44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I really appreciate the comment and we are on the same page: that we need a wartime-like effort. We need to use every tool in the tool box to deal with this. Right now, the government does not have a plan. It has no plan on how it is going to build 3.5 million homes, and this is what we need to do in this chamber. We need to have that conversation and bring forward ideas. Like I said, let us use some public land, but let us keep it in public hands, leasing and working with the private sector to ensure that we can build affordable non-market housing.
This free-market approach will not work. It has not worked anywhere in the world to solve an affordable housing crisis and it is not going to start working now. I want to work with my colleague because we need a plan and right now the current government is a rudderless ship. Removing the GST on rental housing is low-hanging fruit.
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Madam Speaker, as a resident of Vancouver Island who cannot afford a home here, we rent and our rent has gone up. I am not going to say for one minute that I am one of the Canadians having a hard time of it. We all know what we make as MPs. However, what happened to the Vancouver housing market started with converting homes into investment properties.
I am not trying to blame everything on the previous Conservative government, so forgive me, but this did start under the Harper government with a $1-million investment fast track for getting residency in Canada. What we have is a lot of offshore money coming in to buy up million-dollar properties and leave them vacant. That began distorting our housing market in a big way, and we have seen rising home values, as we know.
People will say that is all right, because if they own their own home, that is what they cash in for their savings and retirement. A lot of people in my community who own their own home want to downsize and move somewhere else, but if they sell their home, they cannot find a place to live that is affordable in their retirement once they have divested their property. It is a complicated mess that all started when we stopped treating homes as homes and started treating them as investment properties.
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Madam Speaker, I offer a big thanks to the member for Kitchener Centre for Motion No. 92. I am hoping we get it through.
The housing crisis is exacerbated, no question, by an increase in the number of Canadians here. I favour more immigration, absolutely, but we need to be planning for that so we have homes for the people who are moving here
We absolutely have to act on real estate investment trusts. We have to break the cycle of expecting rising housing prices to drive our economy and recognize that we need to invest in building sustainable housing with sustainable funding, not flash-in-the-pan, one-time-only housing, as my hon. colleague referenced.
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Madam Speaker, if that member had his way, every single house and apartment building in Canada would be owned by the government. We know that government across the country is the worst landlord of them all.
I believe in the private sector building houses. That is the way it has been done throughout our history. In the 1970s, the federal government brought in, for example, the MURB program that incentivized hundreds of thousands of homes to be built. We are not going to do it the socialist way. We are going to leverage the free market to get homes built in our country.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today with respect to Bill C-56, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act, and I will get into those two components.
It has been an interesting debate in the House, hearing various land barons talk about affordable living for other people who have to rent from them. However, the mixture of our market right now has brought us to this situation. That mixture of the market was abandoned by then Paul Martin, when we lost our housing initiatives. Since then, the recovery process has been brutal and that lack of stock has led to the problems we have right now in a free-market system.
On top of that, in communities like Windsor, Tecumseh and Essex around my riding, a lot of building has taken place, but they have been more affluent homes, more on the higher end of the market for the profit margins to be higher. That has been one of the problems. We have lost co-operative and other types of housing units that really should have been built during that time frame. Therefore, even when we have had an increase in housing stock, it has not led to the things we want.
Today, at least we are trying to do something with respect to it. It is not a great bill, but it is something coming forward on which we have some unanimity in the House of Commons. The GST is something that even the Conservatives think the they could agree with, which is ironic, because the Conservatives, going back in history, brought in the GST under Brian Mulroney and brought in the HST under Stephen Harper. In fact, we are still paying for that. When the HST was brought in, the government had to grease a couple of provinces to come on board and we had to borrow billions of dollars, on which we are still paying interest.
I have an updated Parliamentary Budget Office paper and also a House of Commons Library of Parliament paper, which is updated every year to show how much interest we are paying from Harper bringing in the HST, and borrowing billions of dollars. We borrowed billions of dollars to bring in a new tax on Canadians.
