- Member of Parliament
- Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
Leader of the Opposition
- Conservative
- Carleton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $61,288.13
- Government Page
- May/29/24 2:50:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is announcing a catalogue. Come on, give him a round of applause. People cannot afford a home, they might end up in a tent and their rent has doubled, but they have a brand new catalogue.
Will the Prime Minister build 550,000 new homes, yes or no?
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- May/29/24 2:39:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when I was housing minister, we built almost 200,000 houses and apartments, with the average rent being $973 for a one-bedroom apartment, but the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled nine years after he and the NDP took power. What is he doing about it? He is giving half a billion dollars to the Mayor of Toronto, who has just jacked up homebuilding taxes by 20%.
Why does the Prime Minister reward local government gatekeepers who block the homes that Canadians need?
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- May/29/24 2:38:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when I was minister, we built nearly 200,000 houses and apartments. The average rent was $973. That is half of what it is today.
Meanwhile, he is working in partnership with municipal officials to double the cost of housing. My common-sense plan requires municipalities to allow 15% more construction per year. If they exceed that percentage, they will receive a bonus. If they do not, they will be penalized. Why not pay for performance?
Will he vote for more bureaucracy or for more homes?
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- May/29/24 2:35:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, because of the incompetence of the Prime Minister and the Liberal mayor of Montreal, the wait time for a building permit has doubled and rents have tripled.
In Ville-Marie, where the mayor is also in power, it takes 540 days to get a building permit. What is the Prime Minister doing? He is handing out another $95 million to build his bureaucracy.
Why not impose financial penalties on municipal politicians who block housing starts?
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- May/28/24 2:23:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, because of the incompetence of the Prime Minister and the Liberal City Hall in Toronto, rent there has more than doubled over the last nine years. What is worse is that the Prime Minister's so-called housing accelerator fund has given half a billion dollars to Toronto, and only months later, the politicians in that city hiked up homebuilding taxes by 20%. Now 30% of all homebuilding costs are government taxes alone.
Why does the Prime Minister keep sending our money to build bureaucracies that block homes?
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- May/28/24 2:22:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, everything the Prime Minister said is false.
When I was the minister responsible for housing, we built 200,000 new housing units. In Montreal, the average rent was $700 a month. Now it is $2,000. What is more, the wait time for construction permits has more than doubled.
Why does the Prime Minister not follow my common-sense plan, which involves penalizing Montreal politicians by giving that money back to Quebec municipalities that are accelerating housing construction?
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- May/28/24 2:21:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the incompetence of this Prime Minister and the Liberal mayor of Montreal, who is blocking construction, has caused rents to triple in Montreal.
We learned the worst today. Under the headline “Major holdup”, La Presse reported that, “since 2019, [building] permit wait times have more than doubled.”
Why is the Prime Minister continuing to send $95 million to politicians and municipalities that are blocking construction?
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- May/27/24 11:56:36 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, after nine years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled since he took office. It is hard to believe, but on my last day as housing minister, in November 2015, the average rent in Canada's 10 biggest cities for a one-bedroom was $973. Can members believe that? It is now $1,893.
The average down payment needed for a new home then was $22,000; it is almost quaint. Now it is almost $50,000. The average mortgage payment needed on a brand new home was just $1,400. It is now almost $3,500. It took about 39% of the average family paycheque to make monthly payments on the average home. That number has now risen to 64%, a record-smashing total, meaning that one would not be able to eat, clothe oneself, own a vehicle or do anything other than pay taxes and one's mortgage if one is the average family buying the average home.
The Prime Minister did not care much about any of this until he started crashing in the polls, and then he panicked and appointed a big-talking housing minister to take the helm of the ministry of housing. This minister had already, according to Liberal admission, caused immigration to run out of control. Since that time, we have seen a flurry of photo ops and new government programs designed to generate media headlines. However, predictably, these headlines have not reduced housing costs or increased home building. Home building is down this year. The federal housing agency says that it will be down next year and the year after that. Rent and mortgage payments continue to rise.
That is because the government, under the Prime Minister, is building bureaucracy rather than homes. My common-sense plan is the building homes, not bureaucracies act. It seeks to provide exactly what it says: less bureaucracy, more homebuilding.
In a nutshell, here is my common-sense plan to build the homes: First, we would require municipalities to permit 15% more homebuilding as a condition of getting their federal funds; second, we would sell off thousands of acres of federal land and buildings, so they can be used to build homes; and third, we would axe taxes on homebuilding. In this plan, we would get rid of the carbon tax, the sales tax and other taxes that block homebuilding.
This is a fundamentally different approach than what we see from the current Liberal government. What it currently does with its so-called housing accelerator program is to fund box-ticking. It puts together a bunch of boxes that municipalities have to tick for procedural and bureaucratic reforms. Once the boxes are ticked, the money is sent and we move on. The problem is that, even if those are the right boxes to tick and the municipality ultimately ticks them, when the feds turn their backs, the city can then put in place a bunch of new obstacles. For example, municipalities such as Ottawa and Toronto have actually jacked up development charges after getting federal housing accelerator funds. The City of Winnipeg got federal funding and then blocked 2,000 homes right next to a federal transit station.
