- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Parry Sound—Muskoka
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $125,505.29
- Government Page
- Oct/30/23 3:41:13 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would reiterate for my hon. colleague what his own minister of housing said just a few weeks ago at our committee: At the start of the current government's term, in 2015, the housing situation in Canada was not in crisis. People could afford to buy a home and find a place to rent. Eight years later, house prices have doubled, rents have doubled, people cannot find a place to rent, interest rates are skyrocketing and mortgages have doubled. It was not a crisis when Prime Minister Harper was here. It is a crisis today, thanks to eight years under the Prime Minister.
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- Oct/30/23 3:39:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there was an awful lot to unpack there. I think that if anybody is engaged in science fiction, it would be the NDP, because it keeps supporting a government that does not seem to understand the damage it is causing to Canadians.
The fact of the matter is that government makes more money on housing than anyone else in the whole phase, at 33% of every housing unit in this country, on average. Thirty-three per cent of the cost of a house is government. All we are saying is that we need to get government out of the way, get more housing units built and hold other levels of government to account for federal infrastructure spending.
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- Oct/30/23 3:37:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would simply acknowledge that our party understands the importance of investing in municipalities and infrastructure. However, the difference is that Conservatives will require results for that investment. If municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in federal infrastructure funding for things such as transit and transit improvements, we will require them to be on board and at least make sure that the land around those stations is upzoned and ready to go for high-density residential. That is good for public policy, the fiscal policy of the municipality, the planet and housing.
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- Oct/30/23 3:26:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I move that the 11th report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, presented on June 12, be concurred in.
We are talking about the national housing strategy report, which was done by our human resources committee and delivered in June 2023. We should know that the national housing strategy is a program the Prime Minister announced with great fanfare in 2017, as I have said in the House before.
He and a number of his colleagues stood in front of a big building under construction and talked about how this strategy, which was going to be about $40 billion, would be a life-changing, transformational strategy. The federal government was back in the housing business, and it was going to be a really big deal. It was a 10-year plan.
It is still a 10-year plan. The numbers were ballooned to $82 billion, and at the time of the study, it was going to change the world, which was all well and good. We know the Prime Minister is particularly good at these photo ops and announcements with quite a rhetorical flourish.
We received the study in June 2023. Just before that, we had spoken with the former minister of housing. We asked the minister of housing, a couple of different times, if he would describe the housing situation in Canada as a crisis. He could not use that word. What we heard from the minister at the time was that housing was a challenge, and there were some problems and difficulties, but he could not use the word “crisis”.
I would also like to inform the House that I will be splitting my time with the member for Kelowna—Lake Country.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, there is a new Minister of Housing, and there is a renewed sense that we need to do something about the housing situation in Canada. The new minister, when asked if Canada was in a housing crisis, a year after the previous minister, acknowledged that, Canada is in a housing crisis. He used the word himself.
When I asked him at the time if, in 2015, eight years ago, and 2017, when the Prime Minister announced this life-changing, transformational national housing strategy, Canada was in a housing crisis. He would not use the word “crisis” when it came to that. He said we had some challenges. There were some difficulties, but he would not describe it as a crisis at the time the Liberals launched this national housing strategy, this $82-billion, 10-year program.
We heard from the CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is the agency responsible for delivering the national housing strategy and all the programs therein. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is also responsible for insuring a lot of mortgages in this country, millions of mortgages. It does a lot of research on the housing situation in Canada. We have heard a lot from it about the fact that we are in a crisis and that Canada needs to build, in total, about 5.8 million homes by 2030 to restore some semblance of affordability in the housing market.
It is important to acknowledge at this point that the most homes that Canada has ever built in a single year was in 1976 when building a home was a little easier. Homes were not nearly as complex, but 270,000 units were built that year. The average today is about 240,000. We would need to ramp up the building of homes to about 745,000 units per year to meet that affordability target that the CMHC itself says we need to do.
What was this national housing strategy supposed to do? We know, from the reports and from listening to the CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, that this national housing strategy was to remove 530,000 Canadian families from core housing need, reduce chronic homelessness by 50%, protect 385,000 community housing units already in existence, provide 300,000 households with affordability supports, repair 300,000 existing housing units that needed repair and create 100,000 new housing units.
With the $82 billion, we are just over halfway through the program, which begs the questions of where we are at and what it has accomplished.
Even the CMHC would acknowledge that we have a long way to go, and it would acknowledge that in part because its own research has told us that the situation is worse than ever. At the time that the Prime Minister announced this strategy, we had some housing challenges. Today, it is a crisis.
We now know that, after eight years of the Liberal Prime Minister, rents have doubled. We also know that, after eight years of the Prime Minister, house prices have doubled and mortgages have doubled. Frankly, despite the grand proclamations of the Prime Minister and the constant patting of themselves on the back for all the great work they are doing with this national housing strategy of $82 billion, it seems as though the Liberals are starting to catch on that just saying they are going to do good things with photo ops and announcements is not really solving the problem.