Therefore, when the Conservatives talk about taxation, they need to keep their history in check. It is good that they are owning up to the GST issue and these regressive taxes that have been put on Canadians. We even had an election at one point in time when the Liberals and Conservatives talked about getting rid of the GST. We can see it still has not happened in the fullness of time, but at least in this instance we are going to support the waiving of the GST tax for new builds. There is a problem, though, that we have to monitor. Are those savings going to be passed on to consumers who are renters and to other people in the market purchasing those homes.
There need to be real incentives to build those homes. To this day, many people enjoy what is called “wartime housing”. After the Second World War, smaller units, with two to three bedrooms, were built and these were affordable for veterans. Those units now have had additional components built on to them or they have stayed the same. They are still very much part of a good market for many people, including in my riding where we have had a lot of veterans, some who served most recently in Afghanistan and other theatres. Windsor, Ontario has always done its part, going back to the War of 1812. We even contributed support for all kinds of different wars and conflicts, and for peace. We still have housing stock from World War II that has never been followed up on, which is a real issue with regard to our veterans, but thank goodness those housing units are there.
I would point out the new residential rebate, which is important. It is probably going to have to get through the Senate, so we are looking at more delays. When we are looking at an opportunity to get something done, we are probably looking at the new year for this. We have a housing crisis right now, so the response of this chamber is at least a modest improvement. However, not everybody in this chamber is willing to support this bill and get it done as quickly as possible. Therefore, we are going to continue to inflate the problem because the bill is going to take some time to get through.
The other component in the bill is the amendment to the Competition Act, which is really important. As I mentioned in a previous debate, the Competition Act needs massive updating. I am really pleased that my leader, the member for Burnaby South, has tabled legislation to fix the Competition Act in some respects.
This bill is going to have a few components too. It would “establish a framework for the Minister of Industry to direct the Commissioner of Competition to conduct an inquiry into the state of competition in a market”, which is important; “permit the Competition Tribunal to make certain orders...to an agreement or arrangement...to prevent or lessen competition; and repeal the exception in section 96 of the Act involving efficiency gains brought about by mergers.” The last one is a bit more technical, but basically the “efficiency gains” argument is really outdated in Canada.
We can prove that it would be less competition if there were a merger, and the Competition Bureau can prove that as well, but at the same time the merger can go ahead at the expense of people just because there would be a better profit margin. Therefore, we need to get rid of that altogether.
One thing that is really interesting about the situation we have right now is that both Conservative and Liberal governments have constantly allowed mergers to take place, resulting in the loss of Canadian jobs. We had the Lowe's takeover of Rona. We have seen where that has backfired. Some of the Rona stores are now being reopened.
Target took over Zellers, and then Target closed all its stores. By the way, at the time of the takeover, Zellers was the only department store making money and had benefits for its workers. The workers were paid about 12% more than other department stores. It was a Canadian-owned operation. The Liberal government allowed the takeover to take place. We lost all those stores. Target closed in Canada and moved back, south of the border. It was a complete and utter disaster.
There have been others. We watched Future Shop be taken over by Best Buy. Now there is a lack of competition now in the electronics sector. Future Shop was a Canadian icon store, gone. Now we have the Best Buy option and Amazon online, and very little competition.
I could go on and on about some of the different things that have been allowed to be taken over, basically leading to a lack of competition.
I want to highlight a couple of things with regard to the grocery store retail industry, which is another part of what are fighting for. This is going to help in that situation as well.
The CEOs of the grocery stores came before the industry committee and we questioned them. Unbelievably, on the same day, all three of the major chains cut their hero pay, which was paid during the pandemic, on the very same day. There are still issues out there.
Right now in the retail sector, several different things are taking place. In fact, we can look at some of the media stories coming out. Global and Mike Drolet did a good piece on theft in the retail market, how it was changing, how some stores were closing, not only in the United States but in other places, also potentially here, and the way that stores looked at and handled some things.
I bring this up because it is not a victimless crime. It raises the price of all groceries, with respect to theft and the types of behaviour taking place. Also, the same workers, who were the heroes during the pandemic, have to face increased and complicated situations at the workplace, either defending the products, feeling that they are compromised or having confrontations with customers. What is taking place is very important; it is a culture change.