That is why trying to manage process will get one nowhere. When one pays for bureaucratic box-ticking, that is what one gets. However, people cannot live in a box ticked by a bureaucrat; they have to live in a home. That is why my plan would pay for results. It simply requires that municipalities permit 15% more homes per year. If they hit the target, they keep their federal money. If they beat the target, they get a bonus. If they miss the target, they pay a fine. They are paid on a per completion basis, just as a realtor or a home builder is paid per home built. We want to pay for keys in doors and families sitting in a beautiful new kitchen, enjoying their dinner. We want families to be housed, healthy and safe, with money in the bank. That is the result we are going to pay for. Now let us bring it home.
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- May/8/24 2:30:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is absolutely right that we did not waste the billions of dollars that he has now put into his programs, but here are the results.
The average rent for a one bedroom when I was the housing minister was $973, and we built 80,000 apartment units at that low rate. Now the cost has more than doubled. Meanwhile, Stats Canada reports that incomes are down $17,000 per family.
Why are Canadians making $17,000 less to pay double the price for a home?
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- May/8/24 2:26:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, is he seriously accusing me of causing Quebeckers anxiety? It is like he is saying that Quebeckers would never have noticed that their rent has doubled if I had not mentioned it. Does he think Quebeckers cannot read numbers? He says the economy is not about numbers, but rents are numbers. The prices we pay when we buy food at the grocery store are numbers.
Will he finally look at the numbers and see that he is not worth the cost?
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- May/1/24 3:00:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is what the Prime Minister has been saying for nine years, and the results have been doubled rents, doubled mortgage payments and doubled down payments. Just this week, a survey showed that 72% of Canadians who do not own a home believe they never will.
Canada was not like this before the current Prime Minister, and surely, it will not be like this after he is gone. Can the Prime Minister comment on what it is like to be the only prime minister in history to deprive an entire generation of home ownership?
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- 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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- Apr/17/24 2:54:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in 2015, Emily had a home with a mortgage payment of $2,000. Now she has an apartment with a rental payment of $4,000.
How can he possibly suggest she is better off paying twice as much to rent a place than she was, under Conservatives, owning one?
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- Apr/17/24 2:46:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it was solved when rent was $973 a month, until he came along, but this is more proof that he is not worth the cost after nine years. He is blaming the whole world. If the world were to blame for the housing problems in Canada, then why is it that housing here is 50% to 75% more expensive than in the United States?
Why is it that housing costs have risen faster than in any other G7 country relative to incomes? Why is it that we have the fewest homes per capita, despite having the most land and the most lumber? Why is that? Is it him?
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- Apr/17/24 2:41:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we will cut the rent. When I was the minister of housing, we paid half as much for rent in Canada as we pay today.
On the question of the Prime Minister's ambitious housing plan, I decided to read all about it in the Liberals' 2015 platform. They said, “We will make it easier for Canadians to find an affordable place to call home.” That was nine years ago. They have doubled the cost since that promise was made, and then they repeated the promise yesterday.
Why would we expect the same promise, with the same programs and the same Prime Minister to be kept this time?
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- Apr/17/24 2:40:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has got to stop getting his facts from his incompetent housing minister's Twitter account. This is the same guy who, as immigration minister, lost track of a million people.
When I was housing minister, we built 92,782 new apartment units, with an average rent of $973. How many apartments will the Prime Minister build at the price of $972 a month this year?
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- Apr/15/24 2:25:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, more proof the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost is that he picked the most incompetent immigration minister in Canadian history and put him in charge of housing. This is the guy who lost track of a million people, who is blamed by his fellow cabinet colleagues for causing the housing crisis and who presides over the most expensive housing market in Canadian history.
When I was minister, the average rent was $950, and we built hundreds of thousands of units at that affordable price, so why will he not learn from our smashing success in 2015 in keeping costs low, by axing the tax and building the homes?
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- Feb/14/24 3:08:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled as he has built bureaucracies that block homes. In January, according data out today, rent was up 10% year over year to $2,196, an astonishing increase in a very short time. In fact, it is up about 20% in the last two years alone, and it has been accelerating ever since he recently named his incompetent housing minister.
Will the Prime Minister follow our common-sense plan to cut the bureaucracy and build the homes?
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- Feb/14/24 3:04:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let us talk about that program. Since it was created two years ago, rent has increased by 20% across the country. At the Standing Committee on Finance yesterday, the Minister of Housing was asked how many homes have been built through the accelerator fund. The answer is zero.
The minister said the program does not build houses specifically. Those were his words.
If it costs $4 billion to build no houses, how much would it cost to build one?
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- Feb/14/24 3:03:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled since he took office. Today, we learned on Rentals.ca that rent reached a new high in January at $2,196 a month. That is a 10% increase in one year.
When will he learn that funding bureaucracy instead of housing will not address the cost of housing?
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