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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 285

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 26, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 285 - Feb/26/24
Mr. Eric Duncan (Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, CPC)
  • Feb/26/24 6:17:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada is in a housing crisis. There is not one part of this country that has not been negatively impacted after eight years of this Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal record. Housing prices have doubled; rents have doubled, and at a time when we need to build more houses, five million homes in the coming years just to meet demand, we are actually seeing housing starts and construction starts drop in Canada year over year. It is a very dangerous trend to begin with, and the numbers ahead only look worse. One of the worst problems we have in this country is with gatekeepers, and I am going to make the argument that the Liberal government, over the course of eight years, has been one of the worst gatekeepers at both a macro and a micro level. At a macro level, we have the Liberals being gatekeepers because they have doubled our national debt, which has resulted in 40-year-high inflation, and now we are seeing interest rates unlike any we have seen in decades. To build a new home in my part of eastern Ontario, whether it be in the united counties of SDG or the city of Cornwall, the cost to build and the cost of a mortgage for any family that desperately needs a place to live are becoming more and more out of reach, not easier. However, the micro level, where the Liberal government is gatekeeping and blocking new homes and units from being built is right in the city of Cornwall by the Liberals' own transport minister and department. Here is a bit of background. For the last eight years, Liberal candidates locally, and numerous ones after that in the Liberal government, have promised to divest a bunch of waterfront lands in Cornwall, and the City of Cornwall and Akwesasne want to return those to local say and local control. For eight years, they have dithered, delayed, done these vague consultations and over and over again spun their wheels, with bureaucrats contradicting each other. It has been an absolute mess. The record is very clear. The Liberals have had eight years, and they have not even moved any of these parcels of land forward an inch to progress. Now it is getting bad, because there is one small parcel, Parcel 6, at the intersection of Water and Brookdale, where the City of Cornwall is reviewing an application to build a private-developer building of 506 units in two towers on Brookdale Avenue, which is a significant investment that is desperately needed to increase supply. We need more places to live, and this gets 506 in the right direction. However, Transport Canada, with lawyers and bureaucrats and back-and-forth, are still dithering and delaying even on getting this one parcel transferred to local control between the City of Cornwall and the Federal Bridge Corporation just south of it, to allow council to know that they own that intersection, that they can put the entrance into it so that the developer can get it under way and council can approve it once it has all the information. Months and months later, the mayor and Akwesasne Grand Chief Abram Benedict are all on record saying that they want to see this parcel transferred. They want to see it come to local ownership so that council has all the tools and information to try to finalize the site plan and approval for this project. However, Transport Canada and the Liberal government are blocking it. I asked my original question on this topic a couple of weeks ago, but I did not get even a semblance of an answer about Cornwall and this project specifically. Now that the Liberal government has had it and knew that I was coming here for this debate tonight on this topic, what is the update from the Liberals on finally getting even this one parcel intersection transferred, so that we can make a decision and try to get more units built in the city of Cornwall?
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Context: House Hansard - 285 - Feb/26/24
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)
  • Feb/26/24 6:21:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of things to say. First, to answer specifically, the member tried to say that, for eight years, the Government of Canada has not done anything with the project. I can tell the member that there are numerous projects across the country the Government of Canada has moved forward on. It is not quite as simple as seeing a square block of land, clicking our heels and making it happen. Sometimes things take time. The member opposite did not tell the House what some of the complications are. I suspect there are some complications, and he might even know of some of those complications, but he is being very selective in what he is saying. Rather, he wants to pass the blame. He started off talking about how housing is in such a crisis. His current leader was the minister of housing under Stephen Harper and did absolutely nothing on housing. In the last 50 years, there has not been a government more proactive on the housing file than this government. We finally have a government that developed a housing strategy. We finally have a government that came out with new programs, such as the housing accelerator fund. We finally have a government that is working with other levels of government. What does the Conservative Party do? It votes against every measure we have. We have had agreements with municipalities and so forth, far superior and in greater numbers than the Conservative Party could ever imagine, let alone put into place. At the end of the day, there is absolutely no consistency coming from the other side. I can say that, as a national government, we have led very strongly on the housing file. It is not just the federal government alone that is responsible. It takes provinces and municipalities. The good news is that we are working not only with provinces and municipalities but also with non-profit organizations and other stakeholders because we recognize the need for and importance of housing, unlike the Conservative Party, which wants to try to paint a picture that is not complete. The government will continue to work where it can to provide ongoing support for housing. Our actions to date have seen and will continue to see the development of tens of thousands of new housing units. However, every time we bring in some sort of initiative, the initial response from the Conservative Party is to criticize it. Then it wonders why it is that we are not co-operating or doing some of the projects it is identifying. I can assure the member that the department is aware of the request and that there are discussions and dialogue in the Cornwall area on the issue. We waited for a while to try to get the Kapyong Barracks in Winnipeg, a large parcel of land that involved a great deal of negotiations. It took several years to make it happen. We know that the government, through its different departments, is looking at ways we can enhance housing opportunities. We are looking at ways we can work with municipalities. We can contrast that to what the Conservative Party is talking about or what it did when it was in office. I can tell members that it is literally night and day. Therefore, it is a bit much to sit and listen to a member being critical of the government and trying to give a false impression that we are not doing enough on the housing file when I witnessed for a number of years, when I was in opposition, a government that did nothing. We can contrast that to a government that has made historic funding and has worked with other levels of government, unlike any other government in the last 50-plus years.
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