We can look at the obvious things these grocery store chains have done in the past, such as fixing the price of bread, an important staple for children going to school and for families to survive. They colluded, like the robber barons of the past, to fix the price of bread. There was not only a lack of competition, but there was a coordinated approach on one of the basic human staples, increasing prices for Canadians. What happened? The grocery store chains got a slap on the wrist because of current competition issues.
The government responded by saying that it brought the CEOs in and asked them to at least hold the prices, to hold the line. What a garbage stance that is from the government.
Let us go back in history and look at some of the things that have taken place. Even the Liberal government had issues with its own in calling for corporate tax cut reductions until recently. In fact, some of the former Liberal leadership said that it did not cut taxes fast enough. That was their competition.
These grocery store icons, which enjoy monopolies in Canada, had a reduction of corporate tax at that time. At the same time, these CEOs with big pays were fixing the price of bread. There are other types of malfeasance going on with regard to their operations. They have also been known, as I mentioned, to actually push their workers the hardest and, frankly, in some of the most despicable ways possible.
All three of the grocery store chains cancelled hero pay at the same time. Not only does that stink to high heaven, it tells us the disdain they have for their workers. They had no shame in this whatsoever. There was no shame whatsoever when they were in front of the committee, saying that this was just the way they did business, that it was okay.
This bill is a modest improvement. As members in the House, we have the control to get something done on the GST with regard to housing, as well as on increased competition in Canada. Between the grocery retailers, the telcos and others, we need competition and we need it now.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to enter into this debate.
With respect to housing in Canada, as we all know, we are faced with an intense chronic housing crisis. In fact, I would argue that the Conservatives, when they were in government, were the ones who cancelled the co-op program, which is a proven model in Canada that provides safe, secure, affordable housing to community members. More than that, co-op housing provides a community within a community through that model. What did the Conservatives do in 1992? They cancelled the national co-op housing program.
Now, based on the discussion and the leader of the Conservatives, one would think they are going to be the saviour in addressing the housing crisis, but let us be clear: They Conservatives were the people who helped cause the housing crisis we are faced with today in this country. Of course, after the Conservatives cut funding for housing programs and eliminated the co-op program altogether, we had the Liberals come into office. What did they do? They cancelled the national affordable housing program in 1993, further escalating the housing crisis. The truth is that successive Liberal and Conservative governments failed Canadians. They failed to ensure that there was social housing built, and they failed to ensure that there was co-op housing built, to the point of where we are today.
I still remember, when I was in the community in 1993 working as a community legal advocate, the shock that went through my system and through our whole community when we heard that the government had cancelled the program. Part of my job was to try to assist people, including seniors, people with disabilities, indigenous people and women. There were women fleeing violence and women who needed housing because they were in a domestic violence situation. They needed housing for themselves and their children, and they were losing their children because they could not secure safe, affordable housing. It was not because they were bad parents, but because successive Liberal and Conservative federal governments walked away from them and did not provide the housing that was critically needed then.
Fast-forward to today, and where are we at? We have a situation where, just today, a report came out that in my community in Vancouver East and in the greater Vancouver area, it was found in the most recent study that the homelessness count had increased by 30% from the last count. The truth is that, in many ways, I do not need a report to tell me so, although having that data is really important, because I see it in the community with the encampments that have surfaced. It is everywhere. It has proliferated everywhere. In my riding of Vancouver East, we have a permanent encampment. What is wrong with this picture? We have to ask this question.
Why is it that successive Liberal and Conservative governments have allowed this to happen? It is unjustifiable. Housing is for people to live in; it is not a commodity for investors to use to turn a bigger and bigger profit. That is what has happened over the years since the Liberals and Conservatives walked away from co-op and social housing. They allow the market to flourish and then to benefit from it at the expense of people who need homes. Not only are people unhoused; renters are also getting renovicted. Seniors on fixed income, long-time tenants in a building, are being displaced and renovicted, and they will no longer have access to a home. They cannot afford a home. They will no longer be able to live in the place where they have lived for many years. This was allowed under both Liberals and Conservatives and was escalated, I would say, by their bad housing policy and by their walking away from the people in our communities that are in need.
