44th Parl. 1st Sess.

May 2, 2023 10:00AM

May/2/23 10:22:09 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Parry Sound—Muskoka. What we have today, with the Prime Minister's housing crisis, is double trouble. Since the Prime Minister took office and since he promised to make housing affordable, the average cost of a mortgage payment has doubled, from $1,400 a month to over $3,000 a month. The average cost of rent in Canada's 10 biggest cities has doubled, from about $1,100 to over $2,000 every single month. The average required minimum down payment for a house in Canada has doubled, from $22,000 to $45,000. This is all since the Prime Minister became Prime Minister and promised that he was going to make housing affordable. This is not just an inconvenience. This is not just a case where politicians stand up and say that Canadians are having trouble making ends meet or putting food on the table, as politicians always like to say. This is becoming possibly the single biggest socio-economic crisis in my lifetime, as an entire generation of young people have come to accept, for the first time in Canadian history, that they will not be able to afford a home. Let me share with members the mathematics of hopelessness. I was speaking to a young lady who is 28 years old and is a CATSA screener at Toronto Pearson Airport. She calculates that, at her current rate of savings, about $5,000 a year, it will take her somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 years to save for a down payment in Toronto. That means she will be well over 40 and unable to have kids. The hopelessness is not that she cannot afford a home; it is that her calculator tells her she will never be able to afford a home. It would be nice and comforting for the Prime Minister if he could claim that this problem is out of his hands and that it is the result of some crazy global phenomenon that is not in his grasp, and therefore that he is once again just a passive observer in the misery that the Canadian people are living, as he so often tries to portray himself. The stats prove otherwise. This problem does not exist in the vast majority of countries in our peer group around the world. For example, last year, Fortune magazine concluded that the standard home in Canada now costs twice as much as it does in the U.S. Can the Prime Minister explain this? Prices are determined by supply and demand. The U.S. has 10 times the demand because it has 10 times the population. It has a smaller supply because its land mass is more confined and less than ours. It has 10 times the demand and less supply, yet, according to Fortune magazine, the prices in the U.S. are half what they are here in Canada. Around the world, we see other examples. Vancouver, in NDP British Columbia, is now the third most overpriced housing market in the world according to Demographia. Toronto is the 10th. Both are more unaffordable than Manhattan, Los Angeles, London and even Singapore, an island where there is literally nowhere left to build. All these are places with more money, more people and less land, yet their real estate is more affordable than ours. The practical consequences of this are that, for example, almost one-third of homeowners with a mortgage will pay off that debt over more than a 30-year period, due to higher interest rates, a significant increase over the once-standard 25-year amortization. The average rent for a spare bedroom, just the bedroom and not the overall housing unit, in a home, condo or apartment in Vancouver was $1,410. Let us put this into perspective. There are now couples who consider it a bargain to move into a townhouse with two other couples, each couple renting a single room, often sharing a bathroom, always sharing a kitchen, and paying $1,500 a month just for that room. Here in Canada, this is true housing poverty, and it has happened after eight years of the Prime Minister's policies. Why is housing so unaffordable? First, government deficits are driving up interest, which increases the mortgage rates for people with debt. Second, we have the fewest houses per capita in the G7 even though we have the most land to build on. Why is that? The answer is that government gatekeepers block housing construction. It takes up to 10 years to get a building permit. We rank 64th in the world for building permit delays. We rank second-last for the speed at which we approve building permits within the OECD. Every other country but one in that group is faster to deliver permits and allow houses to be build. This blocks construction and prevents Canadians from owning a house. We know this problem is worse in NDP-controlled British Columbia, where hard-left, woke mayors who stand up for the wealthy mansion owners in leafy, ritzy neighbourhoods block the poor, the immigrants and the working class from ever owning homes. Therefore, we do not have enough homes, and that is why Canadians do not have a place to live. The government wants to bring in half a million people per year, which is a million people over the next two years, and it has no plan to build the houses to go along with that. In fact, since the current Prime Minister took office, we have fewer houses per capita than we did eight years ago. In other words, this problem is metastasizing and worsening every single day. The only party with a common-sense plan to fix it is the Conservative Party, and this is the plan. The government has put $89 billion into housing programs. Government housing is not the solution. It is not working because, if there is a confined space of permitted land to build on, we could pour as much money as we want into it and we are not going to get more housing; we are going to get more expensive housing. Worse still, the Prime Minister has announced $4 billion more, not for housing, but for the gatekeepers. The money is literally going to go to the zoning and permitting departments of the big cities that are blocking the construction in the first place. In other words, it is a big, fat reward for those same bureaucrats who are blocking our youth from having homes, and that will build out the bureaucracy and slow down the construction. Here is my common-sense plan. We will link the number of dollars big cities get for infrastructure to the number of houses that actually get built. Those who block construction will be fined. I will cut back their infrastructure. Those who speed up and lower the cost of permits to build more will get a building bonus from my government because incentives work. I will require every federally funded transit station to have high-density housing on all the available land around and even on top of the station. We will sell off 6,000 federal buildings to convert them into affordable housing for our young people to live in. We will speed up immigration for building trades. We will shift more of our education dollars over to the trades, rather than just to the white-collar professions. We have seen the way. We can look at what the Squamish people have done in the city of Vancouver. They have their own land and do not have to follow the rules of the gatekeepers. They are building 6,000 units of housing on 10 acres of land. The Squamish have shown what can happen when we get the gatekeepers out of the way. That is exactly what we are going to do right across the country. We will clear the gatekeepers. We will remove the privileged class inside the castle walls and open the gates of opportunity up to anyone who is prepared to work hard. If people work hard in this country, the rules should allow that they have a decent home where they can start a family and raise kids. It is common sense, the common sense of the common people united for our common home, their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.

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