down the construction of new homes. For example, we are reviving and modernizing Canada's post-war housing design catalogue, which will provide blueprints that can be used across the country to speed up the construction of new houses. Budget 2024 proposes to allocate more than $11 million in 2024-25 to support the development of this catalogue for up to 50 housing designs, including row housing and fourplexes that provinces, territories and municipalities could use to simplify and to accelerate housing approvals and builds. This first phase of the catalogue will be published in the fall of 2024. Speaking of supporting municipalities, our $4 billion housing accelerator fund is already cutting red tape across the country with 179 agreements with provinces, territories and municipalities, with Richmond Hill being one, enabling the construction of over 750,000 new homes over the next decade. To continue the momentum, budget 2024 would top-up this program with an additional $400 million to build more homes faster from coast to coast to coast. As well, to help developers get the capital they need to build more rental homes, we are also topping up the apartment construction loan program, or ACLP, with $15 billion, starting next year. This proposed investment alone would help build more than 30,000 additional new homes across Canada, bringing the program's total contribution to over 131,000 new homes by 2031. We know there is no single player who can fill Canada's housing shortage on his or her own. That is why we need to take a team Canada approach to getting this work done for Canadians. That means all of us working together and using every tool in our tool kit to get more homes built much faster. To that effect, budget 2024 announces Canada builds, which would help to leverage the ACLP so that we can better partner with provinces and territories to build more rental housing across the country. Truthfully, we could not do any of this without Canada's builders, carpenters, construction workers and similar tradesmen. They are incredible people who love their jobs, who are good at them and to whom we should all be grateful because we cannot build homes without them. To help train and recruit the next generation of skilled workers, budget 2024 proposes to provide $90 million over two years for the apprenticeship service program to help create placements with small and medium-sized enterprises for apprentices. Ten million dollars over two years is also being proposed for the skilled trades awareness and readiness program to encourage Canadians to explore and prepare for careers in the skilled trades. In addition, budget 2024 proposes to provide $50 million over two years for a foreign credential recognition program, at least half of which would be used to streamline foreign credential recognition in the construction sector to help skilled trades workers build more homes. We need to do everything we can to make it easier to build homes more quickly and more cost-effectively, and the measures I have just outlined are exactly those. Now, I will go on to the second area of my speech, which is supporting homeowners and renters. Young Canadians in my own community of Richmond Hill, including my son, and across Canada are struggling to find housing that fits their budgets. That is why the government launched the tax-free first home savings account and why, in budget 2024, we are taking action to unlock additional pathways for young renters to become homeowners and to protect middle-class homeowners from rising mortgage payments. To help first-time homebuyers keep pace with the rising housing costs, budget 2024 announces our intention to amend the Income Tax Act to increase the homebuyers' plan's withdrawal limit from $35,000 to $60,000. This budget also proposes to temporarily extend the grace period, during which homeowners are not required to pay their homebuyers' plan's withdrawals to their RRSP, by an additional three years. This first measure will enable first-time homebuyers to save up to $25,000 more for their own down payment faster. For a couple who withdrew the maximum in 2023, extending the grace period could allow them to defer annual repayments as large as $4,667 by an additional three years. Thanks to the new Canadian mortgage charter, more Canadians know about the fair, reasonable and timely mortgage relief they can seek and receive from their financial institutions. Budget 2024, aims to enhance the charter by enabling first-time homebuyers purchasing newbuilds to get a 30-year mortgage amortization, among other enhancements. The government will bring forward regulatory amendments to implement this proposal. Additionally, budget 2024 proposes to call on banks, fintechs and credit bureaus to prioritize tools that allow renters to opt in to reporting their rent payment history to credit bureaus so that they can strengthen their credit scores when applying for a mortgage. We are all committed to protecting the rights of tenants and to ensuring that renting a home is fair, open and transparent. For that reason, budget 2024 proposes actions to protect the millions of Canadians who rent and who have been exceptionally impacted by recent drastic rent increases. I now move on to the third area, which is building homes on public lands. Our government is redoubling our efforts to build homes wherever and whenever possible in the face of Canada's housing crisis. We are accelerating and streamlining the process of converting surplus federal properties into housing, and we are continuing to work with Canada Lands Company to enable the construction of additional housing units. In conclusion, our focus as a government is on building more homes at a pace and a scale not seen in generations to restore fairness and affordability for every generation. I hope my hon. colleagues will support us in this incredibly crucial work.

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