We will hear the Liberals say that in 2017, they entered back into the housing environment with the national housing strategy. If anybody has taken the time to read it, and I urge all Liberal members to pick it up, the report from the Auditor General indicated they do not even know who is benefiting from the government's programs. In fact, they do not even know whether those who are in need, those who are most vulnerable, are accessing the supports they need. “Incompetence” would be one way of describing it, but it is not justifiable with where things are at today.
Now, the Conservatives have a leader who goes around acting as though he were the saviour. Let us be clear: When he was part of the Harper administration as a cabinet minister, under that administration, Canadians lost 800,000 units of affordable housing. That is close to a million units. A million families or individuals could have had access to housing that they do not have now. What is their solution today? It is more market-driven solutions. Let us be clear: It is the market-driven solutions that the government had relied on that got us here today. Nowhere do the Conservatives in their plans talk about building social housing or co-op housing.
The Liberal program does not talk about affordability. How strange is it? What planet do we live on that we operate in this way? It is no wonder we have a housing crisis. The bill that the government has tabled on the GST piece is to facilitate more housing being built. I want to be clear that we need more housing, but we also need to make sure that the housing that is built is accessible to people, meaning that it is truly affordable for people. It is strange to me that the government decided in some weird, altered universe, in this bill, that it would exclude co-ops from accessing the GST exemption. Why on earth would one do that? It makes no sense whatsoever.
The co-op program, as indicated, is a proven model in the delivery of housing in our communities. Co-ops create communities within communities. One can see it when walking into a co-op housing project. One can see the love within the community and the supports that are there for each other. People take care of each other and they build community with each other. To not support co-ops makes no sense. The NDP will absolutely be moving amendments to address that issue.
The other piece the NDP will doing is calling on the government to amend the bill to allow for existing non-profit housing projects to access this exemption. This would allow for some projects to become viable and, in other instances, for projects to create better affordability for the communities in need. That is what we need to do, to work towards, in that direction. We also need to actually set up some level of eligibility criteria in terms of affordability, to make sure the private developers are not just going to get a benefit but that there is also a further return to the community, and that is on the affordability criteria.
We have to think about housing in a holistic way. The NDP is putting forward these ideas. Above all else, we need the government to build social housing and co-op housing like we used to. Housing is for people to live in and not just to make a profit from.
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Madam Speaker, there is no question that the urgency is real. This housing crisis is a chronic crisis. It has been more than 30 years since the government walked away from building social and co-op housing.
To speak to the member's point, it can be done. We just need the political will to do so and for government to say that it will build social and co-op housing, with the models it used to use. When veterans returned from the war, we built victory homes; Canada, at that time, said it would not allow—
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- Oct/5/23 2:55:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree entirely with the need my hon. colleague has flagged, which is to build more affordable housing. I agree that we should be using federally owned land to achieve that outcome. I agree that we should continue to make the investments under the national housing strategy, which is now responsible for the construction or repair of nearly half a million homes across this country.
I will be the first to acknowledge that over the course of the past number of decades, governments of both Liberal and Conservative persuasions did not do what was necessary to get the job done. We changed that in 2017. We will continue to make the investments necessary to ensure that everyone in Canada has a place to call home.
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Madam Speaker, I will let the member from the Calgary area know I do support our leader on this, because, and I will just repeat it again, it is the building homes not bureaucracy act. It is about getting houses built, not more red tape. It is about making sure we are able to provide more opportunity for young Canadians to actually get into a house of their own, and if they cannot, then let us make sure there is more housing stock out there.
My daughter lives in Calgary, by the way, and luckily they are homeowners, but it is getting more and more expensive for them as well. The question becomes whether the City of Calgary will be willing to work with our federal Conservative Party, when we become government, to make sure we are taking away all of the restrictions and all of the NIMBYs blocking the development of land in Calgary and we are creating more homes and more opportunities for people in Calgary to own their own homes.