As it turns out, now the Liberals are announcing new things and new ideas, including things like removing the GST from purpose-built rentals. They are finally catching on, but I worry it might be too little, too late because, in the midst of all of this, in the midst of a housing crisis getting worse and worse, the government has been spending money like it is going out of style. It borrows excessively. The Liberals stand behind this whole business that they were there for Canadians during COVID, but we know that a couple of hundred billion of that borrowing had nothing to do with COVID supports, and that is having an impact on inflation.
In fact, Tiff Macklem, the governor of the Bank of Canada, has said that inflation in shelter prices is running above six per cent. Part of this, he says, is due to higher mortgage interest costs following increases in interest rates. However, it also reflects higher rents and other housing costs, and these pressures are more related to a structural shortage of housing supply. He also said it is going to be easier to get inflation down and make housing cheaper if monetary and fiscal policy are rowing in the same direction.
Therefore, we know that announcing with great fanfare an $82-billion 10-year comprehensive plan to solve the housing challenge of the time, fast forward to today, has turned into an absolute crisis in the housing market and, frankly, a crisis that is, in part, created by the inflationary pressures that the government, and its excessive spending, is putting on the market.
Now we have this report that says that, yes, it is bad. We have work to do. That is effectively the message. Even Ms. Bowers acknowledged that it is going to be very challenging to meet the targets. We know why. The Governor of the Bank of Canada has told us that the inflationary spending of the government is just making it harder. Every nickel it spends is making it harder.
The members of the government do not seem to understand that we need to get out of the way and not only incentivize the private sector, but also bring down the inflationary deficit spending and axe the carbon tax, which is making everything more expensive. We need to reduce the taxation burden. We need to reduce the taxation of deficit borrowing on the backs of Canadians so that they can afford to eat, heat their homes and maybe even have a home one day.
Nine out of 10 young people in this country have given up on the dream of ever owning home, and the responsibility for that falls squarely at the government, its inflationary spending and its reckless way of borrowing billions of dollars. The government says it is going to borrow money so Canadians do not have to, but its members do not realize that the money being borrowed by the government is being borrowed on behalf of all Canadians. It falls to all of us to pay it back. Therefore, we have a situation today where a government will borrow billions of dollars to give Canadians a few hundred dollars to help them pay for things that, because of the government's borrowing, now cost thousands more dollars.
We have a situation where our government is now so desperate that it is playing politics, so it is axing the carbon tax in some parts of the country where the Liberals' poll numbers are really bad, but not in the rest of the country, as we found out, because people there did not vote Liberal. That is the problem. People have to vote Liberal if they want to get treated better by the government and if they want the government to relieve them of the pressures of its inflationary spending.
The national housing strategy can be described as a failure. The Conservatives have written a dissenting report on this, and we need to recognize that the government is simply not getting the job done. Even though its members have great talking points and photo ops, they are making life more expensive every day for Canadians. Canadians know that, despite their promises, the Prime Minister is just not worth the cost.
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- Jun/12/23 5:33:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of the Conservative members of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities to table a dissenting report to the main report of the committee with respect to the national housing strategy.
We all know that when the national housing strategy was presented by the government some years ago, it was described as a transformational plan. Of course, we all know that despite that and the work of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, rents have doubled and mortgages have doubled. This has driven Canada to a high risk of mortgage defaults and has allowed the number of persons experiencing homelessness to grow significantly.
Conservative members also wish to highlight that the person ultimately responsible for these failures of the CMHC is the Minister of Housing, along with the government. He is responsible for the massive increase in the government fees the CMHC has just introduced on multi-unit residential housing. He is responsible for the complex paperwork that stalls so many applications. He is responsible for the crisis that is unfolding today.
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For one true measure of a nation is its success in fulfilling the promise of a better life for each of its members. Let this be the measure of our nation.
Madam Speaker, as I was listening to the fall economic statement, I thought of the words of President John F. Kennedy in his message to Congress in February 1962. I thought it was important to measure this fall economic statement against whether it has in fact improved the lives of Canadians. It is important to think about the layers of hype and peel all that back over the last seven years of the government to see what the results are.
Has the government been good value for money for the Canadians who pay for it? We know that seven years ago the Prime Minister promised annual deficits, but said they would be very small, not too big, and not to worry about it. Of course we know that did not really work.
COVID-19 came along, and the Prime Minister promised to have Canadians' backs. All of us in the House came together and we had Canadians' backs. We had to borrow money to do it, but the $200 billion extra that the government borrowed was not necessary. That was not having Canadians' backs. Thanks to the words of the former Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, we now know that this extra borrowing, this extra abuse of the national credit card, is exacerbating inflation and making things more expensive. It is in fact quite the opposite of having Canadians' backs. It is taking the shirts right off Canadians' backs. It is causing inflation to get worse.
On top of that we have the Liberal government promising that its carbon tax would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and that most Canadians would get more money back than they pay in carbon taxes. Now we know from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that the carbon tax will in fact cost Canadians more than they get back, and the carbon tax has done almost nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
However, people should not worry. The Liberals are coming to the rescue. For those who are struggling to heat their homes and feed their families, the Liberal government is going to save them by now tripling the carbon tax. Members can just imagine what it will cost people to heat their homes and buy food once the government triples the carbon tax.