If the City of Calgary has some great ideas, we are more than happy to work with it and provide it more infrastructure dollars to ensure that there is that opportunity to build more homes, to build more developments, and at the end of the day everyone is better off.
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Madam Speaker, regarding the concern around students who have inadequate or no housing options, I think we have to recognize that everyone should be advocating for more support for people who have inadequate housing options, students or otherwise. I am very proud that the government has doubled the investments in the Reaching Home program to address homelessness, and that we are going to continue to do more, as I outlined in my remarks, to build more stock that will help address the student housing challenges more broadly.
When it comes to seniors, I think we are aligned in our identification of the problem. Where we differ is that the policies we have advanced would actually yield a higher number of homes than the plan the Conservatives have put forward.
With respect to the GST, the most important point in my remarks is that we have to address very specific problems. The GST measure we put in place is designed not only to pass on savings to renters but also to build more supply, which, over time, will bring the rate down as more stock becomes available. I am happy to elaborate in future answers, given that I have run out of time.
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Mr. Speaker, I congratulate sincerely the hon. member on his election to the House.
When I listened to his description of the Conservatives' housing plan, it was clear that he has been reading a different document than I have. When I reviewed their plan, it was the most bizarre series of suggestions. It would literally raise taxes on home builders and cut funding for homebuilding. If the member is concerned about bureaucracy, the Conservatives are proposing a Kafkaesque, Byzantine process to identify which homes would qualify. They would cut out middle-class homes from their GST relief, and they were talking about hiring bureaucrats to run a snitch line on people who have Nimbyist attitudes, which is not defined anywhere in their plan.
My question to the hon. member is this: Why is he supporting a plan that would raise taxes on homebuilding, cut funding for homebuilding and actually, according to finance officials at committee the other day, result in fewer homes being constructed than we were already on pace to build?
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. colleague across the way for the kind wishes.
In 1972, we built more homes than we did last year. That is the record. That is what we are dealing with.
We may be reading different documents, but I am very confident with the plan that our leader has put forward. It is a plan you thought was so good that you would snatch parts of it to put in your own announcement. I do not think we need to take any lessons from the option across the way on how to get homes built in this country.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to speak on behalf of the folks from Kitchener Centre with respect to Bill C-56, the signature measure of which would involve removing the GST from rental home construction.
I will start by saying very clearly that I certainly support this bill, as does my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands. It is an important and good measure. However, it is not nearly the kind of ambition we need to meet the moment we are in, and that is a very deep and protracted housing crisis.
Specifically, in my community, in the last three years alone, the number of people living unsheltered has more than tripled to over 1,000 people. Let us compare home prices. In our community, back in 2005, the average house price was around three times the average person's income. Today, it is over eight times. House prices have gone up 275% and wages have gone up 42%. It is pretty clear that wages are not keeping up.
We are also losing 15 units of affordable housing to rent evictions and the financialization of our housing for every one new affordable unit getting built. What that looks like, day to day, is that the shelter system in my community is overflowing. The week before we returned here, I showed up to a community meeting at an apartment building in downtown Kitchener. More than 40 people showed up on that night, invited by their councillor. I was there, as was bylaw enforcement.
We heard from folks there about the living conditions in their building, everything from cockroaches to bedbugs. The residents of that building were clear in telling us that they knew they did not have any other options. There was no recourse. There are insufficient recourses. We could talk about the Landlord and Tenant Board and the backlog there. However, the fact is that, because we have not building the kind of social housing we need in this country, people are left with no other options.
As I have heard from other colleagues here, I could talk about what I heard when I was knocking on doors this past summer. I spoke with a young man who is engaged. He is working in the trades, living at his parents' house. His fiancé is a teacher, and she is doing the same. They do not know when they will ever be able to afford a place of their own.
To help restore affordability, CMHC is telling us that we need to build 3.5 million more units than planned by 2030. If we are going to do that, we need to be looking at two sides of this. The first is significant transformational investments in housing. This has been done in this country before. Back in the 1970s, 40% of all building starts across the country had federal assistance. That went down to 8% by the 1980s, and today, no surprise, if we look at the total stock of social housing across the country, we are way at the back of the G7 at 3.5%.
Even a call as bold as saying, “Let us double the social housing stock” would only get us to 7%, which is only the middle of the peer average amongst G7 countries. To do that, though, we need to get serious about having CMHC get back into building housing the way that it used to. Many colleagues have been talking about an acquisition fund, which non-profits across the country have been calling for, a fund that would allow non-profits across the country to preserve what are currently affordable units to avoid losing them to the financialization of housing, and in so doing ensure that those might remain affordable over the long term.
In my community, for example, I spoke with a leader from a local non-profit organization. She was able to share with me, and sent me afterwards, 12 different properties that they have already identified. Should an acquisition fund, such as the one being called for by ACORN Canada and many others, be made available, they would be so keen to jump in and preserve those units. This is an organization that has operated in my community for decades, focused on ensuring that we preserve affordable housing, and it is ready to go. However, they are going to need the federal government to step in and ensure that the funds are there to help them preserve those units.
We could also talk about, for example, investments in the rapid housing initiative. It is a fantastic program. It is not that the government is not doing anything. The issue is that it was in budget 2022, and we have not heard anything since about the next round of rapid housing. We need to see sustained, permanent, ongoing funds that organizations across the country can count on.
It is the same when it comes to co-op housing. I was one of the first to cheer when we saw $1.5 billion of new money invested in co-op housing in budget 2022. Unfortunately, none of those dollars have actually rolled out yet to build co-op housing. We need to see that money get spent, but we also need to see ongoing, year-over-year investments so that we can get back to where we used to be before the early 1990s, when we saw federal and provincial governments pull out of the really critical role they have to play in building affordable housing.
This crisis did not happen overnight. It is decades in the making. I appreciate how clearly the Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities has articulated that. He said very clearly multiple times that multiple parties at the federal level have led to this housing crisis. If that is his admission, we are going to need to see investments today reflect the reality of the crisis we are in.
The second thing we need is to be honest that homes should be places for people to live. They should not be commodities for investors to trade. That is what is different between folks who are looking to rent and buy homes today versus my parents in the 1980s. When they were looking to buy a home, they were competing with other people. Today, people in my community are competing with massive corporations, and that has been incentivized.
As members may know, I have spoken many times in this place about one example that I see as a bit of a litmus test. If we were honest about addressing the financialization of housing, we would not have tax exemptions for the largest corporate landlords in the country, but that is exactly what we have. Real estate investment trusts have almost exclusively been buying existing units, the reason being that it is more profitable for them to do so. One of the CEOs of these real estate investment trusts was in the news this past summer for saying exactly that, that it primarily buys existing units to get the best return possible. Why are they are tax exempt? What is the social value of that exemption?
If the government were serious about addressing the financialization of housing, why not take what the PBO has now told us and spend $300 million over the next five years? It is not going to solve the housing crisis, but it is pretty clear that, if we are going to address financialization, we would start by removing the incentives that corporate landlords are currently benefiting from, which only accelerate the financialization of housing. We would obviously move into things like ending the blind bidding process and increasing vacancy taxes. Right now, it is a 1% vacancy tax, which likely is not going to really influence the behaviour of a large corporate investor in the housing market. If we were to increase that, it might change. We also need to move towards more meaningful protections for tenants. If we are going to build this volume of housing, we need to also be doing it with the climate in mind.
We will continue to advocate for the federal government, when it is looking at the new building code in 2025, as I know it is, to accelerate that building code to ensure that provinces and territories can follow the federal government's lead in bringing more resiliency into the code and ensure we are building the kind of housing that is resilient to the climate crisis we are already in the midst of.
As I shared earlier, I am happy to support Bill C-56. I am glad to see this measure moving ahead, and I am looking forward to seeing the federal government step up far more quickly when it comes to addressing the housing crisis we are in.
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