For some Canadians, the Liberals plan to send them $500 for things that now cost thousands more. The price of food is up 11%, and food bank visits are at record highs in Canada. The price to heat our homes has doubled, particularly in eastern Canada and northern Ontario, where too many Canadians are facing energy poverty. Are they getting value for money? I do not think so.
Nowhere has the Liberal failure been more horrifying than on the topic of housing. We know that in 2017 the Prime Minister launched to great fanfare his national housing strategy. He was in Toronto, standing right in front of the mayor of the city. He was going to have this first-ever national plan. He promised $40 billion, and then he upped it to $70 billion. He called it a once-in-a-generation vision that would protect current affordable housing stock, build four times as many units as in the decade past, repair three times as many units as were repaired in the decade past, and reduce chronic homelessness by 50%.
The Prime Minister called it a robust, comprehensive, life-changing plan that would help Canadians get into homes and stay there. How has that worked? Have Canadians received value for the money they have paid the government on housing?
Let us look at the facts. The headline number was $70 billion. We know that in fact it was not really $70 billion. When we pull away from that the existing federal spending commitment and then pull away from that the matching provincial dollars that were required, which they were already spending as well, and then take out the loans and other tools that were being used, the number was actually $6.8 billion over 10 years.
That is fine: $6.8 billion is still $6.8 billion. That is great stuff; am I right? Maybe. That money was supposed to be spent through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, through five main programs: the rental construction financing initiative, the national housing co-investment fund, the rapid housing initiative, the affordable housing innovation fund and the federal lands initiative. How have they done since 2017?
The Parliamentary Budget Officer reported in 2021 that despite the overall increase in spending to help particularly low-income Canadians, it is up to $192 million a year, or a 9% increase. Because of the Liberals' inflationary spending, that actually represents a 15% decrease in the power of those dollars to buy goods. The CMHC programs that were designed to contribute to the cost of construction to address homelessness included the national housing co-investment fund, which spent 50% of its allocated budget. The rental construction financing initiative spent 53%. With respect to Employment and Social Development Canada funds to address homelessness, they have increased that budget dramatically from $118 million a year on average to $357 million per year. That is a 203% increase.
It is amazing; am I right? Not so fast. The Auditor General now reports that the CMHC and Employment and Social Development Canada have no idea if their programs are even helping. They do not know whether they have made a difference or not. What a plan it is. They spend half the money that was committed, do nothing to monitor the grandiose commitments of the Prime Minister and tell Canadians that everything will be fine. However, we know. We know the proof is in the suffering. House prices have doubled since the Prime Minister announced sunny ways in 2015.
A report by the C.D. Howe Institute, named after a fellow who knew how to get things done in this country, cited the burden of government cost as one of the big reasons for our lack of housing supply. In some major cities like Kelowna, Regina, Toronto and Ottawa, homebuyers had to pay an average of $230,000 extra for a home because of the municipal costs. In Vancouver, that number is $644,000. Big, expensive government is getting in the way of new construction. It is getting in the way of retrofits and renovations. It is getting in the way of new rental units. It is getting in the way of accessible and affordable units. It is getting in the way of a person's ever owning a home.
This is all while the government asks people to pay more, earn less and pay higher taxes to cover its ballooning debts. The PBO reported in September that the housing affordability gap, which is the gap between the average price of a house in Canada and the ability of the average family to borrow money, is a whopping 67% now. For the record, in January 2015, just months before the current government took office, that gap was 2%.
It is all made worse by a government that, when it is not bent on its misguided ideological entrenchment, just does not seem to get the job done. The Liberals talk a big game. The Prime Minister peers into the camera with empathetic eyes and says he really cares, but then he does not get the job done.
It seems like a cruel joke, but to the people in this country, those most vulnerable, who are paying the highest price, it is far from a joke. There are seniors on fixed incomes who cannot afford to heat their homes and eat healthy food. Tent cities are growing in communities large and small, all across our country. The current government has failed Canadians. Never has so much been promised and spent and borrowed to deliver so little. The economic statement that we have heard here is more of the same.
The Leader of the Opposition has been warning about excessive government borrowing and that it would lead to inflation that would make everything we try to buy more expensive, and now we know he was right. Even the Minister of Finance knows he was right. In a road to Damascus moment, she actually started to speak about fiscal restraint. However, she only talked about it, because immediately thereafter, she added another $20 billion of debt to her $1.2-trillion debt. Next year, payments on the national debt will be more than we spend on health care transfers.
Canada cannot afford to throw money in the air anymore and just hope it sticks. If we are really interested in supporting the next generation and making sure their life is better than ours, by that measure this economic statement is a failure and the government is a failure. Frankly, we should be voting against this economic statement. Conservatives will vote against it, and every single member of this House should do the same.
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- Jan/31/22 11:15:54 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I noted in the member's speech that he spoke about an action plan for housing. I am wondering if he can tell me what makes him think that what is in this throne speech is going to be an actual action plan.
There have been a lot of promises, but the housing crisis in Parry Sound—Muskoka is worse than it was when Liberals took office, so what is different this time around? Could he elaborate on that, please?
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